Freebee Friday: Weather or Not

The latest addition to Mimio’s Connect teaching community is a great group of material on weather and natural hazards. It’s appropriate for kindergartners through high school seniors, includes 170 images and a slew of lesson plans for everything from the water cycle to observing the weather. It works with Mimio’s Studio 7 software. Whether it’s raining, snowing or you live in tornado alley, it’s all free.

 

 

Freebee Friday: Inside the Brain

Having trouble telling the superior frontal temporal gyrus from corpus callosum? Try the Allen Institute for Brain Science’s new Web site. Funded by Microsoft founder Paul Allen, the institute has been mapping the brain for years and now opens its imaging archive to all. There are sections for the human and mouse brains as well as specialty projects, like its work on glioblastoma. The Brain Explorer program is the center of activity and is enlightening, to say the least. It is available in versions for PCs and Macs, but might require a graphics chip and the latest drivers that your computer doesn’t have. It lets you take a peek inside the brain and move a pointer around to identify certain key areas. The site can help students see what the schizophrenic brain looks like, for instance or just nose around.

 

 

AP Bio, Inside and Out

While it’s impossible to cram an entire year of Advanced Placement Biology into a 45 minute video, Cerebellum’s AP Biology Exam Prep is a good start. It doesn’t attempt to teach the year’s worth of college-level curriculum, yet has a good review of the material and excellent printable worksheets. At $50 for the two disc set, it is money well spent to get a class ready for the big test in May.

Meant for 11-th graders, the set uses Cerebellum’s Standard Deviants troupe of teenage actors to tell the story of life. The program starts with a good overview of what to expect from the test, how it is graded and how the total score adds up. It is chock full of general test taking advice and specific strategies for success in the AP Bio exam.

The hallmark of the Cerebellum exam prep series is “30 in 30.” This section attempts to compress the details of 30 biology concepts in 30 minutes. In this case, it actually takes 45 minutes. The video goes through the major themes and ideas one at a time, from photosynthesis to genetics.

From goofy to earnest, the video snippets are an effective communications tool for teenagers. The topics are comprehensive and presented in a quick-moving lively format that they will have trouble ignoring. Unfortunately, the onslaught of edutainment leaves some of the weightier subjects for the end when attention starts to waver.

As ambitious as the exam prep program is, it can only be useful as an outline to key students into what they need to review in depth and relearn. Happily, it totally ignores the controversy about evolution and deals with just the science.   

Unfortunately, there are several gaffes that mar it. On top of irrelevant backgrounds (like a skulls and bones pattern), some of the kid actors have trouble with the accepted pronunciations of scientific terms. The two most embarrassing faux pas, however, are when “Assortment” is spelled as “Assorment” in a headline about Mendelian genetics and the list of 5 major hormones that actually contains 6 chemicals. More important to teachers and prospective test-takers seeking a comprehensive look at biology, the program doesn’t even mention digestion.

The real gem is the second disc, which contains 5.4MB of worksheets and printable material to pass out to the class. The 42-page workbook has illustrations, fill-in-the-blanks exercises and lots of descriptive material that does a good job of summarizing the curriculum and quizzing students.

On the downside, like Cerebellum’s other text prep discs, these study aids are meant to be printed and not filled in electronically. To me, this misses out on an opportunity to integrate it into the emerging digital classroom with. An iPad or Android tablet version would be a worthwhile effort.

Unfortunately, the Cerebellum exam prep set has an inherent use by date on it because the College Board is revamping the format and material on the biology test. The new test is scheduled to debut in 2013, followed by new exams for history in 2015.

For now, if you have a group of kids anxious about the upcoming AP Bio test, Cerebellum’s Exam Prep set is a great way to let them get a handle on what they know and what they don’t know.

A-

Cerebellum Biology Advanced Placement Exam Prep

 

+ Good review outline

+ Excellent printable worksheets

+ Lively quick-moving format

+ Insight about test format

 

- Can’t contain entire syllabus

- Typos and odd backgrounds

- Worksheets meant to be printed

 

Freebee Friday: The Sun Fights Back

Over Valentine’s Day as your class was giving each other heart shaped cards, our son was getting a little hot under the collar by ejecting a major flare. After years of a quiet star next door, the sun is acting up with an X-class flare, the most powerful and potentially dangerous type. The reason we should care, and a nice physics and social studies lesson, is that when the remnants of this flare hit the earth later today and over the weekend, it can cause havoc with the power grid, sensitive electronics and communications networks. It’s already disrupting radio transmissions in China. For ideas, check out NASA solar flares page.

Freebee Friday: Full Body Scanner

Having trouble telling the clavicle from a cervical bone? Google’s latest app can help with an annotated full body browser. First, you’ll first need to load the beta of Google’s Chrome Web browser, which has extra software for the app. Pick what you want it to display (muscles, bones, organs, etc), decide whether you want labels and zoom in to show what is of interest to the class. As good as it looks on a desktop or notebook computer, it looks even better with a projector or large-screen monitor. It’s giggle proof because it doesn’t show genitals, and is appropriate for any class.

Freebee Friday: Meteor Alert

We’re at the tail end of the annual Geminid meteor shower and in most parts of the country it has been quite a show with some areas having several streaks across the sky a minute. NASA’s Fluxtimator Java application can help a science class not only estimate how often meteors will cross the sky but when to look. The Java application can be set for 331 different events, from the Peresids to the Leonids. Enter where you are and when you want to watch and it will forecast the number of meteors you’ll see during nighttime hours. Personally, I’m sleeping in.

Freebee Friday: A Planet in the Balance

We’ve all used Google Earth to zoom in on maps and geographic places of note, but Earth Alerts can take this digital mapping to a new level. By displaying places where a natural disaster is on-going or imminent, Earth Alerts can show earth science students where the globe is most in trouble. It might be a volcano, earthquake or dangerous storm, but they all show up as icons on Earth Alerts’online map. If you put the mouse of it, the details are shown; click and you’ll see where the disaster is taking place as well as a video feed if it’s available. Some icons even have Web cams associate with them for a bird’s eye view of what’s going on. The latest version of the software works only with PCs and it’s free, but the developers welcome any donations.

Earthy DVDs

No secret, the earth science curriculum deals with our planet and how we interact with it, but learning everything from biomes to minerals is on Cerebellum’s latest series Science Fundamentals: Earth Series. It’s meant for elementary and middle school students and covers the entire landscape including ecosystems, weather and habitats in a series of modules. There’re teaching guides and lesson plans as well as handouts, tests and classroom activities. There’re even suggested at-home projects. There are six DVDs that cost $40 each or the entire set for $216.

A Digital Science Teacher

By breaking down the curriculum in Biology, Physics and Chemistry into two dozen targeted tutorials, Interactive Learning’s Tutor Excalibur series can help kids get ready for finals or the AP exams. Chock full of interactive features and practice quizzes, Chem, Bio and Physics Tutor cost $40 each, two for $70 or all three for $105. There are discounts for site licenses.

STARS Sighting

Curriculum Associates has updated its Strategies to Achieve Reading Success (STARS) program with a new look and a comprehensive teaching manual. With a dozen standards-based reading strategies at its disposal, STARS provides nuts and bolts instruction in reading’s rudiments along with practical advice and tactics for developing fluent readers. Each short passage has a series of comprehension questions as well as a review section.  Student materials are available for K through 8th grade for $9.95 each.