With all the technology in their lives, today’s children never need to be bored, right? Well it turns out, maybe they do. Parents, the New York Times has a wonderful article on the importance of boredom in children’s lives. It helps push them to be more creative and can help inspire them to be more reflective and better at self regulation. Here is a New York Times piece with the details.
www.nytimes.com/2019/02/02/opinion/sunday/children-bored.html
5th Graders are creating videos using Ipads and they are editing using DaVinci Resolve on the PC. Resolve is a professional level video editor that can be downloaded for free on either Windows or Mac. Here is the link to the downloads page. The downloads are at the bottom, so don’t forget to scroll down.
Would you like to see what virtual reality looks like? Here is a picture of the DeWint House in Tappan. Use your mouse to move the picture around. If you have a VR Viewer and a mobile device, you can click to view the picture in full virtual reality. Have fun.
360 0009 Stitch XHC
Momento360 | View and share your 360 photos and 360 videos, on the web and in VR
Take a look at this year’s turtle release in the Haverstraw River. These are turtles rescued during the spring and early summer as mother turtles cross Western Highway to lay eggs in the hills nearby.
I invite you to read my guest-blog post on the National Science Teacher Association website entitled “Off the Deep End: Reflections on my Time as a NOAA Teacher At Sea.”
You don’t see this every day: An Eagle egg is hatching live on a webcam for us all to see. The proud parents are a pair of nesting eagles in the National Arboretum in Washington DC. There are not one, but two cameras in place and you can watch the process here:
http://www.eagles.org/dceaglecam/
The mother is brooding the eggs, but moves around every so often to check on them. That’s when you can see the egg with the tiny bird cracking its way out. Here is a news story which explains more:
Have fun, and thanks to Barbara Salmon for sharing this with me.
Thanks to all who attended our Internet Safety Presentation on January 14th. The entire presentation is available, here: Internet Safetyy 2016. For further information or questions, please email me at jtanenbaum@socsd.org.
Our experiment launched at 12:52 PM Eastern Daylight Time on Sunday, July 13th and returned to Earth on Saturday, October 25th at 3:39 PM Eastern Daylight Time. For that entire time it traveled 4.7 miles per SECOND. Can you calculate how many miles our experiment traveled in all of that time? Post your answer in the space below.
The International Space Station: Photo Credit, NASA
The contest has been extended to Monday, November 10th at the start of school. Certificates will be awarded to everyone who gets the answer correct to within a percent or two of the actual number. Post your answers before Monday!
Did you figure it out?
Our experiment was in flight for 104 days, 2 hours and 47 minutes. That is equal to 8,995,620 seconds. At 4.7 miles per second, we traveled 42,279,414. Congratulations to all who tried. So many of you got an answer close to or equal to mine. Great work!
Our experiment at the International Space Station was loaded on-board a Space-X Dragon capsule for return to Earth. It left the station at 9:57 AM Eastern Time on October 25th, 2014. Here is a video of our final moments as part of the ISS. This shows the station’s robotic arm releasing our capsule and then separating as the capsule begins to slow down and return for splashdown later that day.
Both science classes created flags which teacher Jillian Worssam brought along on her PolarTrec expedition to the Southern Ocean. Check out her blog post, here
http://www.polartrec.com/expeditions/sea-floor-changes-and-the-antarctic-circumpolar-current/journals/2014-09-21
and don’t forget to scroll down. Keep checking back with her from time to time. What an adventure!
