Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
One of Larry Sanger‘s new projects is WatchKnow, a website that rates online educational videos. It has a nice age filter that, while not very useful right now, may be very useful as the site develops.
The video above is the currently the top rated video (4 out of 5 stars) in the category on the writing process. Its WatchKnow page is here.
Teach.Genetics has a bunch of “Print and Go” pdf lessons on their site, but also have a really neat interactive page where you can look inside an animal cell. What’s really neat about this flash app is that you can move around a little, round window as you scan through the cell membrane. You can also take the membrane away to see everything inside the cell at once, but that takes away the challenge.
When you use the little window you have to piece together what everything inside the cell looks like by memory. For a student new to the parts of a cell this might be a bit of cognitive overload, but once your somewhat familiar with the pieces, this makes for an interesting challenge.
The Teach.Genetics site and materials are free for educational use.
The message — that babies and parenting are hard work — seems to be sinking in for some of its intended audience. [15 year olds] Leslie, Miguel and Paola all intend to be parents, but, as Miguel says, “not at this age.” – Grigsby Bates, 2010.
NPR’s Morning Edition had a story on “Teen Mom” and “16 and Pregnant”, two TV shows from MTV. These shows apparently offer a very realistic take on what it means to be a teen parent. So much so, the Kaiser Family Foundation is providing free DVD’s of the 16 and Pregnant series (as well as the Think HIV: This Is Me documentary).
I have not seen either of these series, but am interested in finding out if any of my students are familiar with them, if they’re appropriate for early adolescents, and if anyone else has tried them. From the radio program it sounds like they might be a useful supplement to the Baby Think It Over® infant simulators.
On a somewhat tangential note, every time is see the Baby Think It Over dolls, I’m reminded of Elna Baker’s story, Babies Buying Babies (see Act 3), on This American Life. It’s about the choices parents make when choosing the race of a life-like, newborn doll for their kids. The Baby Think It Over dolls are pretty life-like and I’ve heard anecdotes of kids getting strange looks when walking around, not just with a baby, but one that looks like it’s from a different race.
The history of the second half of the 20th century is interlaced with the history nuclear weapons. From ending the Second World War in the Pacific to mutually assured destruction to the conflict between India and Pakistan. It’s fascinating how you can interpret that history from video above showing the relative timing of the nuclear explosions. It also interesting to note just how many nukes were exploded and by whom. Wired magazine has a good article about the video, and I’ve posted previously about tying nuclear weapons into both the Natural and Social sciences.
Following the theme of philanthropy, if you use Twitter you can help save the Galvao birds of Brazil. More information about this fascinating project can be found at On The Media.
The UN World Food Program (WFP) has the site FreeRice.com where for each vocabulary question you answer correctly it donates 10 grains of rice to the WFP. The site is quite ingenious, it uses the money generated by the banner adds at the bottom of the page to buy the rice. It was created by John Breen and donated to the WFP.
The site is going beyond vocabulary into other subjects such as geography (identify country capitals and countries), identifying chemical symbols, art, language and math (pre-algebra).
They also have a nice video of the rice being distributed to refugees from Myanmar sheltering in Bangladesh.
The group Bright Eyes has a wonderful video for their song First Day of My Life. It consists of a series of vignettes of people sitting on a couch listening to and responding to the song. It’s fascinating to think about the stories behind the couples and individuals (and one dog) sitting on the couch. The people in the video are obviously not actors, and you get a glimpse of their character as they respond to the same thing you are hearing. It’s interesting to see how their response differs from your own.
In reading literature we try to get students to think beyond the book, while in creative writing we try to build and get to know our own interesting characters. In the video you get perhaps a five second glimpse of the characters so there is much room for questioning and exploring. What brought these people to this place and this time, what history do they have that makes them act the way they do?
In a video and song like this one, you can ask many of the same questions that you ask when you read a story. There may be no story arc with regards to individuals, but there is a broader pattern embedded within the lyrics and the sequencing of the video. I would like to use this to introduce different types of reading responses, such as writing a letter to a character, or assessing the issues raised by the video.
Alternatively, the video could be used as a writing prompt. Choose one set of characters in the video and tell me their story. The format of this video is nice for this type of assignment because you have the parallel experience of hearing the same words and music that the people in the video are responding to.
I recently found the 1954 animated version of Orwell’s Animal Farm online at hulu.com (see below). Things on hulu seem to come and go without warning so watch out. I hope this one stays up since the video quality is quite good.