Wednesday, March 21, 2007

What was life like 100 years ago?


While reading the MAKE Magazine blog I came across Shorpy. It has a large collection of photos showing ordinary people doing ordinary things 100 years ago. Especially poignant are the photos of children working. Hopefully today's students will have a new found appreciation for how good our lives are today (at least in our country) as compared to the children pictured on Shorpy. Here's a description from the website:

Shorpy.com is a photo blog about what life a hundred years ago was like: How people looked and what they did for a living, back when not having a job usually meant not eating. We’re starting with a collection of photographs taken in the early 1900s by Lewis Wickes Hine as part of a decade-long field survey for the National Child Labor Committee, which lobbied Congress to end the practice. One of his subjects, a young coal miner named Shorpy Higginbotham, is the site’s namesake.

Monday, March 19, 2007

Dig to China?


Remember how as kids we thought that if we could dig a whole deep enough, we'd end up in China? (I seem to remember a recent commercial about that) Well, the truth is, we'd end up in the Indian Ocean! A really cool Google Maps mashup allows you to drag a map that will show you where a point on the opposite side of the Earth is.
Wouldn't this be a fun activity for students learning about latitude and longitude? Do you think they could come up with the formula for how this works?

Friday, March 09, 2007

Jefferson HS Links

Verizon Thinkfinity (aka Marco Polo): http://www.marcopolo-education.org

Federal Resources for Educational Excellence (F.R.E.E.): http://www.free.ed.gov/

Michigan Educators' Resources (formerly Michigan Teacher Network): http://mer.mel.org

Technology 4 the Classroom: http://misd.k12.mi.us/technology

Kathy Schrock's Guide for Educators: http://school.discovery.com/schrockguide

Librarians' Internet Index: http://lii.org