ETV's Hobby Shop.
www.knowitall.org/hobbyShop/siteAgent.htmlWow! What a site! There are four different lab activities here for grades 6-8: Balloon Catapult, Rockets, Chemistry Lab and Microscope Lab. The pages guide students to perform experiments, step by step. Then they explain the results with hypertext definitions of terms used.
The Chemistry Lab has an accompanying Period Table, which is one of the best I have ever seen. It’s color coded and interactive! Elements are color coded according to whether they are alkali, metal, noble element, halogen, etc. There is a second color coding, a ring around the symbol, to indicate whether the element is a gas, a liquid, a solid, or a synthetic (man–made). When you pass the cursor over elements used in the lab program, the symbol changes to its English name: “Pb” becomes “Lead,” for example. This is a really great help for kids trying to learn the symbols derived from Latin. Finally, when you click on the symbol a pop-up provides the element’s atomic number, its natural source, and its compounds.
Furthermore, the web site provides teacher resources to use along with the web site. There are connections to educational standards, Word and PDF formats of worksheets, transparencies, and supplementary activities.
TryScience
http://www.tryscience.org/Provides the world's first global science museum while allowing students to discover many educational learning experiments and factoids in ways that ignite their imagination. An IBM Educational Partnership Project.
A South Carolina River Adventurewww.riverventure.orgProvides a unique trip along the rivers in the Columbia SC area. Movement is controlled by the position of your mouse. The cursor activates numerous popups that, when clicked, open pages with descriptions, clues that decribe how the rivers led to the city’s growth, and maps. The individual popups provide chains of scenes describing the natural resources, animal life, canals and transportation, development of the city, labor patterns, and history of the area.
This website could be used by teachers in any city or town that grew on a river, drawing contrasts and comparisons with the resources and history of Columbia. For example, the labor of enslaved Blacks was used in the early days, and that of prisoners in the penitentiary in later times to build major constructions like canals. A teacher could compare Columbia’s labor resources with those of a city that never held slaves and/or that did not have a nearby prison.
PBS’s Nova Websitewww.pbs.org/wgbh/novaThe main web site highlights specific (and changing) pages connected to upcoming television programs. One of these has to do with the “Megafloods” that took place in the Pacific Northwest of the US when glacial ice dams broke some 15,000 years ago. This program is being broadcast on May 16 on PBS. Another upcoming broadcast (May 23) concerns a volcano in the Congo that can blow at any time, endangering half a million people.
You can choose already-broadcast programs from numerous major subject areas listed along the side of the main web site page. These are: Anthropology, Disasters, Earth, Exploration, Flight, Forensics, Health, History, Nature, Physics & Math, Space, and Technology. In addition, you can search through Nova’s archives, going back quite a few years.
Nova also has a series of on-line presentations, viewable at your convenience on your computer (and connected classroom projector) instead of on programmed television.
Finally, you can use the “Search Nova” feature to seek out programs on specific topics you may want to view or have students view when studying those topics in class.
All in all, a great site – even if you only want to browse!
World Community Gridhttp://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/This IBM Educational Partnership Project invites your participation on projects that advance global humanitarian efforts by tapping into your organization's idle computer time.
More coming! Check back soon....
