Lightning in a Bottle

HP and the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) have partnered to provide $10,000,000 in technology grants and training to teachers across the country. The applications are targeted at teams of five teachers from a school, “who’s work is related to the school’s goals for bringing technology into the classroom.” Each team member will receive from HP a laptop, projector, and a $500 stipend. ISTE will provide customized online professional development and mentoring program. 150 teams will be selected.

You can read more about the grant and how to apply at www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2003/031015b.html. Applications are due by March 1, 2004.

ASCD has released a neat new book called Visual Literacy: Learn to See, See to Learn by Lynell Burmark. It’s an overview of how images and colors affect our students, how they learn and process visual information, and how our teaching can be adapted to our students’ benefit. Lynell is one of the team of educators that works with David Thornburg, and has a ton of teaching, technology and presentation experience to draw on. The book is well-written, entertaining and very accessible.

It’s available at Amazon.com here.

Amazon.com has added a new research option for us and our students. While you have always been able to search for books by title or author, you search will now go through the content of thousands of books. Amazon has now scanned in the entire text of over 120,000 titles, and your search will go through all of them. You can then view or print the exact pages with your word or phrase, even without buying the book. (You can’t, however, download or email the pages.)

I’ve tried it, and it’s pretty cool. Your search will come up with the usual books, with links to the pages with your text or phrase below. (When you click on the link, if you don’t see your page, scroll down. The pages sometimes load at the bottom of the screen for some reason on my computer.)

To try it for yourself, head over to www.amazon.com.

Milwaukie High School in Milwaukie, Oregon has opened a new art and technology program. Partially funded by a Gates Grant, it increases the capacity of the visual arts program from 240 to 400 students, as well as providing more variety in their courses and improved facilities.

Many students not attracted to the traditional arts are interested in the digital arts, according to teachers. However, the traditional arts teacher had difficulty doing much with only one computer, one scanner, and one printer. Now both the traditional arts classrooms and the art and technology program share the new facility, with plenty of computers for daily use.

The article describing the program is at www.oregonlive.com/search/index.ssf?/base/metro_south_news/1064922969178480.xml?oregonian?smn.

The online collection of materials at the Library of Congress continues to grow at a phenomenal rate. If you visit their online collections at memory.loc.gov, you will find text, images, sound files, and now video files. You can search the hundreds of thousands of files by keyword, or browse the collections by topic, such as the Civil War, the Depression, Early Animators, or many others. It’s an amazing resource, and all of the files can be downloaded for use in classroom presentations.

(A footnote - at this moment on Sept. 18, the site is unavailable, probably due to Hurricane Isabel and the closing of all federal offices in Washingto D.C. If you can’t get in, try again on another day. Assuming they aren’t washed into the Potomac.)

I couldn’t pass this up. I took fifteen credits of Soil Sciences classes in college, and was tickled to find the NASA “Soil Science Education Web Page” (ltpwww.gsfc.nasa.gov/globe/.) It’s a resource page for students with loads of information and activities for studying soils. It even has a “Soil of the Month” picture!

Studying soil is a great integrated science project, because it involves botany, biology, chemistry and geology. (It’s also one of the only educational activities you can do that gives you a legitimate reason to dig big holes in the ground, which, come to think of it, has a language arts tie-in with Holes by Louis Sachar.) If you and your students want to have the necessary appreciation for the ground beneath us, check this page out.

If you aren’t familiar with the FIRST Lego League Robotic competitions, drop by www.firstlegoleague.org for a peek at the program. Geared at upper elementary through middle school, the Lego League competitions are based on the Lego Mindstorms robotics kits. The program is team-oriented, and stresses cooperation at least as much as competition.

This year there will be a Washington state regional competition for the first time. It will hosted by the Washington Engineering and Technical Outreach Council at Newport High School in Bellevue on December 6th. The page with details on this program is at hwww.wetoc.org/fll2003/.

Now in its sixth year, there are already 2,266 teams registered all over the world for this year’s challenge. Registration is open until the end of September.

I have to say that of all the extra-curricular activities I have participated in over my twenty-five years in education, Lego robotics is definitely the most involving and successful. It doesn’t seem to matter what a student’s learning style is, or their gender, or whether or not they like math or science. The levels of sophistication and complexity of the robots the kids design are always higher than I expect, as is the learning they experience. To see examples of what I’m talking of, visit this website at the North Central ESD in Wenatchee. They held four weeks of Lego Robotics camps this summer ? www.ncesd.net/summertechcamp.

The Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago has developed an online set of art activities for students at smartmuseum.uchicago.edu/smartkids/. It has great activities, such as touring an artist’s studio (with interview), Artwork of the Month, and Art Detective. All are linked to an illustrated dictionary of terms and concepts. While the animation and popup windows sometimes go a little overboard, it’s a very informative site. For instance, now I know the symbolism of Daphne transforming into a laurel tree to escape Apollo. (If you want to find out for yourself, visit the Art Detective.)

eSchoolNews has set up (with very clear sponsorship from eZedia) a new resource page on multimedia at www.eschoolnews.com/resources/reports/multimedia/index.cfm. It’s primarily an archive of previous eSchoolNews articles on multimedia and it’s impact on student learning, but it’s handy to have all the references and links in one place. I found some articles in there I had missed!

The Chicago Sun-Times has an fun article on ink-jet cartridges (www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-zay03.html). Did you ever realize that at the going prices for cartridges that you’re paying around $9,000 a gallon for ink? Needless to say, some folks are hard at work trying to develop alternatives. And the inkjet printer manufacturers are equally hard at work trying to stop them!