Happy April Fool’s Day. No tricks coming from here, just a couple of quick hits for now.
- CNN this week is going to have a series of programs about Kids and Race, hosted by Anderson Cooper. Race and racism has once again grabbed the headlines in national news, due in part to the Trayvon Martin shooting in Florida. Cooper and CNN had apparently planned this special, however, before that tragedy focused the nation’s attention on race, having commissioned a study over a year ago in preparation for this program. The show will air nightly the week of April 2 at 8 and 10 pm on CNN.
- Congratulations to my HHS colleague and fellow blogger, Darshan Thakkar, who just recently published two more books and has another on the way already. One of his blogs, Trends in Multimedia Instruction is included in our blogroll and is of course, recommended reading. His books, Web Based Machine Translation: History, Models, and Lessons for the Secondary Language Classroom and Remembering New Words in a Second Language, are available at the links provided. We look forward to hearing more from Mr. Thakkar in the future, and learning all we can from him.
- Google is so much more than just a search engine, but many people aren’t even aware of the many other things you can do with it. Our television and media guru, Mr. Brandon, passed along this find called The Comprehensive Guide to Google Free Tools for Teachers and Students, to me, and now I would like to share it with you. Among the many topics covered are how to use Google Sketch Up, Google Reader and Google Scholar. I’m not convinced it is the final word in all things Google, but it is easy to navigate and includes a number of short videos to cover each of the topics. (The author of the site and presentation claims to be a teacher in Canada and a computer enthusiast. I explored his posts for about an hour and have bookmarked it for future use.)
- Any casual reader of this blog knows how often I turn to TED Talks to share an inspiring or mind blowing video. TED Ed is an offshoot of this great site, aimed at a younger and perhaps less technically inclined audience. It uses more animation and visual aids than the usual “talk”, but I hope that makes it more accessible and fun to watch. In How Simple Ideas Lead to Scientific Discoveries, Adam Savage (co-host of Discovery Channel’s Mythbusters) demonstrates two breakthroughs in thinking that came from simple observations. While the channel is still very young and therefore limited in its collection, the other topics include such interesting titles as “How Containerization Shaped the Modern World” and “Evolution in a Big City”.
- Serendipitous YouTube Find, Leonel Toromoreno’s Art Studio @ Perkins Academy. I still paint,
draw, sketch and doodle to this day because of the huge influence that my uncle, Leonel, had on my childhood. He was an art prodigy if I ever saw one, replicating the paintings of the Renaissance masters using what he could afford; pencil on canvas. I spent hours as a kid dressed in oversized clothing, modeling as a waif for his still life drawings. Today, like so many people in my family, he is an educator, sharing his time and his gifts with the next generation. I was excited to find the video linked above showing off some of the work he’s doing in his classrooms.
Thank you for stopping by and I hope you found something worthwhile.
Copyright © henry toromoreno, 2012. All rights reserved.
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