Mike Falick's Blog

LIFE.com: Life Magazine Puts Its Content and Pictures on the Web with Continuous Updates

Life magazine's website, LIFE.com, has recently been significantly expanded to include free access to its millions of photographs.  In addition, the site is now is updated frequently with "Today in the News" and other photographs.

From the LIFE.com website:

Welcome to LIFE.com, the largest, most amazing collection of professional photography on the Web.

LIFE and Getty Images, the two most recognized names in photography, have joined forces to provide you instant access to millions of breathtaking photographs — for free. LIFE.com not only lets you wander through the legendary LIFE and Getty archives, but with more than 3,000 new photos added every day, it also gives you the best pictures of the people and places shaping our world now.

These are the photos you won’t forget. Taken by the world’s top photographers and curated by LIFE editors, they tell the story of our times — our heroes, our stars, our celebrations and heartbreak, the events etched in our memory and the small moments that make life sweet. When you find a photo you like, you'll be able to share it, print it, and sometimes even buy it.

We'll update the site throughout the day, but to make sure you never miss a great shot, sign up for our weekly "Picks of the Week" E-newsletter. And if you have suggestions or comments about our site, please share them with us — LIFE.com will be constantly improving and adding new features to give you the best experience possible.

Quizlet is the End of Paper Flashcards

I have previously posted a few sites that allow you to make virtual flashcards online.  I just found Quizlet, which is another flashcard site.  What distinguishes Quizlet, other than the fact that it was started by a high school student, is that it has a extraordinarily vast library of flashcards created by its users in subject areas from Algebra to AP and SAT preparation.  It is easy to use, and has a "learning" and "testing" interface.  And for today's students, virtual flashcards will be far easier to create than old-school paper ones.

From the Quizlet website:

For lack of a professional writer working for Quizlet, here are some ramblings from me, Andrew Sutherland, creator of Quizlet, president of Brainflare, web developer, and high school student.

Hello.

Quizlet is how I occupy my free time and even some of my non-free time.

My mission for Quizlet is to make learning vocabulary not a chore. I know a lot of teachers assign vocabulary to students, but few students actually "absorb" words into their vocabularies after they take their test. Which kind of defeats the purpose, right? So Quizlet is my response - it aims to make learning fun, thus make learning effective. At the very least, it can help students do better on quizzes and tests even if they don't fully "absorb" their words.

Lure of the Labryinth: A Fun New Video Game for Learning Middle School Math

Lure of the Labyrinth is another new website that presents a fresh approach to teaching math to middle school students.

Here is a review of Lure of the Labyrinth from a recent post on eSchoolNews:

Maryland Public Television, in collaboration with MIT’s Education Arcade and educational media producer FableVision, has applied the latest research in game theory and design to produce a free learning tool to help all students learn pre-algebra concepts regardless of their math ability.

“Lure of the Labyrinth” is an online middle-school math game developed to reach today’s tech-savvy students in a contemporary way. Using the immersive characteristics of digital games, it blends a compelling storyline with multi-level puzzle play to build pre-algebra skills in proportions, fractions, and ratios; variables and equations; and numbers and operations.

Math is cleverly woven throughout an underground, monster-inhabited world. Students disguise themselves as a monster avatar plunging into a shadowy factory on a rescue mission to save their missing pet.

“Lure of the Labyrinth” can be played individually or in teams; an online communication device allows players to exchange ideas and game strategies and encourages collaborative game play.

Free Science Website Aims to Capture the Interest of 4th, 5th, and 6th Grade Students: As the Website Says " Engage and Amaze Your Students"

The Siemens Science Day website is a new site that is designed to "engage and amaze" 4th - 6th grade students.  The website includes videos and a lot of hands on science activities.

From the Siemens Science Day website:

Teachers, engage and amaze your students. Here you'll find videos, tools and revealing hands-on activities for students in grades 4 through 6 to help reinvent your science class. New, original experiments with intuitive directions, materials lists and home extensions. Get started today.

Also, here's a review of the Siemens Science Day website from eSchoolNews.com:

The Siemens Foundation and Discovery Education have unveiled a new web site that aims to engage students in science education. “Siemens Science Day” provides standards-based videos and hands-on activities for earth, life, and physical science that can help educators turn fourth through sixth graders into aspiring scientists, the two organizations say. “Educators are often challenged to find new ways within their existing curriculum to interest students in science education,” said Dale Fulton, Discovery Education’s senior vice president of curriculum development. “Siemens Science Day provides many new and creative ways to present lessons on a variety of science topics, all tied to national science standards. In addition, each activity invites student involvement, engaging students in the learning process.” Each activity on the web site includes step-by-step directions for in-class use, a materials list, at-home extensions that promote learning beyond the classroom, and related video clips. More activities will be added to the web site in the coming months, its organizers say—creating a rich database of science experiments and demonstrations that help students learn by doing.

Academic Earth: College-Level Course Videos Designed to "Give Everyone on Earth Access to a World-Class Education"

Over the past several years, I have posted a number of websites that I believe are on the cutting edge of both distance learning and providing free and open access to world class online learning opportunities.  (see prior posts here, here, and here).

Academic Earth is another promising new player in this space.  From the Academic Earth website:

Academic Earth is an organization founded with the goal of giving everyone on earth access to a world-class education.

As more and more high quality educational content becomes available online for free, we ask ourselves, what are the real barriers to achieving a world class education?  At Academic Earth, we are working to identify these barriers and find innovative ways to use technology to increase the ease of learning.

We are building a user-friendly educational ecosystem that will give internet users around the world the ability to easily find, interact with, and learn from full video courses and lectures from the world’s leading scholars.  Our goal is to bring the best content together in one place and create an environment that in which that content is remarkably easy to use and in which user contributions make existing content increasingly valuable.

iTunesU Provides Dozens of Free Podcasts on Leadership

iTunesU, which I have featured previously in this blog post, , has a series of podcasts on leadership from a number of excellent sources shown below.

From the email I received from iTunesU:

"Leadership is not something that you learn once and for all. It is an ever-evolving pattern of skills, talents, and ideas that grow and change as you do." — Sheila Murray Bethel. With this collection of content, you will discover the diverse types of leadership, skills, and talents required to succeed. Take the lead from The Center for Creative Leadership's courses in Crisis Leadership and Emotional Intelligence and learn business leadership from American Public Media's Leadership from the Corner Office or Pennsylvania State University's Smeal Executive Insights Series.

You will need iTunes (free download here).  Once you have downloaded iTunes, click on each of the images below to access the podcasts available from each source.

The Federal Reserve Bank Provides a Free Personal Finance Curriculum for High School Classrooms

In these very trying financial times, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis has created a personal finance curriculum for high school students called It's Your Paycheck!

From the Federal Reserve Bank's website:

It’s Your Paycheck! is designed for use in high school personal finance classes. The curriculum contains three sections—“Know Your Dough,” “KaChing!” and “All About Credit.” The lessons in each of these sections employ various teaching strategies to engage students so that they have opportunities to apply the concepts being taught. Each lesson includes black-line masters of the handouts and visuals needed to teach the lesson.

You can download the complete curriculum (.pdf) or in individual lessons. The curriculum (which is all free) includes the following:

Unit A: Know Your Dough

Lesson 1: Invest in Yourself (PDF, 62 KB)
Students are divided into groups to produce name tents. Each of four groups in the classroom produce name tents in a different way to highlight different levels of human capital. The students identify ways in which people invest in human capital and the link between investment in human capital and earning income.

Lesson 2: “W” Is for Wages, W4 and W2 (PDF, 443 KB)
Students compute the gross pay for a fictional John Dough given his hourly wage and the number of hours worked. They compare gross pay to net pay. They learn what FICA and federal income taxes are. They learn how to complete a W-4 form and what a W-2 form is.

Free Online Calendar Creators: Just in Time for the New Year

One of my favorite DIY blogs is MakeUseOf.com.  Just in time for the start of the new year and the second semester of school, MakeUseOf has posted 10 websites that will help you quickly and easily create your own free, printable calendars.

The MakeUseOf list appears below after the jump.

Lecturefox: Yet Another Online Source of Free University Lectures

I have previously posted a number of websites that offer high quality, free university lectures (here, here, here, and here).  Now comes another site, Lecturefox, which brings you many Ivy League University lectures on sciences, psychology, economics, history, and philosophy.  Many of the Lecturefox lectures include not only audio, which is common on other sites, but also video.

From the Lecturefox website:

What is Lecturefox?

It’s all about the joy of learning.

Lecturefox is a free service. You can find high-quality classes from universities all over the world. We collect without exception lectures from official universities, and we have a special interest in lectures from the faculties physics, chemistry, computer science and mathematics. In the category “faculty mix” you can find miscellaneous lectures from other departments like electrical engineering, biology, psychology, economics, history and philosophy.

TimeRime: Here's a Website that Allows You to Easily Create Rich, Multimedia Timelines

Here is yet another free website application that can be used to improve student learning.  TimeRime is a relatively new website that allows you to create timelines.  You can even embed a timeline into a website or blog.

Here is how TimeRime describes itself:

TimeRime.com is an online community that allows people to create, compare and upload information by creating timelines, and to view information uploaded by others. Information can be uploaded by individuals, as well as companies or (public) institutions.

The subjects of the timelines can be anything which relates to time. For instance, one can create a timeline about ones favorite pop star, or one can create a timeline about a scientific subject, like history. But also timelines about company histories, individuals as yourself, your favorite summer melodies, your favorite car, all these timelines can be created on TimeRime.com.

The TimeRime timelines can be characterized as interactive and multimedia. The timelines can be filled with text, music, YouTube movies et cetera, which makes TimeRime.com a platform that combines popular communities and other internet applications in one new portal.