Group items tagged

animal units?

When TED launched its educational website for younger students last week, I think teachers everywhere realised they had to up their game. The 3-10 minute videos are designed to encourage curiosity and show how the world works using compelling animation and the audible explanations of a gifted teacher.  Even if you're not in high school, the videos are sometimes fascinating, sometimes kinda strange, but generally very cool. Here are some of the best videos that are designed to amaze and challenge your brain.

categories include: animals, the arts, history & biography, literature & languages, mathematics & computers, reference desk, science, social studies

Read Writing Think Graphic Organizer- Animal Study

animated political maps of areas like Europe changing over time

This would be great for kids to use on an IWB.

a good example of prime numbers in nature -- and why they are important, e.g., for a kind of cicada which has a 13-year cycle... "Because 13 and 17 are both indivisible this gives the cicadas an evolutionary advantage as primes are helpful in avoiding other animals with periodic behaviour. Suppose for example that a predator appears every six years in the forest. Then a cicada with an eight or nine-year life cycle will coincide with the predator much more often than a cicada with a seven-year prime life cycle. These insects are tapping into the code of mathematics for their survival. The cicadas unwittingly discovered the primes using evolutionary tactics but humans have understood that these numbers not just the key to survival but are the very building blocks of the code of mathematics."

watch music come alive.... note by note.... fascinating.... and great music -- the guy who has done it has several others....

Great resources for stop-motion animation & claymation

"A striking assumption animates arguments on both sides, namely that nonfiction is seldom literary and certainly not literature. Even Mr. Coleman erects his case on largely dispiriting, utilitarian grounds: nonfiction may help you win the corner office but won't necessarily nourish the soul. As an English teacher and writer who traffics in factual prose, I'm with Mr. Coleman. In my experience, students need more exposure to nonfiction, less to help with reading skills, but as a model for their own essays and expository writing, what Mr. Gladwell sought by ingesting "Talk of the Town" stories. I love fiction and poetry as much as the next former English major and often despair over the quality of what passes for "informational texts," few of which amount to narrative much less literary narrative. What schools really need isn't more nonfiction but better nonfiction, especially that which provides good models for student writing. Most students could use greater familiarity with what newspaper, magazine and book editors call "narrative nonfiction": writing that tells a factual story, sometimes even a personal one, but also makes an argument and conveys information in vivid, effective ways."

"What schools really need isn't more nonfiction but better nonfiction, especially that which provides good models for student writing. "  Totally supports my belief that nonfiction longreads are out there on the internet and are not being taken advantage of by teachers -- enough.

Awesome history of Typography video. Great for design, for showing kids the difference between typefaces etc

A video for kids discussing life on earth looked at in numbers, e.g., how many of each species, the heaviest biomass by species, by individual organism, etc. A new series.

This is a great way to display images from a Google Presentation on a website, e.g., a Google Site. Go to: library.uwcsea.edu.sg to see how we are using this.

Article on biomimetics-applying designs from nature to solve problems in engineering, materials science, medicine, and other fields.

Funny video about watching people enter things into Google badly!

Neat video on Procrastination. I'd like to use this as a vocabulary exercise with kids...