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

Here’s my favorite of the new posts:

CreatureCast – Multicellularity from Casey Dunn on Vimeo.

Photo from a post titled "Occupational Hazards"

The Infinite Universe Blog is an engaging and witty site authored by local naturalist and photographer Tim Boyle.

I highly recommend scrolling down and checking out the sidebar section titled “Things kids say to a naturalist…”

“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.

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.

Its really interesting to hear so many of the students say they would like to have people with science careers come into the classroom and talk to them about it. It seems like a no-brainer, but we are not doing it enough.

Miss Baker is a biology teacher who’s class has a blog, and who has her own blog about using blogs for science education. Very exciting and inspiring – she is meeting the students where they are and it is obviously engaging them.

I wonder if local nature centers could engage with schools by using blogs/facebook/twitter etc. Maybe they could even partners with a local biology class to set it up and run the blog for a school year, or get a summer intern. If any organizations are interested in this idea and would like some help setting it up, please contact me.

Its just the right amount of information to give the reader a clear understanding of Minnesota’s geologic history; providing a comprehensive knowledge of the evidence for Minnesota’s major historical geological events while not getting bogged down in too much detail.

Green Women's Month

March is only here for a couple more days, but its not too late to celebrate Women’s History Month.

The 2009 theme is Women Taking the Lead to Save our Planet. Even though women’s history month is almost over, environmental educators can take advantage of this great theme and use it throughout the year.

From www.womenshistorymonth.gov: ”In 1987, the National Women’s History Project petitioned Congress to expand the celebration [from a week] to the entire month of March. Since then, the National Women’s History Month Resolution has been approved every year with bipartisan support in both the House and Senate.”

Here is the president’s proclamation of 2009′s women’s history month.

Project BudBurst

Springtime always peaks my interest in phenology. Recently, I went to a local book seller and inquired if they sold phenology journals, the women at the book store asked if I had looked in the New Age section. Right away I knew her mistake, “Not Phrenology,” I said, “Phenology.”

Here is a list of phenology resources from people and organizations who definitely wouldn’t make the same mistake.

The Minnesota Conservation Volunteer has a great young naturalists article on Phenology, including a teachers guide.

Project BudBurst is “is a national field campaign for citizen scientists designed to engage the public in the collection of important climate change data based on the timing of leafing and flowering of trees and flowers. ”

The National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service’s extensive phenology page.

John Latimer, of Grand Rapids, hosts an interesting phenology radio series with the MP3s available on his website.

Red Wing Nature Notes is group blog which holds true to its name.

And the Star Tribune reports that this week the first barge plowed upstream through the ice at Lake Pepin.

Rock Cycle Journey Activity

5/09 UPDATE: I finally got the chance to test out this game last week and it works beautifully! Of note, the sediment and sedimentary lines get long (all dice, except magma, lead to sediment – and sediment only leads to sedimentary) so leave some extra space by those two dice. Some great follow-up questions include: Are all the dice the same? Why is there an animal station in a rock cycle game? Does anyone have many of the same color beads in a row – do rocks change fast or slow?

After going through the ProjectWet training a couple weeks ago I was inspired to make a rock cycle version of the popular Incredible Journey activity.

The rock cycle version has six dice: Igneous, Metamorphic, Sedimentary, Sediment, Magma, and Animal. Igneous, Metamorphic, and Sedimentary are, of course, the the three types of rocks. Sediment and Magma are transition types – sediment leads to sedimentary and magma leads to igneous. The animal die was included to demonstrate that life interacts with rocks, a snail was chosen because snail-like shells can frequently be seen fossilized in local sedimentary rocks.

Here a link to a pdf of this Rock Cycle activity with the instructions and graphics. If you use it let me know what you think!