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"Fiber optics! Fiber optics! Admittedly, I'm a little obsessed with fiber optics, and for good reason. They are a durable, versatile, and relatively simple way to add beautiful lighting effects to anything you're making. Just look at some of the gorgeous projects you can create with them! There was a time when I mostly used el wire in my illuminated designs, but ever since the amazing Natalina and Technorainbows introduced me to the wonders of fiber optics in their various forms, I've been on a bit of a fiber optic bender. So come fall down this rabbit hole with me, and turn yourself into a mesmerizing bioluminescent sea creature... you know you want to."

"Light is a fascinating and familiar topic for children and adults. It's also rich and complex, which is great if you are teaching a graduate level course in Quantum Mechanics. But how do you lay the foundation for this exciting topic? What do you teach to the youngest would-be scientists? This self-paced, 5 week course is designed for both formal and informal educators who want to teach children ages 6-14 about the science of light and optics. Starting with a simple kit and some basic activities, we'll work through understanding the basics of light, color, shadows, reflection and refraction. Each module offers easy to digest science content, application of science process skills, connections to real world technologies and engaging activities designed to build your comfort and confidence with light and optics. Throughout each module, guidance (suggestions) on how to use and create learning experiences for children will be provided through online discussions and other opportunities for self-reflection and sharing. This process will support the completion of a final project."

Photos of Atmosperic optics. Interesting for science teachers.

"Here is a great Google Doc tip that helps me a lot with my studies in university. As a graduate student, most of my reading assignments and hand-outs come in the form of PDFs and some of these documents are only scanned versions of the original documents. Often times, these PDFs are low-quality as they are poorly scanned which makes reading them a real pain in the butt. Also, scanned PDFs do not allow you to do much on them: You can not annotate or edit text on them. However, there is a workaround to this using Google Docs OCR(Optical Character Recognition). Optical Character Recognition(OCR) lets you convert scanned PDFs or any image that include text in it into text documents using automated computer algorithms in Google Docs. Once converted, you can then edit and annotate the text as you like. Here is how to activate OCR on your Drive."

Lessons on Optics

Brain Teasers, Optical Illusions, Puzzle Hunts, Codes and Cypers, Mechanical puzzles and more

"Physics 4 Kids is a great resource packed full of basic lessons covering different key concepts of physics. You can use this resource to expand students knowledge of physics and to also initiate them to those physics concepts you are planning to teach them in class. Physics 4 Kids provides students with  guided tours that they can use by themselves to learn about physics. To make things easier, the site embeds visual aids and video tutorials to enhance students understandings. Some of the core physics ideas the site covers include: motion and mechanics, electricity and magnetism, modern physics, light and optics and many more. "

"Recently, we discovered a feature of Google Drive that has changed how we prepare and access materials and resources for our students. As we attempt to make all curricula digital and thus make it available to all students, the idea of using PDFs was always a problem. PDFs are just not editable in most situations, and this was an issue when it came to modifying and differentiating documents. Adobe Acrobat was our "go to" application for this type of conversion, but it was costly and often hard to come by in an educational setting. Note: We still use Adobe Acrobat for complex projects or documents that do not convert well in Google Drive. With the most recent update to Google Drive, OCR (Optical Character Recognition) capabilities are better and easier than ever."

"Adobe is getting into the mobile scanning game with a new free iOS and Android app that is supposed to provide users with high-quality images of physical content they want to capture digitally. It's called Adobe Scan, and it works similarly to a bunch of other apps already available. Users point their smartphone cameras at whatever document, white board, or presentation screen they want to capture, and the app automatically crops the image to just pick out a document. The clearest difference between Scan and other apps, like Microsoft Lens, is that the app integrates with Adobe Document Cloud and automatically performs optical character recognition on the PDFs it generates. Users can then copy and paste text from those documents into other files."