courtesy of wwworks on Flickr
I was reading the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology’s Bird Scope Newsletter and there was an article about Spring Peeper (Pseudacris crucifer) calls getting earlier every year and it I gave me an idea for homeschoolers. Why not take an annual survey of the earliest sighting of some specific migratory species in your area like Ruby-throatead hummingbirds, Swallow-tailed kites, or even Bald Eagles. If you start this when your children are young and do it every year you have a nice-long term project that they can work on throughout their schooling.
Google rolled out their new +1 for websites today and the blogosphere it all abuzz about it. I went and took a look and couldn’t figure out how to add it to a WordPress blog, so I asked a few of my Full Sail classmates and Twitter and in few minutes I had an answer. So you don’t have to do the same, I created a video to show you how to do it on your own WordPress blog.
This looks best in HD at Full Screen
A new iPhone app has us one step closer to the Star Trek Universal Translator. What this app does in real time and without a data connection is amazing. Check it out and you will be going to the app store to buy this.
Image via Wikipedia
A very old strategy for building traffic to your blog was to comment on other blogs. Then spammers took advantage of this and we had blog comment spam and people started adding a feature to their comments called “=nofollow” that told Google not follow those links when indexing their blog. All this did was take away the SEO value of commenting but it didn’t stop people from clicking on that link.
Bridge in Mid-City area of New Orleans
Just like when you are looking for a new way to take a picture of something that is often photographed It sometime helps to get a new perspective.
When I first approached this bridge I tried taking a photo standing up an looking at the bridge. I tried it on my tripod and walked across the bridge to the other side and looked at from there. I ultimately ended up laying on the ground to get this perspective.
Read the rest of this entry »
Camping In Style
I wrote this a couple of mornings ago:
It’s a Sunday morning at JellyStone Campground in Robert, LA and I’m sitting watching the campers packing up and moving out. Most of these people will head back to their homes and contemplate how nice the weekend was and get that feeling in their stomach because they know tomorrow they will have to go back to the grind. The windowless cubicle, the horrible, unnatural fluorescent light the unfulfilling career, and office politics. The mindless chatter at the water cooler. And I know that I never want to have that feeling again. Read the rest of this entry »
Fall is in the air
As we enter fall here in South Louisiana and I prepare for the last few months of my life as a student at Full Sail University my mind drifted back to this project that I dreamed up so many months ago. A lot has changed since then and I want to make it clear that I still sincerely want to do this for two reasons Read the rest of this entry »
(Image: Science!!!!, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from jinx's photostream)
Recently I attended on online conference, the 2010 Reform Symposium, and a teacher showed a graphic drawn on a whiteboard that blew me away. She visited a kindergarten classroom and asked kids what was more important to their education: the answers they gave to questions or the questions they asked. In kindergarten it was 80% the questions asked and 20% the answers given and by 8th grade it is the exact opposite.
Have you often heard if you want the right answer ask the right questions? Kids learn by asking questions and kindergartners understand this. Why then do we have 8th graders that think learning is about regurgitating the answers to some questions. True discovery, and thus learning, happens by figuring out what questions to ask.
Take an engineer for example. When an engineer is brought in to fix a bridge, he first has to ask a lot of questions to figure out what exactly is wrong with the bridge. Then he has to figure what exactly do the people who hired him want as a desired outcome? Then he has to ask questions to find out what his resources are to enable him to complete the task. He does not walk into a problem with all the facts laid out and is then asked to solve the problem. Yet, everyday our kids are trained how to do just that. Schools say here is a problem and all the variables and you solve it. Don’t ask any questions, just give me answer. Read the rest of this entry »
(Image: Atitlan beach, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from adjourned's photostream)
Have you ever thought about quitting your job, grabbing the laptop and the iPhone, and heading for some remote tropical destination?
You’ve heard the stories and like me probably read the The 4-Hour Workweek
Your situation may be different than mine. I’m married, with two kids, and that creates it own special set of circumstances. Read the rest of this entry »