Author: rmcmahon

Museum Links

As doors close to public institutions around the world due to the global pandemic, there are many places of note that have gone to extra lengths to ensure that people still have access to what they house. Many museums and galleries have ensured that at least a portion of their items are available through things like virtual tours, allowing people to explore the culture of the world through the internet. I have listed a few more prominent places that store a diverse collection of artifacts and art to provide a sampler of what is being made available.

An item’s detail.

The British Museum offers a beautiful interactive timeline for visitors to explore their collection based on era, geographical area or theme. You can move back and forth on the timeline, from 2 million years BCE until 2000 AD. Each node that you click on presents an item that you can further explore by clicking the details. This will call up a larger picture, explanation of the item and related objects. Options for an audio description and where it is from, located on a Google map, are also options.

The British Museum also provides 11 other ways to explore from home, including a virtual tour, searchable online collection, gallery highlights, podcasts and a YouTube channel.

France’s Musée du Louvre is offering a variety of online connections as well. You can choose from one of the many galleries or exhibitions from which to begin a virtual tour, where you can walk around the museum, street-map style and chose to stop in at any of the displays to find out more. They also have a series of videos and online media, not to mention an app that explores Leonardo da Vinci’s work.

I liked the river scene.

On this side of the pond, New York’s Met Museum has numerous online features as well. MetKids has a neat, graphical way of exploring the museum and finding out about its exhibits. For those that would like to delve a bit deeper, Their Art at Home feature allows searching art on a timeline, pairing them with essays and chronologies.

The Great Wall tour from The China Guide

The iconic Great Wall of China has a virtual tour that is absolutely breathtaking, especially if you blow the viewer up to full screen. While put together by a tour guide company, it still is really something to see. Circle One has put together a 360-degree virtual tour as well, created through Tour Creator. You can also find links to virtual tours in other parts of the world as well.

It use to be there is too much to see and not enough time. It usually referred to the time it would take to travel there and enjoy the sight. Due to social distancing and isolation that the pandemic brings, we may as well use this time to travel a bit and marvel at the sites the internet can transport to us.

As always, if you have a fitting resource that you would like to share, please leave it in the comments section below. I will be adding material as time and findings allow.

rmcmahon Leave a comment

Science Links and Simulators

Science is pretty amazing and if our current world-wide situation shows us anything, it is how important our understanding of the world around us is. Below is a series of links and simulators to help in comprehending how science really works. Grappling with enormous concepts begins with the comprehension of numerous small things. Hopefully items in this list provide the stepping stones to move from a basic idea to the working reality and proof of a scientific concept.

Physics is so cool. It can explain the motion in the scale as grand as that of the planets and solar system, down to the subatomic level of atoms and electrons. Visualizing either of these things is very difficult. Luckily there are a number of simulators our there that can aid us into understanding how all of this works relatively to each other (get it? Relatively? Relativity? huh? no? humph).

The PhET Interactive Simulations project at the University of Colorado Boulder offers some really incredible simulations. I was first introduced to their website by a physics teacher and even the simplest simulation around electron motion clarified some of the questions around atomic structure that had been plaguing me for years. While the simulations in physics continue to leave me dumbfounded, there are examples from chemistry, math, earth science and biology as well.

Positive physics is more formally inspired to teach and learn physics, as they also provide the ability for students and teachers to track progress through grade level targets. Due to school closures, the website is being offered for free through July 2020. Teachers will need to sign-up to join, then create their classes to provide students class codes.

If physics is confounding to me, chemistry is downright frustrating. The idea of things interacting at a molecular level has always been beyond my capabilities to visualize and understand. While the formulas may make sense to me, the reality behind what occurs during a chemical reaction is boggling.

ChemMatters Online is and educational site sponsored by the American Chemical Society. You can find a series of videos and articles that help make the connections as to why and how chemistry works and is important to our everyday lives. There is even a Teacher’s Guide to help bring these resources together in a cohesive manner (ha! Cohesive! I did it again).

Apparently, the periodic table has something to do with explaining the elements and predicting they way that they will interact with their environment. Chemicool is one of many online periodic table that lends a practical understanding behind the theories that explain the composition of the elements, their interactions and real world applications.

Chemicool’s interactive periodic table

For the budding biologists, Cells Alive is a site designed to explain and interact with, well, cells. With interactive models, games and explanatory articles, this site helps the smallest organisms and the building blocks to the largest come to life.

My ecology simulation.

Finally, Biology Simulations provides simulations, games and explanations about biology, making it a fitting title for the website. The simulations are set up more as experiments, with the instructions serving as an explanation to what is occurring and what the virtual biologist should be looking out for. Some provide accompanying worksheets to help keep track of the data, provide space for hypothesis and explain the scientific theory behind the activity.

Whew! That is enough. It may have been the long weekend that lead me to such a long post, but having models in science has been long standing best practice. The idea that the models are now able to be observed in real time is absolutely amazing to me and may have affected my success in the study of the sciences.

One last word, while all of these sites are  free, some are free for a limited time and require the registration at the site with an account. As with all things on the internet, tread with caution, especially if students need to register as well. Most of these are American and do not fall into FIOPPA rules regarding storage of personal information. Using aliases and other ideas will keep you away from such quagmires.

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Virtual Canadian Parks

Wow, the virtual age is truly amazing. This morning I was in Quebec, Nunavut, and Haida Gwaii, exploring our National Parks.

Parks Canada has used Google Street Maps to create virtual tours of many of the beautiful National Parks our country has. So much can be brought to life through the screen of your computer, be it the geography and flora of the different areas of regions, or the visions of historically important places, such as the Fortress of Louisbourg in Nova Scotia.

There is so much potential to bring the material taught in your Socials classes to life through this national resource. More places are being added through their street view project. I encourage you to check this out. It is as close to being there as one could be without the travel and way better than staring at the pictures in a textbook.

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Want to Become a Shakespeare Buff?

Of course you do! Who doesn’t?

The Globe Theatre, the reconstruction of Shakepeare’ original Globe, is offering streaming plays for free beginning today. Hamlet, the play about the Danish prince, is available from April 6th for two weeks. Other plays follow on a two week rotation.

This is a huge opportunity to watch some of the best Shakepearean actors perform at the illustrious venue, for free. Shakespeare’s plays were always intended to be watched and taking this opportunity to see them “live” will certainly help viewers understand why the Bard occupies such an illustrious place in the English literary canon.

Stream them  through the Globe Player, here: https://globeplayer.tv/

Also available through the Globe Player’s free content is Shakespeare Lives, a collection of short films that illustrate the creativity and adaptation that artists have taken some of Bill’s most famous plays. The Sonnet Project NYC, where New Yorkers have at reciting Shakespearean sonnets, and interviews with performers of the plays.

There seems to be plans to release some of their Globe to Globe productions, plays performed in other languages, for free, beginning with a Korean A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I will update with dates for those when I find out more. The itinerary of their streaming English language plays:

‘Hamlet’ (2018), April 6-19

‘Romeo & Juliet’ (2009), April 20-May 3

‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (2013), May 4-17

‘The Winter’s Tale’ (2018), May 18-31

‘The Two Noble Kinsmen’ (2018), June 1-14

‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’ (2019), June 15-28

Interesting stuff all around for the Shakespeare buff or a student trying to figure out what all the fuss was all about.

 

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Something for Needling and Thread

Think Thrice About Your Clothes seeks to reduce waste by helping people to repair and extend the life of their clothes. The series of videos to care for and repair your clothes are short and easy to follow.

I think that clearing out my closet will eventually be part of the plan in the coming weeks, with self-isolation and spring cleaning. This site will give me something to do with that pile of clothes that has been pushed to the back.

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To Get You Through the First Bit

Taken from staff email of April 3rd:
I sincerely hope you are doing well and taking care of you and yours in these difficult times.
As you move forward in developing plans and activities for our students, I wanted to send a shout out and remind everyone that the Pinetree Library has an electronic presence to help with materials. We have been compiling and sorting through access to resources in order to provide them in a way that is useful and not overwhelming for you. I hope to have a shiny, new library web page to make access and information easier up and running soon (thanks DL team 😊).
 
You can still log into the Pinetree Library Catalogue to access ebooks and databases, as well as develop a Collection to share with your students. Everyone can access this from home using their district username and password. I can certainly help with this, please let me help with this.
 
You can also access our district resources through the SD43 Website.  A library channel has been created on the Pinetree Teams and we are more than happy to field questions or offer what aid I can to support your search of materials to suit your needs. Please, please, please, make us do our jobs to make yours a bit easier. This learning curve is steep and everyone can use bit of help.
 
Links to any of the databases may ask for a username and/or password, which is: sd43u  If this does not work, let me know and I will track down the cause. The best bet is to go through the links on our catalogue. The following is a list of some of the items that are provided by the district:
Secondary Level Resources
World Book Online – World Book’s selection page with links to all World Book databases we have access to.
Explora Search
Explora Canada – New interface to search EBSCO’s databases in one friendly screen.
Gale Engage Learning – Gale’s selection page with links to all databases we have access to.
KNOW BC – A major reference that brings together everything you always wanted to know about BC.
Web Library – Provides access to more than 85,000 trustworthy, relevant websites while filtering out questionable and irrelevant content.
Learn360 – Provides over 9,300 full digital video titles and over 28,500 video clips from A&E, National Geographic, Nelvana, Reading Rainbow, and National Science.
Curio.ca – Streaming access to the best in educational content from CBC and Radio-Canada.
EBSCO Host – EBSCO’s selection page with links to all databases we have access to.
Magazines – EBSCO – Browse through hundreds of magazines & periodicals
National Film Board – Award-winning online Screening Room, featuring over 3,000 productions.
Topic Finder – Find new topics or keywords and discover new connections.
Canadian Encyclopedia – Provides updated information about our people and country

Don’t forget, the public libraries are allowing for library card applications to be filled out online and accessing their collections too. They have vast collections of ebooks and online resources, such as Lynda.com and Hoopla.

 

 

 

 

 

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The Lost Coast: Lost Until I Finally Got It

I finished The Lost Coast by Amy Rose Capetta recently. I was warned that it started relatively slowly, but picked up, so was prepared to be patient. Patience was not what I needed, as I was captivated by the storytelling of Capetta, but much like the subject material of the novel, the reasons why eluded me until closing in on the end. First the details, the ones that you won’t necessarily find on the cover, then my impressions and about my discovery about what drew me through the novel.

The story centers around Danny, a girl who moves from Michigan to California for reasons that reveal themselves throughout the book. Danny is a bit of a lost soul, not belonging to any particular group, and is now having to navigate through a new school with new people in a new town. What’s more, is that in this new space, Danny begins to actualize who she is, in terms of her own interests, insecurities and attractions.

She is able to do this with the help of the Grays, a group “of six queer witches forging their own paths, shrouded in the mist, magic, and secrets of the ancient California redwoods” (from the Goodreads site). They have lost one of their members and believe that Danny can help with finding her. The ways that they are to find their missing member and bring her back are elusive, as the ways of their witching magic are not very straightforward, but their journey brings together all of the parts of belonging, friendship and happily existing in a state of otherness.

This is where I finally got in understanding the novel’s effect on me. While the storyline is interesting, the characters well-fleshed out and the mystery of the missing member of the Grays, Imogen, motivating, it was the ethereal descriptions of the relationships between the girls, those existing and forming, that Capetta used throughout the novel.

This took me a long time to figure out. The prose describing the atmosphere, tension, relationships and romance that developed between the characters did not rely on adjectives to convey the depth of emotion that occurs with budding friendships and love, but Capetta somehow wove all sorts of sensory affects to bring a true feeling to the reader.

While I write this, I do not think that I could accurately or succinctly describe any of the friendships that developed or were expressed through the Grays, however I certainly was left with feelings that resonate to create a unique impression for each of the individual relationships that exist between the six girls.

I do wish that I was able to figure this out before getting so close to the end and I would be better able to describe how Amy Rose Capetta managed to pull me along through the emotional development and bonding of the girls in this story. These characters made an impression on me through the language that Capetta used to describe the evolution of their relationships and though I may have trouble putting my finger on it, I appreciate the talent and ability that the author employed to allow me to experience the feelings as they happened.

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