7 Chrome Apps for Science (STEM) Education

1- 3D Solar System

This is a 3D solar system simulation application, which gives you the approximate location of the planets in the solar system at different time, and some information about each one of them.

2- Anatomy 3d

Anatomy 3D provides you with a bunch of interactive tools to use to dissect, explore and learn about the human body in 3D. The tool is also available for Android and iOS users.

3- Anatomy Games

This extension offers users a variety of anatomy games and atlases to help them learn about human anatomy

4- Planetarium

Planetarium is a beautiful interactive sky map that students can use to explore the stars and learn about planets. The tool shows over 1500 stars with a magnitude of up to “+5”.

5- Useful Periodic Table

This is a periodic table of the elements that has all the elements and most of their respective properties collected and stored in one easy to use and simple to find location.  Contained within this periodic table is a unit converter that will convert some of the scientific dimensions.  Also, containing links to wikipedia for further literature on that element that you wish to know.  Great for students because of the elements quiz contained within.

6- BioDigital Human

The BioDigital Human is a 3D platform that simplifies the understanding of anatomy, disease and treatments. Explore the body in 3D!

7- Anatomy Skills : Bones

Learn all of the major bones in the human body using three different modes: Learn, Game and Quiz. The app covers all of the major bones in the body from the phalanges to the femurs. Carefully selected graphics make the features easy to identify.

Links

5 Ways to Stay Safe (Relatively) on the Internet for Parents and Students

 

Click on any title to learn more about each tip.

1- Enable SafeSearch

By enabling SafeSearch, you can filter out most of the mature content that you or your family may prefer to avoid. If an inappropriate result does sneak through, you can report it to Google.

2- Filter YouTube Content by Enabling Safety Mode

If you’d prefer to not to see mature or age-restricted content as you browse YouTube, scroll to the bottom of any YouTube page and enable Safety Mode. Safety Mode helps filter out potentially objectionable content from search, related videos, playlists, shows, and films.

3- Control what your family Sees on The Web

If you want to control which sites your family can visit on the Internet you can use Supervised Users in Google Chrome. With Supervised Users you can see the pages your user has visited and block the sites you don’t want your user to see.

4- Limit access to just approved apps and games

Want to share your tablet without sharing all your stuff? On Android tablets running 4.3 and higher, you can create restricted profiles that limit the access that other users have to features and content on your tablet. Learn more about this feature from this page.

5- Use app ratings to choose age-appropriate apps

Just like at the movies, you can decide which Google Play apps are appropriate for your family by looking at the ratings: everyone, low maturity, medium maturity, or high maturity. You can filter apps by level, and also lock the filtering level with a simple PIN code (keeping other users from accidentally disabling the filter).

Where Are the Hardest Places to Live in the U.S.?

This article was originally posted in the NY TImes:

The Upshot came to this conclusion by looking at six data points for each county in the United States: education (percentage of residents with at least a bachelor’s degree), median household income, unemployment rate, disability rate, life expectancy and obesity. We then averaged each county’s relative rank in these categories to create an overall ranking.

(We tried to include other factors, including income mobility and measures of environmental quality, but we were not able to find data sets covering all counties in the United States.)

 

We used disability — the percentage of the population collecting federal disability benefits but not also collecting Social Security retirement benefits — as a proxy for the number of working-age people who don’t have jobs but are not counted as unemployed. Appalachian Kentucky scores especially badly on this count; in four counties in the region, more than 10 percent of the total population is on disability, a phenomenon seen nowhere else except nearby McDowell County, W.Va.

Remove disability from the equation, though, and eastern Kentucky would still fare badly in the overall rankings. The same is true for most of the other six factors.

The exception is education. If you exclude educational attainment, or lack of it, in measuring disadvantage, five counties in Mississippi and one in Louisiana rank lower than anywhere in Kentucky. This suggests that while more people in the lower Mississippi River basin have a college degree than do their counterparts in Appalachian Kentucky, that education hasn’t improved other aspects of their well-being.

As Ms. Lowrey writes, this combination of problems is an overwhelmingly rural phenomenon. Not a single major urban county ranks in the bottom 20 percent or so on this scale, and when you do get to one — Wayne County, Mich., which includes Detroit — there are some significant differences. While Wayne County’s unemployment rate (11.7 percent) is almost as high as Clay County’s, and its life expectancy (75.1 years) and obesity rate (41.3 percent) are also similar, almost three times as many residents (20.8 percent) have at least a bachelor’s degree, and median household income ($41,504) is almost twice as high.

http://goo.gl/pacOSn

(more…)

10 Must Reads about the “New” Literacies or 21st Century Learning

The literacy landscape is rapidly evolving to the extent that we can no longer expect what it will be like in the next coming years. Regardless of the nomenclature, whether you call them new literacies, emerging literacies, 21st century literacies , the traditional concept of literacy has definitely undergone so much transformations and modifications in the last two decades especially in the light of the the new technological advancements and the emergence of new forms of using and interacting with text. Literacy now entails more than just being able to decode (read) and encode (write) text, but also includes the ability to express and communicate through a multimodal system of signs, the ability to analyze, evaluate, synthesize, critically appraise and share different forms of information.

For those of you interested in delving deep into the concept of new literacies, the academic works below are definitely a must read. These books will help you understand the essence of 21st century  literacies and enable you to conceptualize a working definition of what they mean in an academic context.

1- New Literacies: Everyday Practices and Social Learning  . By Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel

2- The New Literacies: Multiple Perspectives on Research and Practice. By Elizabeth A. Baker EdD (Editor), Donald J. Leu (Foreword)

3- A New Literacies Reader: Educational Perspectives (New Literacies and Digital Epistemologies). By Colin Lankshear (Editor), Michele Knobel (Editor).

4- What School Leaders Need to Know About Digital Technologies and Social Media. By Scott McLeod (Editor), Chris Lehmann (Editor), David F. Warlick (Foreword)

5- Literacy in the New Media Age (Literacies). By Gunther Kress (Author)

6- Teaching with the Internet K-12: New Literacies for New Times. Donald J. Leu Jr. , Deborah Diadiun Leu , and  Julie Coiro.

7- Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. By Henry Jenkins (Author), Ravi Purushotma (Contributor), Margaret Weigel (Contributor), Katie Clinton (Contributor), Alice J. Robison (Contributor)

8- Handbook of Research on New Literacies. By Julie Coiro (Editor), Michele Knobel (Editor), Colin Lankshear (Editor), Donald J. Leu (Editor)

9- New Literacies In Action: Teaching And Learning In Multiple Media. By William Kist (Author)

10-  The Anti-Education Era: Creating Smarter Students through Digital Learning. By James Paul Gee

Educational Resources for Young Learners

A simple website of family-friendly videos. Also available as an iOS app.
A simple iOS app of family-friendly videos. Can also create collections of your favorite videos.
Subscribe to get a box of crafts, projects, and materials once a month for your little learners.
 Subscribe and get a box of do-it-yourself electronics projects for your young engineers.Want more? Check out these collections .App Friday Apps

This collection is curated by children’s media specialist Julie Brannon.

This one is curated by preschool teacher Anna-Karin Robertsson.

8 TED Talks to watch with your kids

Looking for some TED talks to inspire young minds? The list below  contains some wonderful talks to watch with your kids. The talks highlight the importance of creative and imaginative thinking in unlocking the doors of possibilities and knowledge. As the late Maxine Greene argued in her book ‘ Releasing The Imagination”,  students need to be given spaces where they can use their imagination because imagination enables them to search for new beginnings and open up new perspectives  helping them identify alternatives, without imagination, their lives narrow and their pathways become cul-de-sacs. I would add my TED talk in there as well but that would be self-promotion. LOL Just in case anyone wanted to see it here is the link.

1- Science is for everyone even kids 


“What do science and play have in common? Neuroscientist Beau Lotto thinks all people (kids included) should participate in science and, through the process of discovery, change perceptions. He’s seconded by 12-year-old Amy O’Toole, who, along with 25 of her classmates, published the first peer-reviewed article by schoolchildren, about the Blackawton bees project”

2-A teen just trying to figure it out 


“Fifteen-year-old Tavi Gevinson had a hard time finding strong female, teenage role models — so she built a space where they could find each other. At TEDxTeen, she illustrates how the conversations on sites like Rookie, her wildly popular web magazine for and by teen girls, are putting a new, unapologetically uncertain and richly complex face on modern feminism.”

3-  A promising test for pancreatic cancer…from a teenager 

Jack Andraka talks about how he developed a promising early detection test for pancreatic cancer that’s super cheap, effective and non-invasive — all before his 16th birthday.

4- If I should have a daughter  


“If I should have a daughter, instead of Mom, she’s gonna call me Point B … ” began spoken word poet Sarah Kay, in a talk that inspired two standing ovations at TED2011. She tells the story of her metamorphosis — from a wide-eyed teenager soaking in verse at New York’s Bowery Poetry Club to a teacher connecting kids with the power of self-expression through Project V.O.I.C.E. — and gives two breathtaking performances of “B” and “Hiroshima.”

5- Thomas Suarez : A 12-year-old app developer

Thomas Suarez’s interest in technology and programming led him to learn Python, Java, and C “just to get the basics down.” He built an app and then coaxed his parents into paying the $99 fee to get his app, “Earth Fortune,” in the app store. Thomas also started an app club at school to help other kids build and share their creations, and is now starting his own company, CarrotCorp.

7- Adora Svitak : What adults can learn from kids

Child prodigy Adora Svitak says the world needs “childish” thinking: bold ideas, wild creativity and especially optimism. Kids’ big dreams deserve high expectations, she says, starting with grownups’ willingness to learn from children as much as to teach.

8- Birke Baer: What’s wrong with our food system

11-year-old Birke Baehr presents his take on a major source of our food — far-away and less-than-picturesque industrial farms. Keeping farms out of sight promotes a rosy, unreal picture of big-box agriculture, he argues, as he outlines the case to green and localize food production.

You might also like:
A Must Have Resource of TED Talks for Your Class
The 20 Most Popular TED Talks in 2014
8 Good TED Talks on The Origin of Ideas
Excellent TED Ed Math Talks for Students

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