Cool free stuff

I've mentioned the Earthviewer app from HHMI before: think of it as a bit like Google Earth, only you can dial it back to any period in the planet's history. There have been a couple of developments: it's also available for Android, and it's added some new features, including tracking for major fossils. So now you can see the long strange journey of Tiktaalik's bones on the screen.

They're also making available a lovely big poster of earth's history. This year, we here at UMM are putting together a teacher training program to be implemented in the summer of 2015, and it's going to be a lot of work for us — but I'm realizing that HHMI has already done a lot of material preparation that will help a great deal.

I've been known to moan in chagrin over all the multimedia garbage that Answers in Genesis provides to corrupt education in this country — you can just pop into AiG's website and download lesson plans and powerpoint slides to teach creationism. But now HHMI makes them look feeble as well as wrong.

More like this

Once again, please don't forget about our DonorsChoose drive! Please click in the panel to you left, and go make a donation to help schools get the supplies they need to be able to teach math! Most people must have heard by now that about a week ago, T-mobile released the first Android based…
Tiktaalik: music to my ears. Tiktaalik is the lilting name of a newly discovered fossil fish with fingers. It lived 380 million years ago in the northern reaches of Canada, back when the northern reaches of Canada were tropical coastal wetlands not far from the equator. Tiktaalik's discoverers (Ted…
This week, the creationist Ken Ham and his organization, Answers in Genesis, are practicing the Big Lie. They have spent tens of millions of dollars to create a glossy simulacrum of a museum, a slick imitation of a scientific enterprise veneered over long disproved religious fables, and they are…
There are several areas of controversy emerging in the discussion of Minnesota Science standards, but almost none of this controversy has to do with Evolution and Creationism. Amanda and I attended a public meeting on the issue last night, and I felt at the end that a kind of victory had been…