Science

A place to share Web 2.0 ideas for use in the Science arena...

 

 

 

Weather Bonk

by Elfreda Benally

 

Weather Bonk is a mashup that lets you view real-time weather information on a map. If your students are working on a unit on weather, this would be a good resource to use. Data comes from a combination of personal weather stations like schools and homes as well as weather stations. You can create a personalized route forecast for a trip and look at live cam shots of various locations.

 

 

 

myExperiment.com 

 

by Pam Lang

 

myExperiment makes it really easy to find, use and share scientific workflows and other research objects, and to  build commuinities.

 

 

 

 

 

Virtual Pig Dissection

by Shannon Walker

 

Need to teach High School students to dissect a pig but can't get through the smell, check this site out.  This site will help students study the anatomy of a fetal pig with real-time photos...kind of creepy, but cool. 

 

Virtual Frog Dissection

by Shannon Walker

 

Want to teach your students about dissection and anatomy, then check this site out and dissect a frog virtually!

 

 

by Lydia Horstman

 

Google Sky uses Google Maps to show images of the sky.  It includes images of constellations, planets, galaxies and images from the Hubble telescope.  This site also contains podcasts to inform you of what is occuring in the sky tonight.  I've always found it difficult to find constellations in the sky.  The images in Google Sky are great to search throught the different constellations that can be found in the sky.  This site also displayed images of the areas on the moon astronauts have landed.  It provides a brief description of the year the astronauts landed and the shuttle hey traveled.

 

 

by Shannon Walker

 

Here is another space website that allows students to learn everything they want about space.  It has virtual space tours through an animated encycopedia, which is very visual and interest based for students.

 

 

by Shannon Walker

 

You are about to take a virtual space-trip to the depths of the Universe! This website is a space simulation from an astronauts point of view.  For visual learners, this is a great place to start a unit on space.

 

 

I Know That

by Shannon Walker

 

This website offers web-based educational activities for kids ages 2-12. Activities include stickerbooks, simulation games, painting, math and phonics.  Being a science teacher, I really enjoyed the science part to this website.  It showed great simulations on volcanoes, cells, earthquakes and even the human body.  Check it out and be amazed!

 

Neuroscience for Kids

by Patti McFeely

 

A great site for either students or teachers to use to explore more about the nervous system. The site is suitable for elementary through high school science levels. Check the explore and experiment links on the left side of the homepage.  Explore gives a table of contents to link for content. Some of the content links include interactive quizzes. Experiment is the hands-on and interactive portion of the site. Here you can find some project ideas and games. Some great ideas for the modeling of neurons, etc.

 

 

 

 

http://climate.weather.com/

 

Susan Meece

Even if you're not teaching science, this website gives plenty of ideas on what is happening in current events today.  It has categories like, "smart travel," "smart health," and 10 people you should know.  It lists the top environmental stories, has its top video clips, and a blog talks about everything from the weather to healthy recipes.  It is sponsored by the weather channel but definately appears to be designed for the classroom and students of science.

 

 

Online Science Games

by Shannon Walker

 http://homeschooling.about.com/od/gamesscience/Online_Science_Games.htm

 

When it comes to science, it's hard for teachers to get students motivated.  In order to get them motivated, we need to find something that interests the students.  Well why not incorporate video games into your curriculum.  The above link will give you a few examples of some fun, educational games that students can play online for free.

 

Discovery

by C. Colcord

One of my favorite places to go on the web for science is the discovery channel's web site. They have a lot of videos that are alright for students to view. For example, we just finished a unit on volcanoes (in our science class students will be building volcanoes) in which we read the book "The Mountain is on Fire" and then we studied several vocanoes including Mt. St. Helens and Mt. Vesuvius. There were two videos that we watched and the students learned about lava, magma, and eruptions. They really got a kick out of it. After the videos, see below

 

 

Google Earth

by C. Colcord

 

I had the students use google earth to find the volcanoes that we read about so that the class could find out more information. Once the students found the volcanoes that were part of our reading assignment, I had them locate pictures and additional data in groups. Once their data was collected they presented their findings in front of the whole class.  Then, I had the students use google earth to find more volcanoes (Mt. Fuji for example) and we discussed these additional volcanoes in class. It was a blast. The students really seemed to get a lot more out of the lesson when I used my Web 2.0 resources.  

 

Science Buddies

Ann-Marie Jackson

http://www.sciencebuddies.org/

 

This site helps students with science fair projects from finding a topic to setting up the science experiment and then how to layout the project for the actual Science Fair.  This site has project ideas to project guide.  It even helps the students with thier research.  This whole site would help both teachers and students develop a successful science fair project.

 

Physics Education Technology (PhET)

By Patrick Schwab

Online Interactive Physics Simulations: Fun, interactive, research-based simulations of physical phenomena from the Physics Education Technology project at the University of Colorado.

 

 

 

National Computational Science Alliance

By Patrick Schwab

The University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), one of the five original centers in the National Science Foundation's Supercomputer Centers Program that uses a super computer for research purposes.

  

fotoflexer

By Adam Hunt

 

Fotoflexer is your free, online answer to Photoshop Elements.  This site allows you to edit images in many of the same ways as you can in Elements.  There is a lasso tool to cut out portions of photos, and you can layer one image on top of another, which is really what sets this site apart from other on-line photo editing sites.  There are some other cool tools, like the morph tool, which allows you to literally make one image out of two, you can bring in images from a webcam, resize images, and all the other basic tools you find in a photo editor (changing up color schemes, cropping, etc...).  Then, like any other good 2.0 tool, it works seamlessly with other 2.0 applications, allowing you to move images directly to sites such as facebook and flickr.  From the photo album, you can email an image directly to someone or download it to take with you (one note-when I downloaded the image it initially did not save as an image.  I had to open it back up and resave it as a jpg).  Basically, as they say, the most powerful on-line photo editor.

 

So now, many of the things you might use Photoshop Elements for you can apply to this program.  I won't try to list them all (I'll leave that up to the rest of you...gotta love wikis), but the one I will mention relates to the photo you see here.  This image I created by taking 4 other photos, cutting out the three animals (frog, mosquito, and grasshopper), and then placing them into their habitat, the fourth photo, that of a pond.  Students could do a similar activity to create a food chain shown in its environment, create a certain habitat given a set of pictures, or even show where trees might be planted on the school campus (take a photo from google maps/googleEarth).  As described here, this would be probably an activity for 5th grade and up.