I’ve just been sent a link to a recently re-developed educational website, www.PestWorldForKids.org, a children’s web site developed by the US-based National Pest Management Association (NPMA), designed to educate children/students about a topic that all kids love— bugs!

I’ve had a look through the site dimensions and can imagine this being a real winner with kids, and a very useful resource in the classroom.

Originally launched in 2005, the site has recently undergone major transformations, both in design with funky and fresh new colors, and content adding new lesson plans and fun project to the mix. In fact, the site now offers even more educational content for teachers to use in the classroom and for parents to utilize as part of home-schooling programs as well as for fun, yet educational computer time with their children.

The report writing center includes a downloadable writing manual, giving children a 10-step tutorial on researching and developing written reports. The science fair section helps students to build and test hypotheses using the scientific method and provides several projects to test these newfound skills. The lessons aim to bring creativity into the classroom with such assignments as creating Pest PSAs and writing new cases for the interactive game, Pest Detective.

Other enhancements include a pest glossary, a comprehensive pest guide, downloadable fact sheets and project PDFs, taking materials from computer desktop to backpack in just a few quick clicks.

Some great resources are being made available to support learning about space which I think will be of real value in the classroom.

NASA has produced a great set of freely available video resources. The NASA eClips are short relevant educational video segments designed to inspire and engage students and help them see real world connections. New video segments are produced weekly exploring current applications of science, technology, engineering and mathematics topics. The clips are organised to cater for primary, intermediate and secondary students, and a section for the general public.

The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a Web 2.0 visualization software environment developed by Microsoft Research. The WWT enables your computer to function as a virtual telescope—bringing together imagery from the best ground and space-based telescopes in the world for a seamless exploration of the universe. Imagine Google Earth - but with the cameras pointing out into space!

Unfortunately the WWT is only designed to run on Windows-based machines, so I miss out on my Mac, but Roy Gould’s  public demo of the World Wide Telescope captured on Ted Talks provides a good insight:

Of course, if you’re like me and don’t have a Windows machine, or the memory required to run WWT, there’s always Google Sky or Celestia, the free space simulation that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions that runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

Whatever suits you best, the options available for really engaging with the “final frontier” are certainly much more advanced that the days when I sat browsing books in the library, or waiting for days before images of the moon landing appeared on the black and white TV we had back in 1969!

‘Inanimate Alice’ tells the story of Alice, growing up in the early years of the 21st century. Written and directed by writer Kate Pullinger and digital artist Chris Joseph, this series of multimedia, interactive episodes uses a combination of text, sound, images, and games as Alice takes us on a journey through her life from the age of eight through to her twenties. Alice becomes a games animator; not just any animator, but a creator of characters for the most successful games company in the world.

And one character stands out: Brad, Alice’s only true friend in life. The ten episodes of ‘Inanimate Alice’ become increasingly interactive and game-like, reflecting Alice’s own developing skills as a game designer and animator. ‘Inanimate Alice’ is a study of human/computer relations in a world where having friends means never having to meet them.

I was contacted by Ian about this project recently - and I thought it worth passing on. He draws attention to episode 4: Hometown” (http://inanimatealice.com)in which Alice previews a software tool that she has created, called iStories. A supremely simple storytelling tool, iStories enables students and staff to choose photos, add words, music and sound effects and BOOM! you have your own interactive story in minutes. Check it out at http://www.iStori.es

I’d love to hear from any teachers how have the chance to try this with students.

Following my recent post about Software as a Service I’ve had several discussions with teachers about the use of Google Docs by staff and students in schools. many are finding that these applications provide pretty much everything they need on a day to day basis. So it was with interest that I took a look at the Interactive Tutorials that Google have developed to explain concepts within all of the current GoogleApps (including the GoogleDocs suite).

I’d love to know how they’ve developed these tutorials - they’re easy to follow and are a great example of how instructional material can be presented online - both pedagogically and technically. I wonder when this service will be provided as one of the Google Apps??

Issues like world hunger and the world’s energy crisis can simply appear too big to tackle for most individuals, but there are ways we can demonstrate that the collective action of individuals can make a difference.

My family and I participated in the very successful Earth Hour in Christchurch on Saturday evening - despite meaning that I missed watching the Blues vs Bulls game live on TV We spent an enjoyable hour as a family playing Scrabble by the light of two candles. It was my kids who were particularly keen for us to do this, having been exposed to advertising about the event at school and in the media, so while we played Scrabble, we also discussed in detail the significance of the Earth Hour event. I’m a fan of Social Action outcomes in terms of what we do in education - even if they take the form of demonstrators or symbolic events such as Earth Hour - hey, 12.8% saving in the city’s electricity use for one hour has to provide some indication of what can be achieved on a longer term basis.

Back to the Scrabble game and the focus on vocabulary and word meaning - made me interested when I came across an online vocabulary building activity called Free Rice. The site has two goals; 1. Provide English vocabulary to everyone for free, and 2. Help end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free. For each word you get right the site sponsors will donate 20 grains of rice through the UN World Food Program to help end hunger.

This is a great activity site - with 55 levels and the ability to select the level you start at and remember this for another occasion. You even have the ability to listen to the word before selecting its meaning from a list of four options. And of course, using the site provides a great opportunity to highlight the issues of world hunger and what can be done about it.

Thanks to Clarence Fisher’s Twitter message, I’ve been introduced to Phun, a 2-D physics modelling application. Still in Beta form, this freely downloadable application has been created by Swedish computer science student Emil Ernerfeldt for his Master of Science Thesis.

Currently available for Windows and Linux (with a Mac version in development), Phun is intended to be a playground where people can be creative. It can also be used as an educational tool to learn about physics concepts such as restitution and friction.

Nigel posted this video on my Facebook Funwall recently, and I’ve been pondering its usefulness for education. Four things occur to me:

1. It provides a very useful framework for engaging students with thinking about complex issues and reconciling multiple points of view. I’ve long been a fan of the scenario-planning methodologies, and this framework uses some of this thinking (although I’m guessing is origins are more in the economic modelling and decision making domain).
2. It provides a great vehicle for encouraging group work by providing the four perspectives that could be explored by different groups for instance. it provides an opportunity to us the ideas promoted by DeBono with his thinking hats to encourage students to explore ideas from a perspective that may not be their own, or the one they’d naturally identify with.
3. It provides a good model for how students could present the efforts of their individual or group research into topical issues - both in terms of the framework itself, and in terms of the video as a way of sharing it. I also got to thinking how effective it would be to create the quadrants in a web environment and add hyperlinks from each statement to supporting evidence etc.
4. It’s a ready-made learning object for use with a class thinking about climate change! Students could be encouraged to add their own perspectives to each of the quadrants, debate what the presenter has already added, seek the evidence to support their statements etc.

Some food for thought here, and I’m sure this could be a starting point for lots of teachers to explore other ways of using such a framework for ‘unpacking’ complex issues and working towards identifying solutions or acceptable outcomes - whether these be big issues such as global warming, or deciding on what foods should be served in the school tuck shop etc.

Just received an email from my electricity supplier in Christchurch - telling me of an educational website they are sponsoring called ElectroCity. It’s worth checking out - reminds me a lot of the SimCity projects that I used to run with kids at school - dividing into groups to see who could create the most successful city, and using the experience to discuss issues such as taxes, transport, recreation, governance etc - and coming to understand the issues involved in designing and maintaining a city.

ElectroCity is very similar, although its focus is on teaching about about energy, sustainability and environmental management in New Zealand. I worked my way through the very well constructed tutorial an can see real potential in this being used as a virtual learning experience in the classroom.

There’s a resource area for teachers, a very helpful FAQ area, and some pretty impressive prizes being offered in two categories, one for schools and one for public contributions.

The game is designed to be played online - but something I found to be of interest is that there is an option to download a limited version of the game that runs on any computer and doesn’t need internet access, with two versions available, one for MacOSX and one for WindowsXP. (I haven’t had the chance to try these yet, so can’t vouch for what they’re like).

If I was back in a class again I’d certainly be looking at this as a useful learning resource - some notes from the website explain why:

ElectroCity is not a win or lose game. There are lots of different ways to play and you can set your class specific objectives. For example, if you wish to try a green approach, a win might be considered any city with 50,000 people and an A rating in the environment category. Or you might focus on economics and get the kids to go for the most money.

ElectroCity is designed to be flexible, so you can use it as you wish. A whole module that deals with energy, the environment, tourism and growth could be centred around the game, mixing formal lessons with fun interactive game play. You could return to the game again and again over several weeks and compare how the kids played at the beginning with how they play at the end, putting their new knowledge into practical use and getting the kids to assess what they’ve learnt to help them make better decisions in the game.

Now here’s some serious competition for the traditional print media publishers - WikiJunior, a project of WikiBooks, aims to…

…produce a series of full-color booklets for children aged 8 to 11. The subjects will be appealing to kids, and the writing will be light and friendly. These booklets will be richly illustrated with photographs, diagrams, sketches, and original drawings. The texts will also follow a format, so that each booklet, while different, will also have certain common features.

Using wiki technology and an open community format, over a 1,000 textbooks are being assembled online (with some PDF and print versions as well). Titles include Accounting, Chess, European History, Physiology, Managing Groups and Teams, Ecology and more.

I downloaded a PDF copy of the solar system booklet - 97 pages packed with information and images. The layout is pretty basic from a design perspective, consisting largely of headings and blocks of text, with the occasional image inserted here and there. The image quality is pretty good on the whole. The main headings are phrased as questions that students may come seeking an answer to, but without an index of them it’s pretty hit and miss as to whether you’ll find the question you want. I’d have to say that the language level may be a bit challenging for many students in the target age group - many comparable published texts that I’ve watched my 9-year old become engrossed in would have a greater amount of visual material including annotated graphics etc to make it easier to access the meaning of some of the scientific and technical terms.

That said, this is an interesting development which will deserve to be followed to see how it develops and how the resources being produced are used.

A further 8 pages follow that provide details of the GNU Free Documentation License which tells you what you are able to do with regards copying and distributing copies of the booklet.

Thanks to Kevin Kruse for the heads up on this one

I had the opportunity to attend a part of hte IBM conference here in Christchurch last week, and was introduced to some of the education projects that IBM has been supporting. One of these is TryScience.org which I’ve had the chance to play with now and can recommend.

I’d guess it’s best use would be for senior primary and junior secondary students. The publicity states that “TryScience is the collective knowledge of thousands of science expertis in subjects ranging from archeology to zoology, and it’s presented in a way that ignites the imagination of children”

In the “Fieldtrips” area I tried the “catch a cultprit” activity! A crime has been committed, and you are required to use your skills of observation and science knowledge to find the perpetrator. Completing the exercise called “Suspect Sketcher” requires intuitive deducation and attention to detail - the basis for scientific discovery!

within the TryScience environment there are five distinct areas to exlpore:

• Adventure - interactive experience.

• Experients - hands-on scientific activity
• Field Trips - visit science centres throughout the world
• Curious - investigate scientific topics in the news
• Live Cams - offer a real-time look at some of the world’s most interesting science and technology exhibits.

There are plenty of other activities to explore and engage with - I’ve only started to scratch the surface, but I’ll be sharing this with my son for sure, and observing just what takes his interest.