Darwin Online

We celebrate the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin (1809–1882) this year. Educators will find a cornucopia of classroom activities online that illustrate Darwin's extraordinary life and achievements. The following are a few recommendations.


- About Darwin: View maps of the historical journey of the HMS Beagle and a timeline of Darwin’s journey and research data.
- AMNH exhibit: Discover the man and learn about his ideas in this interactive exhibit. Includes interesting videos.
- Darwin's writings: Links to online copies of all editions of Charles Darwin’s literature.
- Voyage of Discovery: Activities from PBS to teach about Darwin's great journey.
- "Endless forms most beautiful" webcast: In lecture one of a four part series, evolutionary biologist Sean Carroll discusses Darwin and his two most important ideas: natural selection and common ancestry.
- Darwin Special Issue: The journal Evolution Education and Outreach has free pdf downloads of its articles celebrating Darwin's birthday.

(Photo: AMNH Exhibit online)

Twitter for Educators

Twitter is a free service that lets you keep in touch with people through the exchange answers to a simple question. What are you doing? Where's the next workshop? Twitter has become a popular microblogging tool. It can be accessed a variety of ways, such as via the web or instant messaging services. Why is it useful for educators? Consider these possibilities:

1. Quick networking: Your one question may draw responses from a host of people quickly. If you have a relatively good number of fellow educators in your contact base, some of them are bound to be checking their twitterfeed when you pose your query.

2. Knowledge sharing: People are eager to answer questions because they can also learn from the shared experience. It's a quick way to find a URL to a classroom activity or information about an educational event, for example.

3. Track conferences: Twitter can help you stay on top of what's going on at conferences. If you can't attend one, someone may be tweeting about a session. Or, as often happens, you are at a conference but several great sessions are happening concurrently. A tweeter buddy can fill you in. To avoid multitasking during an important presentation, you can can check the conference tweeterfeeds later.

For more information and information, check out check out Twitter Fan Wiki. For a twitter application database rating, see twtbase.

Benefits of Social Networking

In a first-of-its-kind study, researchers at the University of Minnesota have discovered the educational benefits of social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. The study found that, of the students observed, "94 percent used the Internet, 82 percent go online at home and 77 percent had a profile on a social networking site. When asked what they learn from using social networking sites, the students listed technology skills as the top lesson, followed by creativity, being open to new or diverse views and communication skills. What we found was that students using social networking sites are actually practicing the kinds of 21st century skills we want them to develop to be successful today." Watch videos to learn more about this study.

Science Glossaries for EL Students

Do you know that Google has a translation tool? On the Google search page, in the navigation options, click on "more". At the bottom of that pull-down is the "even more" option. Choose it to find a list of tools. You will fine Translate in the section titled Communicate, Show & Share. Type your text in the field provided and choose the appropriate language.

Another free, online tool comes courtesy of McGraw-Hill. The Multilingual Science Glossary presents an extensive vocabulary list, with each term and definition translated into 13 different languages. There are separate glossaries for middle and high school.

Hispanic-speaking students might find the Pearson Audio Glossary for the Earth Sciences interesting. They can hear how some terms are pronounced in English and Spanish. There's also the Genome.gov talking glossaries in English and Spanish.

Slideshare & Effective PowerPoint

Slideshare is the the world's largest community for sharing presentations. Membership is free. It is a great way to get your slides out there on the web, so your ideas can be found and shared by a wide audience, or to find slideshows for your research or teaching. You can share slideshows publicly or privately, download presentations, and embed them in your blog.

Most experts agree on guidelines to creating effect PowerPoint presentations:

• Use the rule of six (called by some "joy of six"): maximum 6 lines per slide and 6 words per line.
• Maintain unity of design elements, such as color, font, and graphics.
• Test readibility using the "floor test" by placing a printed copy of a slide on the floor and reading it while standing over it. If not, increase font size or style. In general, font size should range between 18 and 48 points.
• Avoid fancy fonts or all caps -- they are difficult to read.
• Include only essential text that is self-evident.
• Minimize special effects for they can be distracting.
• Graphics, such as clip art, should not overwhelm the text. They are used as support to the text message.
• For presentation timing, consider using three slides per minute maximum.

BEN: Digital Biology Education Library

Biosciednet.org, or BEN for short, is the biology education pathway of the National Science Digital Pathway. Over 11,187 reviewed resources to date, covering 77 biological sciences topics, are available. BEN resources can help you engage student interest, shorten lesson preparation time, provide concept updates, and develop curricula that are in line with national standards for content.

You can locate resources in several different ways: basic keyword search, advanced search, "browse by subject", and "browse by resource type". Only about 10 percent of the BEN resources require a subscription or fee to view the resource. If you do not want to see fee-based resources in your searches, an option is provided to view free records only. Currently, registration is not required in exchange for access to the wealth of information freely available through the BEN Portal. Users retain the option to register and/or login to join the library's community of 10,046 biological science educators.

Free Blog Platforms

If you would like to try blogging, Blogger.com is free. It's what I use for my blog. In future posts I'll explore some educational uses of blogs, but for now here's a way to play in the blog sandbox. If you want your students to blog, you should try it out first. Blogger offers ready-made templates that you can customize to your liking. No HTML knowledge is required. You can choose to limit who sees or comments on your blog, useful if you are just testing the waters.

Some bloggers prefer platforms on social networking sites (SCN), for example MSN Spaces or Yahoo! 360. These give you your own web page with a blogging feature built in. However, you also get some of the problems inherent to SCNs.


Some free blog platforms are designed for education. WordPress is one but it requires that you already have a hosting provider or website. Another option is Class Blogmeister, which requires you to log in with your school's code. If you know of other free blog platforms, please share them in the comments.

Digital Libraries

A digital library is a library where collections are stored in a digital format rather than print or microfiche formats and which are accessed by computer. They are libraries in cyberspace that can be used by anyone at anytime and anywhere. Some digital libraries are designed specifically for educators, providing teaching and learning materials. The educational virtual libraries are credible sources for educators because they have staff that reviews, selects and structures resources.

There are digital libraries that cover all teaching subjects, such as MERLOT. Others focus on a particular subject, such as the science specific NSDL. This blog provides links to some of these on its home page menu.

What about students? Your school district will have a digital library accessible to them. Virtual libraries for students or the general public not associated with an educational or public institution are just beginning to emerge. One fine example is The International Children's Digital Library (ICDL) where youngsters can read books in their preferred language and save books to their personal bookshelf.

Copyright & Ed Tech

It's been a while since I've posted on my blog. I completed my UFL course on educational technology since my last post and I've started a new one -- about distance education. I've learned something new about copyright as it applies to education. Section 110(1) of the American copyright law has always provided educators with the right to display or play the materials of others in a formal classroom above and beyond fair use. The educator's world has changed since the act was introduced. Learning online through class wikis, blogs, and the like, is a big part of teaching today. To address how and what can be used for online transmission, section 110(2), or the TEACH Act, was created. I developed a PPT presentation about the TEACH act for my course and I'd like to share it with you:

Digital Natives and Education

My previous post mentions digital natives. If you're wondering who they are and, if you are a teacher, what it means to teach digital natives, think about this video created by the YouTube user khokanson:



To learn more about the topic, read Marc Prensky's excellent article Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. (PDF document)

Web 2.0

Some of you may be wondering what I am learning in my online course at University of Florida. In a nutshell, the course is about understanding the learning needs of the generation nicknamed "digital natives" and exploring how to apply technology to teach them. The following slideshow sums it up pretty well. It was created by GladsteinS using Slideshare. Click on the show's embedded links to learn about applications new to you.



Slideshare.net is a place to share and find slideshows. Membership in Slideshare is free and users can embed their own or others' slide shows into web pages as I did in this blog.

Save the Internet

I was browsing through YouTube when I came across this activist video. I read about this issue in newspapers but didn't hear much more about it. The issue is about Internet providers wanting to set up a two-tier system: pay more for high-speed special treatment, or less and get lesser service. The video asks us to help support "Internet Neutrality." I hope the activists accomplish their mission. I want the Internet to remain accessible to everyone all over the globe. Some individuals in the U.S. may be able to afford extra fees but what about the student in a developing country whose only access to global information may be the Internet or the disadvantaged child here in the U.S.? What would that do to school and library budgets that offer free access to their students or constituents? If you feel the video message is misguided or off the mark, let me know.

Blogging Books

With this fifth post, I am completing all the technical blog tasks of my UFL online course. I'd like to recommend some books that teach basics about blogging and how to use a blog in an educationional setting (we used the first book in the list below for our UFL online course):

• Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms by Will Richardson (Corwin Press, 2006)
• Classroom Blogging: A Teacher's Guide to the Blogosphere by David Warlick (Lulu.com, 2005)
• Blogging For Dummies by Brad Hill (For Dummies, 2006)
• No One Cares What You Had for Lunch: 100 Ideas for Your Blog by Margaret Mason (Peachpit Press; 1st edition, 2006)

All are available on Amazon.com but I haven't hyperlinked the book titles to the commercial site since they're not paying me for clicks. Better still, support your local bookstore or library and find the books there. Anyone have other suggestions for good books about basic blogging or educational blogging?

Thanks to the visitor who provided a link to an article about adding bullets to my book list (see comments to this post).
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Sharing Multimedia

One of my assignments in an educational technolog course was to embed multimedia I created (as opposed to pre-existing multimedia, which I have embedded in the previous post "Enjoy the Video"). This worksheet was designed using the free diagram drawing tools on Gliffy.com (click worksheet to view larger image). I have created a website/blog evaluation worksheet for students based on Kathy Schrock's criteria. Gliffy keeps a copy of my graph on file. This means I can share the diagram with others; particularly useful when members of a team are working together to develop a concept. I can also provide a link to or upload the completed diagram (in my case, a worksheet) to a class web site. Gliffy gives you options to allow students (or anyone else) to write on the worksheet online. I'd love to share the worksheet with you but Blogger won't let me hyperlink to it. Try pasting http://www.gliffy.com/publish/1148218/ in your web browser. Let me know if it works. I can't verify because I am a Gliffy member and the URL may work only for members.

I'm sure there are more sophisticated tools on other websites, but they may not be free. I would have liked a diagram that has a built-in calculator, so the total score on the worksheet would be automatically generated after students completed typing the scores for each evaluation row. Please let me know if you have suggestions for free worksheet templates, with computational features, available on the Internet.

Enjoy the Video

Today I spent several hours trying to include a video or interactive game in my post. I discovered that Blogger won't accept certain html code from other sites. The video above was easy to insert because it came from YouTube, a web site that has figured out how to avoid code glitches for the not-so-tech-savvy user. Does anyone have any hints about which code works and which doesn't?

I hope you enjoy the whimsical video above. It has nothing to do with the theme of my blog other than it's an example of multimedia embedded in a post from another source. I chose it because I needed something cheerful after hours of trying to search for video sources. Whenever you need a happy moment, come back here and replay the video.

There are thousands of videos to choose from at YouTube. So it's not an easy task to find what you need for teaching. Searching using the main categories is cumbersome. I had better luck using the search option. Words like "geology" and "microbes" yielded some interesting possibilities, like the clip about how and why penicillin was discovered. None of the videos are reviewed for accuracy and that may also be a problem for teachers. Has anyone used YouTube in class? Did the clips help student learning?