Dorman’s Trouvailles

I love the ways that Google Earth allows you to explore and interact with highly engaging visual data.  So, when I came across kmlfactbook I nearly flipped!  kmlfactbook allows users to tap into the data contained in the CIA World Factbook and the World Resources Institues EarthTrends.  Registered users can also upload their own data sets to kmlfactbook.

Users can access the following data sets from every country contained in the CIA World Factbook through kmlfactbook:

• People
• Economy
• Transport
• Military
• Geography
• Government
• Communications

The data from WRI EarthTrends includes:

• Climate and atmosphere
• Forests, grasslands, and drylands
• Population, health, and human well-being
• Energy and resources
• Economics, business, and the environment
• Agriculture and food
• Biodiversity and protected areas
• Water resources and freshwater ecosystems
• Environmental governance and institutions

The data can be viewed through the web browser in preview mode or can be downloaded as a KML file for use in Google Earth.

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

The applications for kmlfactbook are nearly limitless.  The colorful and interactive interface make it perfect content for your interactive whiteboards, tablets, and LCD projectors.  Importing the KML files into Google Earth adds additional functionality and allows students to use the data to build their own Google Earth tours and data sets and allows users to layer additional data to create hypotheses and generalizations.  The ability to readily access data from all geographic areas instantly allows students to compare and contrast with ease.  Downloading the KML files and opening them in Google Earth allows students to create their own thematic maps.  (Not sure what a thematic map entails?  Check out this great Google Earth resource on Thematic Maps.)

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Here is a listing of some of the additional Google Earth layers that are terrific classroom content.

Don’t forget that if you are a Discovery Education subscriber you can enhance your Google Earth placemarks with DE media.

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

To learn more about Google Earth, access training and tutorials, and explore educational applications, visit my Google Earth training site.   You can also download my presentation, Roundtrip Tickets to Anywhere: Discovery Education and Google Earth.

Discovery adds new content to its Discovery Education streaming media library all the time. Here is my new favorite media asset – Interview wih Paul Rusesabagina, the hotel manager featured in Hotel Rwanda. This video is part of the new content added to the DE streaming service this summer by the Underground Railroad Freedom Center, one of the new organizations joining the 180+ content providers who license their media for teacher and student use through Discovery Education.

Paul Rusesabagina, the hotel manager who saved more than 1,200 Tutsis during the 1994 Rwandan genocide, shares his thoughts on freedom, personal responsibility, heroism, and social justice.

Click here to access the full 28-minute video. (Note: you will need to log into Discovery Education to access the video.)

As with most DE streaming videos, the interview is segmented into chapters to make it easier to use in targeted classroom instruction. This interview is organized into 70 chapters, one segment for each interview question and response.

I wish that I would have been able to use this when I was still in the classroom and teaching my students about genocide. I would likely have used it in juxtaposition with First Person Singular: Elie Wiesel, which I used to prepare my students to read Night.

Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel reflects upon his life, his work and his concerns for the future of mankind. The celebrated author of the Holocaust memoir Night reveals how he reconstructed his life after surviving the horrors of Auschwitz to enter a world of writing, teaching and campaigning tirelessly against threats to human rights throughout the world. He presents a warm and lively account of his experiences as a journalist in Paris and Jerusalem, of his authorship of more than 40 novels, plays and essays, and of his human rights activism. He also focuses grimly on the ability of human beings to dehumanize each other in order to kill with impunity. In discussing the events of September 11, he reflects on how the re-emergence of terrorism in a new and unimaginably more dangerous form casts doubts on whether the 21st century can avoid re-creating the nightmares of the 20th.

The Genocide Education Project has some excellent classroom resources to teach about genocide, focusing in on the acknowledged instances of genocide in the 20th century — Armenian Genocide 1915-1918, Holocaust 1939-1945, Cambodia Killing Fields 1975-1979, Rwandan Genocide 1994, and the Genocide in Sudan 2004-today. I have used some of the materials from the “Confronting Genocide: Never Again” unit from the Choices Program developed by Brown University. Click here for more resources to teach genocide.

I think it would be a terrific social studies – language arts collaboration to have students explore the different first-person experiences with genocide and how survivors managed their memories and used them to inform their future commitment to humankind. I did something like this one year as an integration with my partner language arts teacher. Students read both Night and Maus: A Survivor’s Tale and produced multimedia representations of survivors’ experiences during and after the Holocaust. One of my favorite projects was this podcast. It was an imaginary conversation between Elie Wiesel (Night) and Vladek Spiegelman (Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale, My Father Bleeds History) in a coffee shop in New York City.

I could see expanding this project and including exploration of the survivors from other genocides. Perhaps, Elie Wiesel might have a conversation with Loung Ung, survivor of the Cambodian Genocide and author of First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers, or with some of those survivors from the Rwandan featured in Philip Gourevitch’s book, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda.

The video segments from DE streaming could be used to provide the scaffolding so that students gain a foundational understanding of genocide before starting to read the first-person accounts and memoirs. In addition to the segments I already highlighted, here are a few others that would be useful.

The Legacy of the Pol Pot Regime and Khmer Rouge
Keepers of Memory: Survivors’ Accounts of the Rwandan Genocide
The Holocaust: In Memory of Millions
Civil War and Genocide in Rwanda: Video Yearbook Collection 1994

DE streaming has many more videos, images, and articles to support learning about genocide.  The media is helpful in providing background when teaching a very difficult and emotionally charged topic.

Welcome back to the new school year! To help you get started, register for a Discovery Education streaming Back-to-School Enhancements webinar to learn about all the new benefits of Discovery Education streaming .

• Filter search results more effectively
  
• Discover related resources to the videos you choose
  
• Students may access assignments from anywhere, anytime using their own unique student login.

Download an overview of what’s new.

If you have forgotten your password, retrieve it and login today .

One of the most anticipated features of the Summer 2009 release of Discovery Education is the My Classrooms feature.  With My Classrooms . . .

Each Student will then have the ability to:

• Access all of their assignments, quizzes etc. in one convenient location.
• Search for and save content into their own My Content area
• Download materials

Teachers will be able to:

• Assign content to an individual student, multiple students or an entire class.
• Track progress and student results
• Create a folder of materials and assign materials for student project or remediation without the need to create an assignment

Creating a class is quick and easy.  There are 3 simple steps.

Step 1: Create a class name and set active dates.

Step 2: Add students from the school/district roster or create accounts for them manually.

Step 3: Review the class.

I love being able to bookmark content on the Internet to make it easier for me to access anywhere, anytime (especially, when I really need to find that great video segment I used last year for tomorrow’s lesson  . . .)

Discovery Education streaming and Science used to have a product-specific My Content that allowed users to create folders and subfolders and populate them with all the media assets and assessments required to build engaging multimedia learn experiences for their students.  The drawback was that users who subscribe to multiple services could only see the assets bookmarked to one service at a time.  The new launch of Discovery Education boasts an enhanced My Content folder that is universal, allowing users to access media content and instructional activities from all DE services to which they subscribe.  So, I can build a folder that contains video segments and articles from DE streaming, virtual labs and eBooks from DE Science, student activities from DE Health, and lesson plans from DE MediaShare all in one global interface.  Users will be able to access the new My Content from the icon in the global DE banner as well as from the My Content module on their My DE home page.

For users exploring the new interface, DE’s developers have put in a helpful “What’s Changed” button that will summarize the enhancements to My Content.

Your My Content section has been enhanced and is now global across products. This means that you can add and access content from any of your Discovery Education services through a single My Content interface. Please note that in order to make this transition easier we have created a folder for each product you subscribe to, and your My Content from each product is now located within that folder. If desired, you can now move your existing folders from the product folder into the root My Content view.

In addition, we have added a Trash Bin which holds your deleted content. In the case that you accidentally delete content, you will be able to click on the Trash Bin button and restore that content to the appropriate folder.

In a future post I will be addressing the new My Classrooms feature.  Once students are set up with a Student Center account they will also have a My Content folder to which they can save media and research. Teachers will even be able to access their students’ accounts to see what students are bookmarking to My Content.

If there is one natural resource consistently in VERY short supply for teachers it is time.  When I was in the classroom I never seemed to have enough time to gather all the resources to build the type of learning experiences I envisioned for my students.  That’s why I was so taken with the new grid view search results page in Discovery Education.

Take a look below.  (or, click here to see the image in a new window)

The new grid view yields 4x more search results in one page than the old list view in the previous version of DE.

In addition, users can mouse over the media asset to open up a preview window with a description, 10-second video preview (if the asset is a video or video segment), and other related information.  Users can add the media asset to their My Content folder with one click on the the preview window’s Add to My Content button.  All of this without ever even opening the media asset page!

It’s a time saver for educators who are searching for media content to build learning experiences and instructional activities.

But, if you really miss the old list view, you can always click on the List View button to revert back to the more traditional search results view.

Here is another REALLY cool feature of the 2009 launch of Discovery Education — sharing media assets out to your professional learning network with a simple one-click post.

Check it out . . . (click here to see the image in a new window)

By clicking on the new Share tab on the media asset page you can share your media gems via popular networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Delicious, and Diigo.  Of course, you need to have accounts established with these third-party services before you can share to them.

You are also able to access a unique URL address that is linked to the media asset (which could be a video segment as opposed to the full video).  You can use this URL to post DE media to your class webpage, Blackboard site, wiki, blog, Google Earth placemark, etc.  It is not a violation of copyright as anyone who clicks on that will be forced to authenticate (i.e. sign in) before viewing the media. Thus, only DE subscribers will be able to access the media.

I am really excited about the possibilities for sharing and collaborating made possible by the new Share features.

Have you logged into Discovery Education in the past week?  If not, you REALLY need to log in to check out the new content and features upgrades.

I am going to be blogging about these upgrades over the next couple weeks.  The new feature upgrade for today is the unified search on the new universal DE header.  This new search function will allow users to search across all products to which they subscribe or to limit their search to just one product.  Users can also filter search results by selecting one or multiple grade level ranges and can also filter by just one media asset type.  This unified search will save users a lot of time and will make searching much more efficient.  The universal DE banner will appear atop the entire Discovery Education suite.  Users will only be able to search the media libraries of products to which they currently subscribe.  If you are interested in taking a test drive of one of the DE products, visit http://www.discoveryeducation.com/products/ to request a site preview.