Dr. Jess – Raw Data

“Academic Earth is an organization founded with the goal of giving everyone on earth access to a world-class education”.  This, from their own description, provides the student with access to high quality instructors lecturing on high quality content.  I listened in on a lecture by David J. Malan on Introduction Computer Science 1.  This is by no means a beginners class.  He follows the path of a simple request, such as to connect up to the CNN web page, and reveals the path to that server.

The New York Public Library and VoiceThread have formed a relationship to help teachers explain parts of it’s collection.  Each VoiceThread contains a picture and an avatar explaining what is in the picture.  Images of the ancient world are pictured as well as the Wonders of the Ancient World.  There are even lesson plans for elementary, middle and high school.  Not satisfied with hearing others, well create your own or a student’s VoiceThread. This is a great resource for teachers who want to bring another dimension to  instruction.

Blogging has been a real boon for teachers who are not able to set up web pages to communicate with parents, students or community stakeholders.  Many school systems do not give teachers space to host a web page.  Blogging is the answer! There are free blogs for educators and if you don’t need a lot of space they are quite usable. Here is an embedded video on why blogs can help you.

When I was a high school teacher, one of the subjects that I taught was economics.  I have always been interested in the dynamic that moves our economy.  There are many aspects to this dynamic. However most people are familiar with the household dynamic of “Where does my money go?”  Visual Economics, a great web site provides a visual depiction of this dynamic. It is pretty cool. So select the icon pix and visit this site.

I happened to browse by the Census Bureau web site and was startled by the quantity and quality of data on this web site.  It is absolutely a treasure trove of numbers. In addition to a population clock there is an American Community Survey, an economic census and countless fact sheets.  If you need number for any type of class, this is a great place to find them.

For the past year our work group has been using Google Docs to collaborate our activities, planning and editing of documents.  So naturally I have been poking around in Google’s other resources.  One of them is Google News.  I am a big news reader.  Google News is located in Google Labs.  The news in offered to us as ….. “A web application that organizes information chronologically. Google News Timeline allows users to view news, scanned newspapers and magazines, blog posts, sports scores, and more on a zoomable, graphical timeline.”  I like time lines as they display information in a manner that most resembles the way I think.  I tend to think linear! I’m not sure that is a good thing, but that’s ME! Mouse over the graphic and select this link to Google News.

Do you remember, as a child, being told what the future would hold?  Do you remember seeing TV shows that described what life would be like in the next 100 years? Well, we are not the only ones who have asked those questions.  People from the past asked that question and wrote about it as well.  That is what www.Paleo-Future.com illustrates.  So what did the people in the year 1890 think our world would be like?  Almost every decade predicted personal flight.  They thought we would all be flying around with balloons attached to ourselves. Do you remember predictions about flying cars?  I thought my Ford Galaxy would actually be in Orion by now! All kidding aside, this web page has great illustrations collected from the past. Kind of naive, yet very cool!

TWAN is a great web site for observing the night sky.  TWAN has posted a number of unusually beautiful images of the night sky.  Many of the pictures utilize a long exposure image.  The shutter of the camera is manually opened over a relatively long period of time to expose the medium.  They describe it as…. “The World At Night (TWAN) is a program to produce and present a collection of stunning photographs and time-lapse videos of the world’s landmarks against the celestial attractions.”  They have tutorials on how to recreate some of the stunning visual effects that sky photography allows.  One of the unusual aspects of this site is that all of the photographs require a backdrop that is of a historical site.  These sites can be man made or of natural origin. (Such as a rock outcrop like Devil’s Tower)  I can look at these sites and imagine myself in those places.  A very quick travel trip.

WorldWide Telescope is a a Web 2.0 visualization software…. “WorldWide Telescope is created with the Microsoft® high performance Visual Experience Engine™ and allows seamless panning and zooming around the night sky, planets, and image environments. View the sky from multiple wavelengths: See the x-ray view of the sky and zoom into bright radiation clouds, and then crossfade into the visible light view and discover the cloud remnants of a supernova explosion from a thousand years ago. Switch to the Hydrogen Alpha view to see the distribution and illumination of massive primordial hydrogen cloud structures lit up by the high energy radiation coming from nearby stars in the Milky Way.”

This is very exciting and is a must for the study of science.

One of the blog sites that I regularly read had this link to TagGalagy.com  So out of curiosity I opened it up.  WOW, what a concept.  Write a subject in the center line and a galaxy appears with planets in orbit.  Each orbiting planet is a relational subject to the center “SUN”.  Select a planet and the photo’s appear to fly onto the sun.  This is amazing, and it only get’s better.  Click and drag the planet and you can move the sphere around in circles.  Very Cool!  Select the arrow at the top and new ‘Flickr” photos zoom in onto the sphere for a whole new set of views.