Green Energy Activities

Tags: Alternative Energy, Earth Science, Physics, Easy Lab Activities

I was surfing on Diggdot.us and came upon a site that talked about different types of wind turbines. This piqued my interest since I plan to buy a home in the near future and the City that I live in houses often do not have large enough lots to build the traditional fan blade type wind turbine and I am interested in fitting the house that I will buy to be able to generate some electricity. Granted it would not be enough to get me off the gird. However every little bit helps and it would be nice to be able to do my part and work towards a solution of a cleaner and more environmental friendly home.

Re-energy.ca is a Canadian website that is working on educating Middle to High School students about how alternative energy resources work through informational resources, links, and most importantly hands on activities. They have various lesson plans to teach about, solar energy, wind energy, hydroelectric energy and more topics. They have very well written plans for students to build various devices to demonstrate how each type of alternate energy works.

I was just hired to teach in a very large school district and I am not sure what subjects I will be teaching. Whatever I end up teaching I'm sure that I will probably use some of their resources in my lessons.

Rocketry on a budget (Diet Coke & Mentos)

If we can only harness the power of the Mentos rocket for NASA, we could probably send people to Mars and back easily. (Just kidding)

I had wished that I had done some homemade rocketry before the school year was finished in the vein of these intrepid rocket scientists.



Also check these fellows out.

Really, how does this relate to classroom science instruction? The Mentos disrupt the cohesion of the water molecules within the soda, thus releasing the carbon dioxide trapped inside the soda. However since the Mentos are rough they provide many sites for this to happen, this break up of cohesion within the soda works very fast thus releasing a large amount of gas. You can check these pages out (1) (2) which provide a more detailed write up on how to harness the power of Mentos and Coke for classroom instruction.

Tags: Physics, Easy Lab Activities

I (heart) clipmarks

A while back I found a very useful tool for saving web page addresses, I stumbled upon the Clipmarks website and Firefox extension when I was researching about the newly released google notes. While I had played with both Google Notes and Clipmarks, I found Clipmarks to be a better fit for me as I usually like to share with other people what I am looking at or have found to be interesting. What pushed Clipmarks over the top is the fact that on can publish recently saved website materials on my blog.

I will usually save clips from webpages that I find interesting and will later write them up here in a more coherent format.

Tags: Intro, Web 2.0 Tools

Why this now?

Well Summer is here again. I have resolved to blog about interesting pages that I encounter on the Web as it relates to my avocation of teaching Science. I will highlight what I think is useful (well what I would definately use) and interesting resources for other Science teachers who may encounter my Blog.

Tags: Intro

Testing Testing 123

Testing Testing 123