Google’s Global Science Fair

Don’t miss this opportunity!

Google’s Global Online Science Fair is open to students aged 13-18 and is accepting submissions from Jan 11 to April 4.

Of coures, the project encourages the use of many different free Google tools : Google docs to create surveys, gather data and create presentations; YouTube to present a video of the project; Google Scholar and other search tools for research, and so on.

Google and partners (CERN, National Geographic, Lego, Scientific American) are offering some pretty great prizes like a trip to the Galapagos Islands, scholarships and more.

And students will need a Google account to submit their project via the template available in Google Sites. (Sample submission)

Want to know more? Check out the Resources for Teachers page.

Too much Google?

Say what I might about Google owning our lives (and I do!), this looks like a fabulous opportunity for your students. And a great chance for you to explore some tools that you may not have tried yet. I know what great things educators are doing with these tools from all the interesting ideas I’ve heard in the Google Tools workshops I’ve been teaching. Of course, there are are many other tools that students can use in their research projects as well. That’s the basis of another workshop I’ve been offering called Research 2.0 Hope to see some of you at the next session later this month in Saratoga.

A Dozen Back to School Uses for Big Huge Labs Trading Card Generator

In a class last week, someone suggested using the the free trading cards generator at bighugelabs.com as a ‘get to know you’ sort of exercise at the beginning of the school year. That got me thinking about and looking for other back to school ideas for this fun tool.

Like all the tools at bighugelabs, this one is very easy to use. Upload a photo/graphic or grab one from your flickr or photobucket account, enter a title, caption and some text and shazam, you have a cool trading card. You can download the trading card to your own computer, post it your flickr account, copy html code to put it on a web/blog/wiki page or print it out.

Some ideas – please share your ideas in the comments!

Book Reviews – find a photo that expresses your feelings about a book you’ve read. Write a few lines about what the book meant to you.
Student book reports - Use the 2-sided Character Trading Card generator from the ReadWriteThink to create a summary of the book, notes about the characters, plot and more. (sample card)
“5 facts” reports – Find a photo or graphic of a topic. List 5 facts about that topic. Expand this to a podcast of the ’5 facts’ (that idea from the Beverly (MI) Elementary School Podcasts) and use the trading card to illustrate the blog/web/wiki page listing the podcasts. (more…)

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