Discovery Channel Interactive Corner

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This Discovery Channel site offers a large collection of interactive games, quizzes, puzzles, and other activities.

Students can virtually time travel back to the the age of dinosaurs, build a volcano and watch it erupt, relive the final days of the battleship Bismarck, dive on the Titanic, and much more.

Among the numerous games, kids may play Darwin and create a species that will survive a million years of evolution, try surviving in the rugged Alaskan wilderness, or test their crime trivia knowledge from crime scene to criminal trial.

There are thirty items in the Quizzes section on topics such as the Titanic, pharaohs, tornadoes, sharks, and Mythbusters. There are more than twenty puzzles many of which are based on popular Discovery Channel shows such as Dirty Jobs and Deadliest Catch.

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More TV Ad Technology

Earlier in the week I posted a TV ad from Sprint that I thought was a good illustration of why we need to be teaching with technology. I since came across this VISA ad from Australian TV that further emphasizes that need.

What's Happening Now

This is why we need to be teaching technology ...

Windows Live Search does the Math

Did you know Windows Live Search can solve linear and quadratic equations? I only tested linears and quadratics, maybe it does more.

Just enter the equation in the search box and hit enter. It's pretty fast, too.

Two New Google Tools

Google Labs has just introduced two new tools that many educators may find useful, Similar Images in Google Image Search and Google News Timeline.

Similar Images
Google Image Search is a tool you can use to find just about any kind of image, but it can sometimes be difficult to find the perfect image if you can't describe it in just the right words. Similar Images allows you to refine your image search with visual similarity, searching for images using pictures rather than words. By clicking the "Similar images" link under an image you will find other images that look like it.

Using visual similarity, you don't have to refine the text of your search, instead, you can just click on the link below an image you like. For example, if you search for [jaguar], you can use the "Similar images" link to quickly narrow your search.

You might try exploring the pyramids of Egypt or discovering the Forbidden City. So if you see an image you like, but you're not sure how to describe it, just click the "Similar images" link to see more like it.

Want to know more? Check out this video tour.



Timeline
Google News Timeline organizes information chronologically by presenting results from Google News and other data sources on a zoomable, graphical timeline. You can move through time by simply dragging the timeline. You can set the time scale to days, weeks, months, years, or decades, or just include a time period in your query (i.e., "1977"). To see this in action, check out the results viewed by month in the summer of 2006.Google News Timeline can show results from many different sources, including both recent and archival news, scanned newspapers and magazines, blog posts, and sports scores and media like music and movies. You can view multiple sources simultaneously, allowing each source to lend context to the others.