Marla Parker's Weblog

FreshBrain activity ideas
I've been reading the FreshBrain blog every week or so and participating in the forums on freshbrain.org. I used to work for the Headbrain (I'm not making this up, that is his username on the site) and I'm very excited about what this new non-profit is trying to accomplish.

I am especially interested in participating in the Eco/Green part of this sprouting community, or maybe now they are calling it Eco/Green Science, even better! I hope I'll be able to contribute some activities that would be useful or accepted or whatever the word is for however the site will work. For example:

The fun with kml files that I blogged about. It was really easy to manually create a kml file that works with google maps or google earth and shows placemarks with pictures from family vacations, with links to more pictures. For the activity, it might make sense to do a really tiny example by hand, not necessarily to create it but just to look at it, and then say you can do this by hand or you can use this tool to do it faster.

Another direction to take is to try the kml file you create with the other tools: NASA WorldWind, ESRI ArcGIS Explorer, Adobe PhotoShop, etc.

My high-school freshman daughter went on a bike ride and then came home and used google map, I think, to make a map of where she went with annotations. It was not a kml file, though. I did not look at it closely enough to understand how it could be published, as that was an option.

A student posted a reference to the Cyber School Bus in the Fresh Brain forums, and wow, what a cool site that is! I wonder if some activities could be created around doing something on or with that site. Maybe not in eco/green, but whatever.

Those are the FreshBrain activity ideas that I wanted to list so I don't forget them.