World Water Day

World Water Day is on March 22nd and the Tap Project  is a campaign that celebrates the clean and accessible tap water available as an every day privilege to millions, while helping UNICEF provide safe drinking water to children around the world.  Participating restaurants invite their customers to donate a minimum of $1 for the tap water they would normally get for free. For every dollar raised, a child will have clean drinking water for 40 days.  Boston is a participating city so I may have to donate during my travels tomorrow.

Free Rice

Free Rice is a non-profit website where you can practice SSAT/SAT vocabulary words, and for every word you get right, rice is donated to the United Nations to help stop world hunger.  It is pretty addictive and all of the advertising dollars are put toward rice that is distributed by the United Nations World Food Program (WFP).

One Laptop per Child

The One Laptop per Child Project has a special Give 1 Get 1 Program starting November 12th for a limited time. Their mission is to provide a means for learning, self-expression and exploration to the nearly two billion children of the developing world with little or no access to education. The sturdy hardware, software and interface are all designed specifically for a child and many activities for the laptop are the result of a collaboration of over 2,000 programmers from all over the world. In addition, they are solar and have hand cranks. A donation of $200 will pay for and deliver one XO laptop to a child in a developing nation, and in November you can get one for yourself and have one delivered to a child for $399. I really want to check one out, but at the very least donate one to such a great cause.

Spell with Flickr

Here is a fun Flickr tool called Spell with Flickr that lets you type in a word or sentence and it spells it with photographs. If you don’t like the first letter it gives you click on the letter and you can scroll through until you are happy. I may use this to make some cool signs for the walls at school.

Yahoo Teachers

I signed up for Yahoo Teachers back in July and am looking forward to the public release. It will be a free tool built by teachers that will allow teachers to easily share lesson plans. I watched the sneak peak and there is a product called the Gobbler that lets you easily gather parts of web pages for a lesson plan. It is an awesome widget that allows you to grab text, images and links simultaneously from a page and drag and drop them into your Yahoo Teacher projects. The combination of collecting information with gobbler, organizing it as a Yahoo project and sharing it with a worldwide network is impressive to see all in one product. I sure hope it lives up to the hype.

Google gets its Sky On

I was excited to see today via Slashdot that Google Earth has added a Sky feature to use within the product. It allows you to take 3-D journeys through stars, constellations and galaxies. There is all sorts of potential for teacher and student use during the school year.

Here are some helpful websites for users:
Sky: Educational tours (Made by Google Earth users)
Google Earth Blog
Ogle Earth

Women in Science

Found a nice website to compliment a Women in Science unit that we do with 4th graders. Iwaswondering.org is from the National Academy of Sciences and is designed to spark girls’ interest in Science. The site includes information about cool scientists, a women scientist timeline and some fun games. I also noticed that there is a series of 10 books called the Women’s Adventures in Science Series that are linked to the scientists on the website.

We have been using a CD called Telling Our Stories: Women in Science which hasn’t been updated since 1997. They are currently looking for funding to put the project online at a site called Content Clips. This program links in perfectly with our program so I am crossing my fingers that they will get funding to transfer the content.

Bee-Bots

I got some Bee-Bots to use with Preschool and Kindergarten students this year in Computer Class. They are small bee-shaped robots that have four arrow buttons to program the bee to go from one place to the next. They were a great hit with students, so I’m hoping to find more opportunities to use them next year. I got the class bundle that included 5 Bee-Bots. Since I never have more than 5 students, this allowed each young student to independently program and learn control, directional language and programming skills. It is a fairly new product from the the U.K. and there aren’t a ton of on-line resources yet. I might search around and see if some of the Logo resources can be translated to the Bee-Bot.

Update: Just learned about a great blog in Australia called Bee-Bots Downunder in my comments. Thanks Nicole!

I brought one home to practice and Kitty Kelly was not pleased.

Design Squad

PBSKids has a new reality show called Design Squad that is set in the Boston area. Its goal is to get viewers excited about engineering. Eight high school contestants tackle engineering challenges for actual clients — and the person with the most points gets a $10,000 college scholarship from the Intel Foundation.

I caught part of an episode where they had to construct a bike for SCUL (Subversive Choppers Urban Legion) using 3 bikes obtained from an organization called Bikes Not Bombs. I have been meaning to donate my old mountain bike to that organization for a while. It is a non-profit working for alternative transportation, community development, environmental education, meaningful employment, and safe sustainable communities in Roxbury, MA and abroad. I also noticed that in addition to bicycles they are accepting donations of the plastic containers with lids that Kitty Litter comes in for shipping parts and storage.

The Great Turtle Race

The Great Turtle Race is a fun site that shows the progress of some tagged Leatherback Sea Turtles travelling from Costa Rica to the Galapagos Islands.  Right now they are 7 days into their 14 day journey.  After the race ends on April 30 you can follow the turtles at TOPP (tagging of Pacific Predators).