Hey Teach!

Most people are familiar with Senator Al Franken’s stupid human trick of drawing a freehand map of all 50 United States. In order to promote Geography Awareness Week, Nat Geo asked all 100 US Senators to draw a map from memory of their home state.

The eleven senators who have taken the challenge so far get big Hey Teach! ups.

thanks @shareski for the tip on this one.

Ignite is an interesting approach to presenting. Presenters are allowed 20 slides that rotate every 15 seconds; five minutes total to get their message across. I feel that this could definitely catch on in secondary schools, and is a great twist to the usual presentations students do for their classes.

I just love interactive maps. I don’t know how much this one is good for aside from bragging rights. The research shows little love for the midwest. As far as the accompanying written report, I’ve heard it all before. The methodology is also a little off, depending on which way you lean when it comes to educational policy. States get better marks for having laws providing performance pay for teachers, for example..

VPN stands for Virtual Private Network. It’s essentially creating a “LAN” over the Internet. If you’re familiar with what a LAN is you know why it’s funny to say one can exist on the Internet.

Anyway. You can utilize this to use a lot of games/programs that would normally work over a LAN with anyone on the whole Internet.

This will be a boon to teachers looking to involve students in projects that will have them programming simulations. It’s a little too technical for me to implement, right away at least, but I can definitely see the potential. A commercial 3D gaming developer kit, made free? Teachers everywhere rejoice!

thanks @sundayideas