Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
Take home message: As soon as someone’s paid enough that money is no longer an issue, paying them more (or giving bonuses) can even have a negative effect on their performance on anything that requires higher level thought.
Which suggests that if we take grades out of the equation kids will learn more?
Audio from Daniel Pink’s TED talk on motivation.
↬ Mrs. D.
NASA’s Perpetual Ocean visualizations are excellent animations of the oceans’ surface currents.
In the early solar system, 4.5 billion years ago, the planets were still coalescing, something enormous hit the Earth.
After it formed, huge impacts shaped the surface of the moon into what we see today. NASA takes up the story:
These videos are awesome introductions to the early history of the Earth, Moon, and solar system.
CGP Grey explains why we need leap days to fill in the calender.
BadAstronomer has posted an awesome video of the moon going through its phases for an entire year.
(it’s particularly awesome in full screen and HD.)
The video is based off a NASA webpage that will generate a picture of the moon for any hour, of any day, in the year of 2012 (and only if you’re in the northern hemisphere near the equator, but close enough). They have lots more videos and images.
Interestingly, the images are all computer generated — they’re not real photos. They are based on high-resolution images and topography data taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
The Guardian paints a fascinating, chaotic, and terrifyingly feasible, picture of the future of journalism.
(via The Dish).
NOVA shows how you can see your own DNA at home. (Learn.Genetics has more details about why it works.)
(hat tip: Mrs. D. our head of school).