Category Archives: SciLinks

The official blog site of SciLinks—putting the best teacher-vetted web resources at your fingertips. Click on a headline to read the entire post.

More oil spill resources (again)

Last month we shared some resources on the Gulf oil spill and the situation is even more critical now. The Encyclopedia of Life has added an entry on the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill 2010 that describes the diversity of life in the Gulf and has links to news articles about the spill. Unfortunately, the [...]
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SciLinks and sports

Connecting scientific principles to student interests is a way of showing students how science relates to “real life.” Earlier this year, the Winter Olympics provided a context for studying the physics of winter sports. And with the 2010 World Cup taking place in June, soccer (or “football” as it’s called in many parts of the [...]
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Educational technology standards

I had an interesting conversation with some teachers about technology skills for the 21st century. Many years ago in the last century (the mid 1980s), when personal computers were emerging into the schools, we had similar discussions and made up lists of skills we thought would take our students into the future. Looking back at [...]
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Behind the scenes at SciLinks

As a SciLinks user, you have access to thousands of websites in the database. An intrepid group of reviewers called NSTA Webwatchers—made up of science teachers—work behind the scenes to search for potential entries and review them for inclusion in SciLinks. Let’s meet a few of them.
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New “Quiz Manager” in SciLinks

Perhaps you’ve used the “Favorite Websites” feature of SciLinks, in which you can create lists of websites to share with students. The new Quiz Manager takes this a step further. You can create questions for a particular website in the SciLinks database and assign students to complete them. You would need to have a class [...]
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More oil spill resources

The massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico seems to be on everyone’s mind. Even some third-graders I was working with today were talking about it. The major news services are keeping us informed through web articles and photographs as well as traditional television news segments. Blogs and other news sites have current information [...]
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Weather

Everyone talks about the weather, but the articles in this issue show students doing more than talking. Just look at the action words in the titles: blog, cruise, teach, make, watch, look, learn. The differences between weather and climate can be challenging for younger students. The author of Making the Climate Connection suggests a “progression” [...]
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Community collaborations

During April, many classes are involved with “projects” related to Earth Day themes. If you want your students to go beyond the make-a-poster-about-the-rainforest type of activity, several articles in this issue illustrate how students can become involved members of their own communities. In Students for Sustainable Energy, physics students investigated how to reduce the need [...]
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Volcano resources

This semester, a group of students from a nearby college are participating in a study abroad program in the UK. Last week they set out to learn more about sustainable energy—in Iceland. So they are right on the scene of the current events there. What an opportunity to learn up close and personal! The websites [...]
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Air and gases

April is the month of Earth Day, and this issue on air and gases also has ideas for environmental studies related to the atmosphere. The article Using Citizen Scientists to Measure the Effects of Ozone Damage on Native Wildflowers describes how students near the Great Smokey Mountain National Park in Tennessee are doing a longitudinal [...]
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