1. A variety of Oil Spill Curricula links from the National Environmental Education Foundation’s National Environmental Education Week webpage. Great for formal teachers and environmental educators alike!

2. The Biodiversity Heritage Library on-line collection. From their website “The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), the digitization component of the Encyclopedia of Life, is a consortium of 12 major natural history museum libraries, botanical libraries, and research institutions organized to digitize, serve, and preserve the legacy literature of biodiversity.”

Translation: Free access to scanned natural history books.

Be sure to follow their blog for the Book of the Week feature. This weeks book is the Peregrin and Modern Aviation.

3. Henderson State University’s Arkansas Nature Trivia Page. Surprisingly addicting. Covers a wide array of topics from the adaptations of the spotted salamander to life as a goldenrod.

4. Free download of the Buy, Use, Toss? A Closer Look at Things We Buy curriculum from Facing the Future.org. According to the site, its a $20 value for free.

Sugar Ants Rebuilding After Rain

If you haven’t checked out John Latimer’s Phenology podcasts recently this is your reminder.

Every podcast has some new seasonal tidbit which inspires me to do crazy things – like get on my hands and knees to check the size of ant mound entrance holes.

John’s August Phenology Report

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

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.