Elementary+Science

Kid-Friendly Search Engines for Science

[|Thermometer] ($.99) - With the internet connected, an iPad is turned into a location-based thermometer in either Fahrenheit or Celsius. Application Ideas: Analysis, Inquiry, and Design (Scientific Inquiry) Key Idea 3: The observations made while testing proposed explanations, when analyzed using conventional and invented methods, provide new insights into phenomena. The student will compare the results of investigation(s) using graphs, diagrams, tables, or models to show the comparison. The student work product shows the student’s comparisons indicating warmer or colder at each time of day on the table.

3-D Tours of the Solar System

Time Warner sponsors this [|searchable database of activities and resources] found in your community that promotes the learning of science, technology, engineering, and math in response to President Obama's "Educate to Innovate" campaign. It's simple to search by locale or topic to find extracurricular activities to stimulate the minds of young scientists, engineers and mathematicians.

Physics Sites for ages 7-11 covers a wide range of topics in physics and explains them in a way that younger students can readily understand. Study electricity, sound, light, friction, and magnets. Each section includes the essential idea accompanied by an illustration. There are also experiments for home or school, vocabulary, a quiz, worksheets for teachers, and an image bank to further illustrate each concept. The directions for the activities are easy to follow and use common, inexpensive things.

40 Awesome STEM based PBL Resources The sites included are considered to be great resources that provide ideas or blueprints for an entire PBL project. Included in most plans are project titles, content addressed, 21st century skills, driving questions, products, procedures, and evaluation. The resources in this collection tend to focus on the entire PBL process.

Top 10 Science Resources for Teachers and Students

Explania is one of my favorite resources for animated explanations of topics in technology and science. Some of their offerings are videos and some of their offerings are interactive animations. One of their interactive animations that could be quite useful for biology teachers and health teachers is The Human Heart. The Human Heart animation allows visitors to learn about the parts and functions of the human heart by clicking on different parts of the heart to find short explanations of that part's function. Your students can access the interactive animation on the Explania website or you can embed the animation into your blog or website. //From freetech4teachers.com//

Math Rap - Don't Let Pi Make Ya Cry
Rhyme 'N Learn produces clean rap songs about math and science. They've just released a new song, "Don't Let Pi Make Ya Cry." In this new song students are introduced to the function of Pi. You can watch the video below. And if you really like the song, you can buy it along with other Rhyme 'N Learn productions on iTunes and CD Baby. This post originally appeared on Free Technology for Teachers.

==Complete Missions on NASA's Station Spacewalk Game == NASA's website is full of great resources for teachers and students. Here is another good example of that. NASA's Station Spacewalk Game is designed for middle school students to learn about the purposes and functions of the International Space Station. In the game students go on Extravehicular Activities modeled after real EVAs performed by astronauts. Station Spacewalk can be played online or downloaded for free as a Windows game or as a Mac game.

NASA offers a short set of questionsthat students should be able to answer after attempting the EVAs in Station Spacewalk. The question set isn't terribly deep or complex so you will probably want to expand the questions to match your curriculum. //This post originally appeared on Free Technology for Teachers.//
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Images to support inquiry and understanding
Fotopedia is a collaborative photo encyclopedia that hosts high-quality images whose subjects are matched to Wikipedia articles. For subjects that don't have a Wikipedia entry the community can build one. Some images are linked to a map so that you can see where the image was taken. You will find that some Fotopedia contributions are Creative Commons-licensed (copyright friendly) and others are not.
 * Integration example: Browse Fotopediafor a Creative Commons-licensed picture of a Zebra (to be posted on a class website about animals). Browsing is a great visual way for students to discover information about animals. While browsing the collection of Zebra images students can read the article about Zebras, click and see where the images were captured, and then jump into browsing images and information about where those images were captured. In the Zebra example, a student can begin with looking at pictures of Zebras and go to browsing pictures of Tanzania and reading about habit in Tanzania.//(This post originally appeared on Free Technology for Teachers.//)

==Ocean Tracks - Track and View Marine Animals in 3D == Source: Free Technology for Teachers - Richard Byrne

Ocean Tracks is an Australian website on which students can view the tracks of marine animals in an online 3D environment. The "tracks" part of Ocean Tracks shows you where in the world tagged animals are swimming or have swum. Ocean Tracks uses the Unity browser plug-in to provide animations of the underwater views of tracked animals. You can see what bluefin tuna, swordfish, sharks, and many other fish see in 3D. Watch the promo video below to learn more about Ocean Tracks.

Ocean Tracks could be a great resource to use in marine biology lessons to show student how far some marine animals travel. Students will also enjoy seeing what those animals see. Those underwater views could be helpful in demonstrating to students why animals like sharks use their sense of smell to find prey.
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If you do decide to use Ocean Tracks in your classroom, bear in mind that it is quite bandwidth intensive. (Elementary teachers - hang in there...we are getting the bandwidth fix in Elementary! Mark this for future use!) //This post originally appeared on Free Technology for Teachers.//

==Listen to Dinosaurs Talk About Themselves == DinoDatabase.com has a great little feature called //If Dinosaurs Could Talk//. In //If Dinosaurs Could Talk// you will find twenty audio recordings in which a narrator playing the role of a talking dinosaur shares a little information about that dinosaur.

In addition to the //If Dinosaurs Could Talk// feature, Dinodatabase.com offers a huge glossary of terms about dinosaurs.

//If Dinosaurs Could Talk//could be a nice little resource to use in elementary school lessons about dinosaurs. You could use the audio recordings as a way to spark students' curiosity about dinosaurs before sending them off to read and research more information about the dinosaurs that they just heard talking to them. //This post originally appeared on Free Technology for Teachers.//
 * Applications for Education **

The Scale of the Universe
by Cary Huang A graphic illustration of the size of a person in scale with other things in the universe - large and small - from space to microbes. It's amazing and a bit mind-bending. @http://htwins.net/scale2/scale2.swf?bordercolor=white