Thing #14

I have had lots of fun looking around on both youtube and teachertube. I'm actually glad we can't view youtube at work without really working at it because I have actually spent hours on it at home. On teachertube I found Mr. Duey's fraction video most entertaining as far as sharing with kids and math facts. http://www.mrduey.com Lots of teachers seem to be using this format to teach concepts. I love it!! Mr. Duey visits schools to rap about all subjects, from parts of a cell to how to treat each other as people.

I usually go for the weird or funny videos on youtube, I am also interested in what people can do with Photoshop or lapsed time videos. But, I found some beer pong trick shot videos that did amuse me (if you mute the screamo music and cursing). There is a genuine physics concept related to this. In most of the videos I chose to view they were using glasses of water and a ping pong ball, but doing accurate and sometimes amazing tricks. One person floated a cup of water in a full fish tank and made the ping pong ball into the cup from at least 10 feet away. There has to be a lot of hypothesizing (practicing), measuring, and trajectory, not to mention "experimenting" to perfect their shots.

Instruction could be supported with this just as much as the proverbial dropping of the egg off the rooftop to see whose design keeps the egg from breaking; which according to students I've talked to is getting pretty outdated. But, both involve engineering in some form. I found rules of play on wikipedia that vary by region or college campus. In fact, after googling physics and beer pong, I came back to edit this post because I found this site---http://www.alongyotte.com/platinum_equation.html that appears to be a physics paper written by a college student for his physics class. I know, I'm easily amused.

My Art Wordle

Thing #12

I found bitstrips http://www.bitstrips.com/ when we first started the course through just playing around. It could be pretty amusing to see what kids could come up with as far as putting a comic strip together or using it as a storyboard for a book report. I think you could even use it to explain processes like the water cycle or life of a plant, etc... For language arts it would be fun to have them create a story telling about themselves and creating avatars of themselves and friends or family. Maybe a good beginning of the year project for getting to know each other.

Wordle http://www.wordle.net is a great site, it makes you want to be creative. It is a great way to present poetry, tell about yourself, etc. the guy who designed it worked for a big corporation so he's reallyy cautious about how or where it's used. I guess because he was still working for that company when he created it, so technically it belongs to them. There are easy instructions for how to embed your wordle. I have ended up losing mine and not being able to find it in the gallery. I did put a cartoon from bitstrips on my wiki that relates to a personal joke between me and my sister so if no one gets it-that's why.