Explore Ancient and Modern Calendars

Calendars Through the Ages is a website sponsored by the Institute for Dynamic Educational Advancement (IDEA), a nonprofit organization committed to enhancing the public’s knowledge of science and culture. The site begins with an in-depth look at the astronomical basis of calendars. Significant historical calendars (such as the Roman and Mayan) and currently used international calendars (Jewish, Chinese and Islamic) are covered in Various Calendars. In the Do It Yourself section, students can make a calendar page by watching the moon everyday for a month and learning about the phases of the moon. To find out how their observations of the real sky match up with predictions, students can see a simulation of the whole month or a single day at a time.
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Click Here to Visit Do It Yourself Page

Share Stories Honoring Military Families

Inspired by the film The Way We Get By, the Returning Home website allows families and friends to become troop greeters by sending encouraging messages to American soldiers through user-generated content and virtual care packages.
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Six Week Rule-Plannig for Spring Break?

It is a beautiful day in West Tennessee. It doesn't seem like winter at all. This makes me long for Spring Break..Florida.... Cardinal Baseball. Here are some sites from Budget Travel to help you with your dreams.

"In a press release, a spokesperson for ARC clarified that, “We’re not advising people to purchase tickets only at this time during the cycle as there is no guarantee they will receive the lowest price of the year.”

In other words, airline sale alerts from sites like AirfareWatchdog and ticket price monitors, such as Yapta, continue to be useful. For a specific route, you can also check out the predictions of whether fares may go up or down within the next week by using Bing Travel. If your dates are flexible, you may benefit from using a fare calendar, such as the one on metasearch sites Kayak and Google Flights.

Is the study meaningful? Critics will point out that, if a large number of travelers find out about the six-week rule and start buying at that time, the pattern will change for everyone. The retort to this is that most people aren't reading websites like this and won't change their behavior even if they hear about the rule."

Newt Knows (not a Political opinion)

Don't worry, this is not a political editorial.  

By now you've probably heard Republican Presidential Candidate Newt Gingrich's comments last week that by the end of his second term in office (provided he's elected and re-elected) there will be an American base on the moon. If you didn't hear Newt's comments last week, The Atlantic has a piece on it right now. 

Newt Gingrich's comments and the aforementioned article in The Atlantic made me think about NASA's role-playing game Moonbase Alpha. Moonbase Alpha is an online game developed by NASA to be played on the Steam online gaming platform. Moonbase Alpha a simulation game in which players assume the role of an astronaut working to repair equipment in order to restore oxygen delivery to a settlement on the moon. The game can be played by up to six players at a time who communicate using voice over communication. 

See the trailer for Moonbase Alpha in the video below. 
 

Applications for Education 
Put a classroom discussion of Newt Gingrich's comments together with Moonbase Alpha and you might have a nice little lesson covering both Civics and Space Science.

This post originally appeared on Free Technology for Teachers.