Gifted Update from ODE

I received an email with the following information. Please click on the link below to access this month’s Gifted Update: http://www.ode.state.oh.us/GD/Templates/Pages/ODE/ODEDetail.aspx?page=3&TopicRelationID=503&ContentID=14325&Content=124381 These are PDF documents. If you do not have Adobe Reader, click here (http://get.adobe.com/reader/) for a free download. You can also access this page by visiting the ODE website at http://education.ohio.gov and search the term “gifted update.” This month’s update should be live in the next few days.

Kahn Academy collaborating with VLA

The Khan Academy is an organization on a mission. They are a not-for-profit with the goal of changing education for the better by providing a free world-class education to anyone anywhere. All of the site's resources are available to anyone. It doesn't matter if you are a student, teacher, home-schooler, principal, adult returning to the classroom after 20 years. The Khan Academy's materials and resources are available to you completely free of charge. Their library of videos covers K-12 math, science topics such as biology, chemistry, and physics, and even reaches into the humanities with playlists on finance and history. Each video is a digestible chunk, approximately 10 minutes long, and especially purposed for viewing on the computer. The virtual Learning Academy (VLA)is collaboratimg with the Kahn Academy so many videos are now embedded into the content of our program! There are over 3,000 videos a the present time in the Kahn Academy and VLA is working on embedding videos as needed! Click on the following link to check out the Kahn Academy: Kahn Academy

PhET Interactive Simulations is a wonderful way to explain various scientific techniques. Fun, interactive, research-based simulations of physical phenomena from the PhET™ project at the University of Colorado. PhET provides fun, interactive, research-based simulations of physical phenomena for free! The website offers over 70 million simulations on areas such as Physics, Biology, Chemistry, Earth Science, and Math. Some example simulations cover subjects such as bending light, balancing chemical equations, building a molecule, gravity and orbits, and many, many more! To help students visually comprehend concepts, PhET simulations animate what is invisible to the eye through the use of graphics and intuitive controls with click-and-drag manipulation, sliders and radio buttons. And to further encourage quantitative exploration, the simulations also offer measurement instruments including rulers, stop-watches, voltmeters and thermometers. As the user manipulates these interactive tools, responses are immediately animated thus effectively illustrating cause-and-effect relationships as well as multiple linked representations (motion of the objects, graphs, number readouts, etc.) The Virtual Learning Academy is a sponsor for PhET simulations and we have a partnership where PhET simulations are now being embedded into the VLA curriculum! Check out their website to see for yourself all that PhET Interactive Simulations has to offer! http://phet.colorado.edu/