Mrs. D. recommended this nice little article on “flipped teaching”, where students get lessons from videos (usually at home) and spend their time in class working on problems and getting help from peers and their teacher. Sounds a lot like Montessori. In middle school, for example, where you get a short lesson at the beginning of the week and spend the rest of the time working on projects and assignments.
Pushing the video out of the classroom can, potentially, be a useful step, especially for those students who can work independently. I’ve been trying it a little with the Khan Academy videos, but I need to organize it a bit more.
Influence Explorer is an excellent resource for assessing data about money in politics.
The website Influence Explorer has a lot of easily accessible data about the contributions of companies and prominent people to lawmakers. As a resource for civics research it’s really nice, but the time series data also makes it a useful resource for math; algebra and pre-calculus, in particular.
Adam Cole has an excellent NPR article on some fascinating researchers who are storing data — text files, web pages, sonnets — on DNA.
This should be a interesting introduction for middle-schoolers to the idea of DNA as a means of storing and transferring information. The question I hope to get is, “How did they do that?”
This app lets you drag and drop electrons, protons, and neutrons to create atoms with different charges, elements, and atomic masses. You can also enter the element symbol, charge and atomic mass and it will build the atom for you.
Note, however, it only does the first 20 elements.
To figure out if the climate is actually warming we need to extract from the global temperature curve all the wiggles caused by other things, like volcanic eruptions and El Nino/La Nina events. The resulting trend is quite striking.
I’m teaching pre-Calculus using a graphical approach, and my students’ latest project is to model the trends in the rising carbon dioxide record in a similar way. They’re matching curves (exponential, parabolic, sinusoidal) to the data and subtracting them till they get down to the background noise.
Carbon dioxide concentration (ppm) measured at the Mona Loa observatory in Hawaii shows exponential growth and a periodic annual variation.
[A]t the time of the image, the air quality index (AQI) in Beijing was 341. An AQI above 300 is considered hazardous to all humans, not just those with heart or lung ailments. AQI below 50 is considered good. On January 12, the peak of the current air crisis, AQI was 775 the U.S Embassy Beijing Air Quality Monitor—off the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency scale—and PM2.5 was 886 micrograms per cubic meter.
The pollution in Beijing seems to be a result of automobiles and construction, and not factories as you might think. One of my Chinese students (A.S.) pointed out that the Chinese government had moved a whole lot of factories out of Beijing about 10 years ago in preparation for the Olympics. Curiously, the factories were relocated to poorer areas as the cities have become wealthier; something we’ve seen at a global scale as well.
The relocation of factories out of Beijing is part of a mass migration of Chinese industry in recent years from wealthier cities, which have become environmentally conscious, to less-developed ones.
Spotted salamanders, too, are in a long-term relationship with photosynthetic algae. In 1888, biologist Henry Orr reported that their eggs often contain single-celled green algae called Oophila amblystomatis. The salamanders lay the eggs in pools of water, and the algae colonise them within hours.
By the 1940s, biologists strongly suspected it was a symbiotic relationship, beneficial to both the salamander embryos and the algae. The embryos release waste material, which the algae feed on. In turn the algae photosynthesise and release oxygen, which the embryos take in. Embryos that have more algae are more likely to survive and develop faster than embryos with few or none.
Then in 2011 the story gained an additional twist. A close examination of the eggs revealed that some of the algae were living within the embryos themselves, and in some cases were actually inside embryonic cells. That suggested the embryos weren’t just taking oxygen from the algae: they might be taking glucose too. In other words, the algae were acting as internal power stations, generating fuel for the salamanders.
