Accessories company Henge have produced what surely must be the first docking station of its kind – a Macbook docking station. We are quite familiar with the concept of docking our tech devices. Docking does a number of things for us:
1. Powers and chargers depleted batteries
2. Connects devices to a larger screen or peripheral technology for use
3. Reduces clutter and tidies cables – saving precious Teacher Office space! 
and perhaps most importantly
4. Simplifies the screen syncing process for teachers moving between classrooms 

Most of us have docks for our phones, mp3 players and the like but have you ever seen a dock for your entire macbook?

I just love the idea of this.

Take a look at the video:

I can see a lot of schools taking advantage of a simple device like this to create a smoother process for syncing teacher laptops with screens and projectors in different classrooms.

www.hengedocks.com

Although we are not fortunate enough to be able to join in his US based workshops, we are able to access his awesome videos. They can be used as demonstrations or they can be replicated for a lesson, particularly as most of the materials he uses are everyday objects. I know that I, and my former students, will forever be thankful that we discovered Steve Spangler!

Discover him too using the link below.

http://www.stevespanglerscience.com/video/

This thing is crazy! I don’t remember ever before being so excited about a search engine. Probably because Wolfram is so much more than that.

Still in it’s infancy, testing stage even, this new engine will still return the occasional error but considering the fun I was having, the glitches were ignored.

It’s a given; students can fly through the internet as if it were their own bedroom. Often I hear people associate ‘the internet’ with ‘wasting time on MySpace’. Sure, introduce a student to a school where they have free rein and they’re going to hang out in the playground. Right? It takes a teacher to show them the science lab to discover the wonders of space exploration.

If we are going to truly educate this next generation about the educational value of the internet, awareness of such brilliant tools such as Wolfram is essential. I’m no statistics nerd, but I couldn’t help but become engrossed in the wealth of data Wolfram was able to offer.

Enter a birthday to find out what time the sun rose that day, what time it set, what was the moon doing…? It’s a dictionary, an encyclopedia, a calculator, a stock report and… it makes learning fun!

‘Google it’ has become a household term. We know that. There’s dwindling value in asking a student to look it up, it’s too easy. The challenge I found with an extreme array of data at my findertips was; what do I ask it?! Then in the classroom, how can this be applied? That’s the fun part, the part that really got my brain ticking, the part that made me think hard, outside the box. First I tried ‘weather Brisbane’ – interesting, then; ‘weather brisbane 5 october 1973′ (my birthday) – pretty cool, then I went exploring and saw ‘compute the frequency and other properties of a musical note‘ – are you kidding?! So this science calculator would be brilliant in a music class!

I’m sure we’ll be hearing a lot more about Walfram in the coming months. Who knows? We may even be ‘just wolfing it’ before too long?

Google recently held a competition for higher education titled ‘Model your Campus’. The winner’s can be found here and boy are they impressive results. You’ll need to download Google Earth to view the Winning Models.

Integrate your model with the Earth

Creating the 3-D model is just the beginning. You’re then able to deposit that building into Google Earth! A popular classroom project has been to re-create landmark buildings in the area then ‘drop’ them into the appropriate location. Here are some Brisbane building re-creations. Users are creating walk through models of actual buildings. We have map view, street view, satellite view.

How about this for a K-12 example?!

… There are any number of lessons – from learning about area and volume to studying building and community design …

… SketchUp is one of those products that will easily get kids learning – and thinking they’re just having fun, as your classes apply SketchUp to geography, social studies, history and industrial technology…

“… We’ve got a lot of different software packages in our applied technology lab, but SketchUp is by far superior to anything else in terms of ease of use.”
- Dan Zahner, Teacher, Boulder High School, Boulder, CO.

The above excerpts were taken from Google Sketchup for Educators.

Here’s an example I found on YouTube where a student displays a 3-D tour of his school. Head over to YouTube and do a search for Sketchup for some more amazing examples.

Further reading:

• Download Sketchup
• An Australian case study: ‘Solar Passive Cabin Project’.
• Classroom activity examples
• Go Green Project
• Some personal experiences shared by teachers using Sketchup in the classroom.

How do you think YOU could use this remarkable freebie?

Mr Barlow’s VCE Biology Podcast

Douchy’s Biology Podcast

Simon Borgort’s Maths Podcast

David Fagg’s iHistory Podcast 

Ringwood Primary School

Podkids

Living History Podcasts

Please add links to other Australian podcasts you know about, by providing the web address in your comments on this post. 

Feeling confident that the class novel we were studying that semester, Deadly Unna, was sure to engage the students, I encouraged the student to borrow an audio recording of the novel from our library (which he put on his iPod). Sure enough, he finished the novel and he was was very enthusiastic about participating in class discussions about the novel. 

I have since come across a number of websites that offer free audiobooks that students can download onto their iPods and MP3 players. Use the links below to search for titles that are available. Generally speaking, items published before 1923 are widely available, including classic novels by Jane Austin and Charles Dickens, plays by Shakespeare and even poetry.

LibriVox

Project Gutenburg

Literal Systems.org

Free Classic Audio Books

Audiobooks.net

Audiobooksforfree.com

Lit2Go

Learn Out Loud

But yesterday I found something that I think will be even more useful, particularly when I need to know how to say a particular phrase, like “Can you tell me where the bathroom is?” (Lets face it, who really cares about basic greetings and counting, when you really need to pee!) It’s called Talking French Phrasebook, which is one of the applications available in the new “Apps Store” (in iTunes). Again its completely free to download and I put it on my iPod Touch (you can put it on your iPhone as well, if you have been lucky enough to get one). The phrase book is easy to navigate, because the essential phrases have been categorised from essentials (which includes basic greetings), to socializing (aka pick-up lines).

French Phrasebook Directory

So to ask where the toilet is in French, the phrase is: Y a-t-il des toilettes pres d’ici? Need to hear how that sounds? No problem, you can hear how it is said through your earphones. This is a wonderful resource for LOTE teachers, and there are a growing number of phrasebooks for different languages being added all the time. There are also a growing number of applications for other subject areas as well.

In fact, I now think that I really only need to learn one phrase in French before I leave: “Oh, you don’t understand English, would you mind putting this ear phone in?”