News: December, 2010

Happy holidays! It is December, and the season of shopping is upon us. You'd be surprised by how much money we can spend while taking mini-breaks from working on this website!

So much has happened with this site in the last month. We have been updating individual pages, which has created a few glitches. If a page looks a bit wonky, have no fear...we are working on the problem.

We are also working to improve and increase our interactive vocabulary games. It's a lot of work, but we as well as you want to have online vocabulary games for each of our college-prep vocabulary lists. This task is underway, and we will hopefully make a lot more progress by the new year.

As you know, the educational image galleries continue to grow. Keep your fingers crossed that we maintain our momentum!

We have likewise changed the layout of a few pages, particularly the citations and graphic organizers. Some of you have reported back that the pages load more quickly, which is terrific. We were hoping for this. We were also trying to mix things up a bit by making the individual web pages more varied. The "same" is good for the most part, in terms of users always being able to find the information they need on a page, but a little diversity helps to keep the eyes from tiring.

The Rise of Parliamentary Democracy in England

We have an interesting interactive image gallery on the rise of parliamentary democracy in England. Our unique images are captioned with facts that explain the people and events in this unique period in European history. Who was Oliver Cromwell, and what effects did he have on England and Ireland? Who was Charles I or Charles II? What were the Puritan Revolution and Glorious Revolution? This is a great introduction or review for teachers and students.

Death and Destruction in World War II

We have nearly completed our World War II image galleries. The latest gallery focuses on Death and Destruction in the Second World War. Several of the images are quite graphic, so please use with caution when showing the gallery to students. This particular photograph, taken in 1944 by the Germans and confiscated after the Allied victory, features American casualties at a crossroads in Belgium.

Existential Depression in Gifted Students

If you come in contact with gifted students, here is a neat article for you on existential depression among gifted students. The basic premise is that familiarity with the "big questions" of life can leave gifted students feeling depressed, because these students are emotionally unequipped to deal with the inevitability of death, etc. (We know...who is?) Luckily, strategies are offered to help students to overcome this sort of existential crisis and continue their ascent into higher planes of human knowledge.

Convert PDF Files to Word Documents

Look what we found online! This is a PDF-to-Word Converter. Take PDF documents (the type you open using Adobe Acrobat Reader) and open them in Microsoft Word. Why? You can extract the text you need easily, change the text around, and more.

Tree of Life Chart

Attention science teachers...the University of Texas has a gorgeous tree of life poster/picture that you can use with your Biology classes. It looks pretty darn cool, and it's free for non-commercial purposes.

Students (and Teachers...and Parents) on Facebook

Here's a neat article on "What Not to Post on Facebook." It might seem that these "adult" issues (identity theft, home robbery) do not affect students, but they do. When it comes to online safety, we generally advise students to stay away from inappropriate comments and photos and the like.

But what of the teenager, with 1000+ friends on Facebook, who posts that he and his family are going on vacation out-of-state for a week? There are now 1000+ people who know exactly where this teen's house is, and that it will be empty for a week. If the teen posts a lot of pictures, potential thieves are probably aware of what this house has to offer.

There are a lot of bad things that can potentially happen. Of course, this does not mean that we should coerce everyone to delete their social networking accounts. But we should open a dialogue with kids (and parents...and teachers) which logically and rationally looks at what we are putting online, and what the repercussions might be.