Chemistry, what a fascinating science discipline!  Isaac Newton, one the greatest scientists in history said in 1676: “If I have seen far, it’s because I stood on the shoulders of giants“.  And you bet that’s true for Chemistry, and for any other discipline as well.  Chemistry was not built by one chemist, or two, it is in constant growth with the contribution of millions of scientists worldwide.  Some of them achieve fame, others don’t, but they are all necessary to advance our knowledge.  They come from different venues of life, they speak different languages, they use different talents, and they work in teams not to find “the right answer” but an answer that they could support with scientific evidence.  What a wonderful model of a learning culture to bring to the classroom!  Here are just a few of the resources that you can find via NSDL to teach the history of Chemistry.  Start with Democritus from the ancient Greece, one of the first atomic theorists, using the Matter: Atoms from Democritus to Dalton lesson (also in Spanish), which includes links, questions, and quizzes, available from the MSP2 Pathway.  Lavoisier, who in the 1700s ended the Phlogiston theory, is often quoted as the father of modern chemistry.  He and other chemists can be studied using Elements and Atoms: Case Studies in the Development of Chemistry, from the AMSER Pathway.  Lagrange, a mathematician contemporary to Lavoisier, said upon his friend’s tragic death: “It took only an instant to cut off that head, and a hundred years may not produce another like it.” Dalton followed Lavoisier, developing in the early 1800s the Dalton’s Atomic Theory, available from the NSDL Chemistry collection. (Follow title link to read more).

At the turn of the 20th century, Marie Curie with her amazing works laid the ground for the public admission of females in science.  Read about her and see the pictures in the Marie Curie and the Science of Radioactivity resource in the ALSOS collection.  Our ComPADRE Pathway offers Einstein: The Man of the Century, a biography of this unique human being.  Also remarkable are the works of Linus Pauling who remains the only person ever to receive two unshared Nobel Prizes: one for Chemistry (1954) and the other for Peace (1962).  Visits Linus Pauling: A Centenary Exhibit online from our NSDL History of Science collection.  Also, explore pictures, activities, movies and the teacher’s guide from the Stephen Hawking’s Universe site from our DLESE Pathway, a comprehensive resource about the life and work of Stephen Hawking, who is one of the greatest contemporary scientists in spite of his physical impairment.  You can find more examples of scientists’ great ethnic and gender diversity in the ChemEd DL Pathway resource: Biographical Snapshots of Famous Women and Minority Chemists, and a collection of seminal original papers and interesting curiosities in the history of Chemistry in the Selected Classic Papers database from our BEN Pathway.

According to the American Cancer Society, breast cancer is the second most frequent cancer type (after lung cancer), with 15% incidence.  It is estimated that more than 200,000 new cases will be diagnosed before the end of 2010.  However, there is much hope and optimism: in the last 30 years the death rate has been decreasing for all ethnic groups, the rate of new cases has been declining in the last decade, and there are now about 2.5 million breast cancer survivors in the US.  The first Susan G. Koman Race for the Cure took place in 1983, and 27 years later, these 5K runs/fitness walks are going strong. 25% of the net income from each race supports the Komen for the Cure Award and Research Grant Programs, while up to 75% of the income supports local community efforts funding breast health education and breast cancer screening efforts. Many factors may influence the incidence of breast cancer and NSDL has resources to help teachers guide their students in learning about them.  For example, the New Animal Study May Explain Why Alcohol Consumption Increases Breast Cancer Risk is a report that our partners at the BEN Pathway make available to us along with many other related sources, such as the What Is Breast Cancer?  Another possible risk factor in breast cancer is presented in the report Breast Cancer Risk and Drinking Water Contaminated by Wastewater from the Engineering Pathway.  The online textbook Oral Contraceptives and Breast Cancer from the National Academies Press presents yet another suspect in the fight against breast cancer. If you are looking for visuals, the Pictures of Breast Cancer Diagnosis from our AMSER Pathway partners or the Genetic Therapy and Breast Tumors movie from our Teachers’ Domain partners could be your answers.  For more hands-on types of activities, You be the Radiologist! from the Teach Engineering collection of the Engineering Pathway would have your students create a 1-D strain plot in Microsoft Excel depicting the location of a breast tumor amidst healthy tissue.  Finally, your work as a teacher bringing cancer education to our youth is essential to win this battle, thank you very much!

The increasingly rich cultural and language diversity in our schools offers great opportunities for our students to learn first-hand about the whole world right there in their classrooms. But it also challenges teachers to deliver instruction that nurtures students’ individual talents, fosters collaborative skills, and benefits from the diversity in the classroom. One way of doing it is through distributed learning environments, student-centered teaching approaches in which teachers assign different digital resources to different students who will later share expertise of the content that each of them learned. NSDL has a variety of resources to support instruction of multilingual learners such as the Earthquakes Around Us, in our Earthquake Education Environment collection, Mixing in Math from our SMILE Pathways partner, and the Plant and Soil Sciences eLibrary. You will find many more resources in the new NSDL Bilingual Resources page. Students could also work together in multilanguage groups using interactive sites in Spanish, such as the fascinating bilingual text and audio The Virtual Body graphics from our The Fun Works partners. If content for students’ projects is what you are looking for, check out our links to multilingual digital libraries such as biologia.org, a comprehensive resource in Spanish for biology accessible through our BEN-Biological Sciences Pathways and the Awesome Library in our NSDL General Science collection that includes very many disciplines and also English Language Arts and Social Studies, in more than 20 languages. Finally, collaboration could be full circle if English-speaking students could learn scientific terms in Spanish. Our Spanish resource from our Instructional Architect is only one example of many other resources in our collections can help teachers to do just that.

Keep checking the new NSDL Bilingual Resources page frequently as we will be adding more resources regularly.

Just to the west of our NSDL offices in Boulder, Colorado, a devastating wild fire is raging, and no doubt, raising questions for local students about how wild fires spread, the technologies and techniques the firefighters are using, and the future impacts of the fire on the people, land, and wildlife. Here is a sample of NSDL resources that teachers can use to help students understand this complex issue. Looking for maps? In our NASA SVS collection from DLESE, you will find California Fires with Fire Pixels, a visualization of Southern California Fires, Time Series of the Biscuit Fire, a time series of the 2002 fire that burned 500,000 acres of forest in Oregon and Northern California, and A Pop-up of the Arizona Fires, among many more. AMSER makes available the Satellite Observations of Forest Fires, a series of maps of some of the major wildfires that were burning across 264,794 acres in six Western states–Oregon, California, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado and many other related resources. Looking for a database? Our AMSER partners also provide the E.V. Komarek Fire Ecology Database a continuously updated searchable Fire Ecology Database that covers a broad range of fire-related information. Looking for Fire Science? A module from our COMET collection titled Introduction to Fire Behavior: Influences of Topography, Fuels, and Weather on Fire Ignition and Spread provides 3-dimensional graphics, animations, audio descriptions and commentary provided by a fire behavior expert about factors that affect the ignition and spread of wildfires (this resource requires account setup, but well worth it and is also available in Spanish). Looking for Fire Ecology, fire prevention, and interdisciplinary resources? The Fire Ecology site from our partners at the Internet Scout Project examines fires and fire ecology in different ecosystems, regions, and time periods. The Michigan Online Resources for Educators: Widland Fire Prevention and Education features fact sheets on the environmental impacts burns have on the ecology of the land as well as those who inhabit the surrounding areas. A large focus of this section is how to prevent forest fires and how to promote forest fire safety practices as well as specialized prevention information for those living adjacent to large forested areas. The Forest Fire Management: What’s Best and for Whom? blog from the 2007 posts on NSDL’s Expert Voices discusses both the positive and negative influences of forest fires, connects fire science to the National Science Education Standards, and suggests ways in which teachers can help students understand the impact of forest fires.

What a great way to start the new academic year and get to know your students: ask them what they did during the summer! Chances are that they did a lot of sports. Be prepared to show them how sports relate to the math and science curricula! Here is a sample from our wealth of wonderful sources that could help you do that. The Internet Scout Project has the Physics of Sports collection, which includes content related to basketball, football, Scuba diving, and tons of other sports. In our AMSER Pathway, you will also find the Physics in Sports collection, where you can find videos of football players to explain Newton’s three laws of motion. Among our collections, you can explore The Science of Sports to get ideas and examples of lab projects that high school students have conducted related to the engineering of sports. Continuing with sports engineering, our ComPADRE Pathway can take you to The Science of Speed, a series of videos on the scientific and mathematical principles behind NASCAR racing and car designs. Furthermore, to get your students to think about disabilities, our Engineering Pathway includes the Able Sports resource in which students are asked to design a new sport for a given disability. Also, The Fun Works collection hosts Skateboard Science and the Science of Surfing. Last but not least, this summer your students may have been hooked up to the Soccer World Cup in South Africa. Examine our dragonflytv resources Soccer Ball that will help students to understand the science behind this beautiful sport and our Math Forum @ Drexel collection in which you could find in the Ask Dr. Math resource the item Math in Soccer that uses geometry to analyze the best position for a goalkeeper to prevent the goal!

If you are not yet familiar with Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears: Integrating Literacy and Science in K-5 Classrooms, you should be! If the early summer is heating up too fast for you, take the opportunity to explore Issue 20 of this exemplary resource for K-5 teachers and students (the latest). BPPB is a terrific resource for helping young learners to understand science concepts while exercising their literacy skills.  The focus of  Issue 20 is on climate change, and features podcasts and articles from experts in the field.  Each issue of BPPB features: a science content article, a misconceptions article, a podcast, a feature story (with text differentiated along three grade bands) and an interview with a researcher (for Issue 20, Richard Alley). Packed with stunning images, lessons and activities, science content knowledge and feature stories, and podcasts, BPPB’s archive of issues covers great topics for use in the classroom: polar explorers, peoples of the Arctic, icebergs and glaciers, oceans, tundra, polar plans, mammals, patterns of day, night, and seasons, learning from the polar past.  Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears is a project of the Ohio State University.

If you haven’t had the opportunity to explore and use NSDL Content Clips - make room in your schedule! Content Clips is a great resource for teachers and curriculum builders to find and organize multimedia ‘clips’ to produce web-based teaching activities, presentations, interactives, and much more.  Browse the collection by topic area (e.g. amphibians, birds, desert life, earth & space); create your own account and collection of favorite clips; use the Work Zone to create a set, an activity, add your own content or select from the Content Clips collection, via easy-to-use drag-and-drop assembly. There’s a template for building e-books, and automated feedback options within activities. Content Clips offers 30 sets of teacher-selected clips, 30 related activities, lesson plans for teachers, aligned with elementary science topics and standards, and suitable for electronic whiteboard use. Some sample products include:  Life on the Ice (Cube) e-book (from the Beyond Penguins & Polar Bears project); the Freetail Bats video, the Golden Gate Album. Have fun!

This year is the 40th anniversary of Earth Day. It all started on April 22, 1970, when Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin hired a small staff, led by Denis Hayes, to coordinate a series of ‘teach-in’ activities throughout the country. Those teach-ins expanded and evolved into an energetic grassroots effort, and effectively, the beginning of the modern environmental movement. 20 million Americans participated in the first Earth Day, in multiple events nationwide, ultimately leading to environmental protection laws including the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and amendment to the Clean Air Act of 1963. The Earth Day Network site contains links to events, outdoor activities, lesson plans, fact sheets, and resources for participating in Earth Day activities, and links to partner organization activities. The US Environmental Protection Agency’s Earth Day site and NASA’s Earth Day site also contains information, multimedia, and activities. NSDL partners providing a range of Earth Day resources include the following: Read the rest of this entry »

NSDL’s Teacher’s Domain Pathway has released a new digital media special collection - Where Words Touch the Earth -  for grades 3-12, featuring Native American perspectives on climate change and how these impacts affect Native American communities.  Downloadable videos are available of interviews of elders and other community members by students from American Indian Tribal Colleges. A range of issues are covered, from the ecological function and spiritual roles of wetlands, the relationships between humans and nature, to more specific impacts such as depleted salmon populations in Washington state. There are also activities for teacher professional development, as well as student activities. Support for the collection creation was provided by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Additional NSDL resources reflecting Native American perspectives include Peoples of the Arctic (Issue 16, Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears, K-5);  Broadening Participation in Computing (from the Engineering Pathway); Digital Library of Indigenous Science Resources (DLISR) (a DLESE collection); Educator’s Guide to American Indian Perspectives in Natural Resources (AMSER); and the American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC) (CSERD).

Do you know about the Corvid family of birds? What about phenophases? Springtime is in the air and it’s a good time to engage students of all ages in some great citizen science projects.  Project BudBurst is an exemplary citizen scientist program that engages the public in making careful observations of phenophases:  first leafing, first flower, first fruit ripening, etc. of trees, shrubs, flowers and grasses in local areas. You can also share your photos on Flickr, join scientists on the BudBurst science blogs, explore the field guides, and much  more. There are projects for students, for educators, and special projects for everyone.  Also check out the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s extensive projects, including:

Get outdoors and get active!