Digital Bridge to Nature

I am consulting with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources to facilitate teacher workshops about digital nature photography.

This fantastic program, funded by an LCCMR grant, gives teachers (grades 3-9) of all disciplines the knowledge and tools (i.e. digital cameras) needed to bring nature photography into the classroom and plug students into nature.

Each FREE four-hour workshop is standards-based, and is designed to provide training for approximately 12-20 teachers of any subject area.

The format covers the use of digital cameras, basic photo tips, a hands-on photo activity, reveiwing and discussing the photos taken by staff during the photo activity, downloading and editing techniques, and student project ideas. We’ll show how to enhance your curriculum, not add to it!

After the workshops teachers have access to a classroom set of digital cameras to check out for free from the DNR.

I am facilitating two open workshops at the Como Park Street Car station on October 23, 2010. If you are teacher (grades 3-9) email me to register for the morning (8:00 – 12:00) or the afternoon (12:30 – 4:30) workshop. Hurry, space is filling up fast!

On July 11, we had a kick-off event in Luverne, Minnesota sponsored by Jim Brandenburg and his family. We practiced our photography in Blue Mounds State Park where we were all astounded and thrilled to find the rare western prairie fringed orchid.

Jim B. Photographing a Western Fringed Prairie Orchid, Photo by Jane Eaton, Diamond Path Elementary

The blog Information is Beautiful is a demonstration of how art and creativity transform dry data into something stunning, attractive, and readily meaningful.

Check out this musical zen planetary interactive.

Solar System Music Box

Or this climate change graphic When Sea Levels Attack.

When Sea Levels Attack

EM Scan of a Post-It

For some crazy reason the ASPEX Corporation is scanning samples sent in by anyone with their electron microscope then posting the images online. Send something in!

Here’s my favorite of the new posts:

CreatureCast – Multicellularity from Casey Dunn on Vimeo.

Ponyo Movie Poster

There is a new delightful Hayao Miyazaki movie out called Ponyo. In the film, the world is returning to the Devonian Period, AKA the Age of Fishes.

The movie is worth watching alone for the beautiful animation of trilobites, armored placoderms, and other pre-historic creatures. I tried to fish-out some clips of the sea creatures but the official trailer doesn’t feature any devonian animal scenes. If you’re a historical geology lover this is a must-see movie!

Link to more info about the Devonian Period.

Hand Knit Periodic Table Sweater. (Click for more details)

“Cymatics is the study of visible sound and vibration, typically on the surface of a plate, diaphragm or membrane. Directly visualizing vibrations involves using sound to excite media often in the form of particles, pastes and liquids.” (wikipiedia)

Make has a great video using an amp and a cornstarch-water mixture to demonstrate how cymatics work.

iQ font – When driving becomes writing / Full making of from wireless on Vimeo.

Two typographers from pleaseletmedesign.com and a pro race pilot (Stef van Campenhoudt) collaborated to design a font with a car. The car movements were tracked using a custom software, designed by interactive artist Zachary Lieberman. ( openframeworks.cc )

You can see the entire typeface here.

Black Crappie Image From the Leader's Guide

I finally got a chance to take an indepth look at MinnAqua’s Leader’s Guide.

I knew it would be good because it won a 2008 NAI Interpretive Media Award, but it far exceeded my expectations. I anticipated a curriculum guide much like the Project WET and WILD guides – which are great resources. However, the MinnAqua Guide builds on the template in a couple major ways.

First, each chapter contains an impressive quantity of local aquatic natural history, essentially eliminating the need to seek out other sources to build your knowledge or to tweak activities to be locally applicable. The guide is alone worth reading to simply increase your natural history knowledge.

Second, the guide also comes with a CD containing a plethora of seriously impressive images, especially of fish. No simple line drawings here, think detailed full-color images that look like the fish jumped out of the water onto your page.

The guide also includes hyper-detailed evaluations of how each lesson meets Minnesota’s Academic Standards and ready-to-use assessment quizzes and standards. To top it all off, the entire guide was reviewed by over 100 experts in various fields so you can feel ultra-confident about the accuracy of the content.

You can get a copy by attending or hosting a MinnAqua Educator Workshop. Contact Michelle Kelly for more info.

International Children's Digital Library

The International Children’s Digital Library is wonderful website full of great resources for educators, parents, and anyone who loves children’s literature and illustration. 

There are many science and nature themed books with high-res scanned images of all of the pages, including the illustrations. And many of the book’s copyrights have expired so you can used the illustrations for programs. The organization has even developed a Teacher Training Manual. 

“the mission of the International Children’s Digital Library Foundation is to prepare children for life in an ethnically and culturally diverse world by building the world’s largest online multicultural repository of children’s literature.”

Image form the International Children's Digital Library