Google Lit Trips Lets Students Experience Their Books

Subscribe to BrokenAirplane!

This was a tip from a colleague and I am glad I remembered it as I was caught up in some recent traveling. Humanities Teachers at my school have the job of teaching both Literature/Writing and History/Geography. Within the context of a story, one can often bring the history and geography into it and provide a richer experience.

With Google Lit Trips, much of the work has been done for you. Simply look at the top of the page for the level of reader (K-5, 6-8. High School, and Higher Ed) and scroll to find the book you are reading. Then download the file to Google Earth and play the tour for your students. The content has been created by teachers just like yourself and can include a landmarks tour and Sketchup Models of ancient or fictional buildings. You will also find great resources like reader guides and links to interesting websites about the book.

If you have a passion for a particular book, why not add it to the website and share it with the world!

If you have not used Google Earth or Sketchup before, you will be amazed at how easy and fun it is for learning. There are many great tutorials on how to use both: Google Earth Tutorials (Historical Imagery), Getting Started with Sketchup are some examples.

Be sure to check out the BrokenAirplane Humanities Resources page for other resources for English, Social Sciences, Geography, Music, Foreign Language and more!


By the way, this project was created by Jerome Burg, a Google Certified Teacher. If you are interested in becoming one, the deadline for this year's Teacher Academy is June 16th so click the link and apply!

What Does Your Music Say About You? Python Music Experiment Part 1

Subscribe to BrokenAirplane

I love the last project of the year. I have spent an entire year with these students learning about their interests and  helping them become proficient in math, science, and programming. I like to experiement with the last project and try something new that hopefully will go well but at least can be refined for next year. I was pleasantly surprised about how this final project went and so I thought I would share it with you.

I am always on the lookout for inspiration for projects and this one began 3 years ago with a fascinating article about Pandora (sorry I don't have it anymore). I was so interested in the way the system learned what you like and don't based upon more than just genre. In fact it was based upon over 400 different factors according to the Music Genome Project on which Pandora is based. I thought this year I would have the students analyze music based upon one of those factors, lyrics.

I asked the students to find 20 song lyrics and paste them into a Google Doc. What was interesting is how often I was asked if they could use songs with profanity, violence, etc. I simply responded that I wanted them to choose their all time favorite songs or the ones they listened to the most and if they didn't then the project wouldn't work.

Next we generated some Pseudocode. I asked them if you were to sit a small child down and tell him to write down how many times a certain word came up in a song what would you tell them?

This took about ten minutes of silent thinking, erasures, and debates so don't get the impression that they got it the first time (but who does).  Eventually the class came up with this.

1 2 3 4

Go through the song. Each time you come to a word, check to see if that word has come up before. If it has not, write the word down and a one next to it.If it has, add one to the count/tally.

Next, we began to translate that into Python script. It gave me an opportunity to talk about data and dictionaries which is always a plus but when we were done, they had a big smile on their face as they realized how similar their pseudocode was to the actual code. To test the code as they were building it, we used Michael Jackson's Smooth Criminal as almost everyone knows it and in my opinion it has the most epic music video of all time. It also has some funky lyrics and punctuation that allows for refining the translate function.

The quick tutorial I gave them to learn about strings can be found here, but as I said this project will be refined as will the tutorial.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

from string import * song = '''Insert Lyrics Here''' cleanString = song.translate(None,',.:;!?') #removes these characters cleanList = cleanString.split() #splits it into a list songDict = {} for word in cleanList: if word not in songDict: songDict[word] = 1 #if not already in the dictionary, add it else: songDict[word]+=1 #if already in the dictionary, add 1 to it print word, songDict[word] #option 1 for word in songDict: #option 2 if songDict[word] > 1: print songDict[word]

The first option will print out the entire dictionary without any filtering. The second option was devised by the students after seeing how many times a word came up only once and will create a threshold to only print words that show up more than once (or more if they want). I love it when they come up with a solution like that!

After they saw the output, I asked them to reflect upon what significant words came up the most for them. For some it was "I, me, you, my" etc. which they saw as an indicator of songs about love and intimacy. Others were surprised how often a curse, violent, or derogatory word came up. Since their humanities teacher is teaching them how to write Sonnets and going through Romeo and Juliet, we ran those words through the code as well. Not surprisingly, the words were very intimate since they are both romantic literature.

Feel free to use the code to analyze your own songs and if you have any thoughts for next year's version of this I would love to hear about it in the comments. I hope to incorporate more of Pandora into the next iteration as I was informed that the software uses a form of the distance formula to decide which song to play next. Ha! Take that those who think Algebra is irrelevant.

Code formatting was made possible via Hilite.me. There are other great options out there but this was the quickest for me. It also made it easy for you to copy and paste the code for your own use. If you have a recommendation of how to do it better, please let me know.

Subscribe to BrokenAirplane and keep up with all of the latest education and technology resources!

Wolfram Alpha for Powerful Science, Math, and Humanities Research

Data is everywhere, it doesn't matter what you teach, you need data and researching the web is a fast and great way to do it. Sometimes, we don't always get what we want.

If you have not tried it, enter 5 pounds to grams in Google. The effect is even cooler because of Google Instant. Or try entering 60/2.5. For all that Google can do, it is also a great calculator or conversion tool. In fact Google is able to do all kinds of helpful things besides just searching for websites (link)

Yet, try entering y=2x+5 and you will receive websites that may help you understand linear equations or maybe eventually show you the graph but this isn't exactly what you meant. What if you are researching different countries and comparing demographics? England and China, England vs China, no matter what you try, you will still need to root through search results.

Now I love Google, this would happen if you were using Yahoo, Bing, or any other search engine because that is what they do, find and return web pages that match your search terms. This all changed last year when WolframAlpha.com emerged on the scene. Developed by Stephen Wolfram and his colleagues, it touts itself as a "Computational Knowledge Engine". For those of you familiar with Stephen Wolfram's previous work with Mathematica, the website is powered by the same algorithims.

Try it out or look at some of the examples. I honestly, could spend a lot of time going through each one. They are just so beautiful and helpful. Going to our original examples, go to WolframAlpha.com and type in y=2x+5 and hit enter. There is the graph you were looking for. WolframAlpha.com is a full fledged graphing calculator.

Now try England vs China. This will not pull up sports scores or obscure websites with those keywords. You are presented with a useful side by side comparison of the two countries' demographics, landmass, etc.

I enjoy typing in my name as it will tell me how many others of me there are in the world. The examples are certainly worth your time. Click around and see the possibilities of seeing data in a way that is truly useful.  This isn't surprising from Stephen Wolfram who has spend a great deal of time and energy trying to make the world's knowledge not only searchable but computational. Data is worthless if we cannot work with it and that is exactly what Mathematica and Wolframalpha.com were intended to do. You can see more of Mr. Wolfram's philosophy in this TED talk where he draws from his research and writings in A New Kind of Science.

In an effort to make Wolfram Alpha more accessible, others have implemented this in Firefox, and Chrome, (free) and now Android, iPhone, and iPad (for $1.99).

Two other free options for educators are Wolfram Alpha Demonstrations, and Widgets. Demonstrations are similar to the examples, but with a large amount of interactivity. Show your students a physics or math principle, art and color, sports examples, optical illusions, and more. Widgets are an option for you or your students to create your own mini Wolfram Alpha program. It is easy to create one to add to your website or for your classroom, there is also a gallery of premade widgets.

Whether you teach the humanities or sciences, WolframAlpha has the power to make data managable and useful. If you haven't already go over to the site and browse you will find it hard to leave.

Humanities Resources (English, Reading, Art, Social Studies, Theatre, Music, Foreign Language)

Although I am not a humanities teacher by trade, I do keep an eye on this kind of stuff as it is useful to my teaching partner and others. So I will maintain this list as I do the Math and Science Resources post.

For ease of compilation, I have considered humanities to involve English, Social Studies, Economics, Theatre, Music, Art, and Foreign Language.

General:
Student research resources

Art:

Inkscape - A free an open source alternative to Adobe Inkscape

GIMP - A free and open source alternative to Adobe Photoshop

Communication: With either of these tools, you can set up conversations with students, teachers, speakers, authors, etc from around the world for free. All you need is a webcam.

Skype

Google Talk

Foreign Language Tools:

Google Translate - Easily translate documents, websites, or simply text to numerous foreign languages. Keep in mind it is not perfect but often is enough to give or get the idea.

Busuu - They say that the best way to learn a new language is immersion. However, it is rarely feasible to create such an environment. Yet with Busuu, you and your students can study with people around the world in order to learn. Best part is, it is free!

http://www.openculture.com/freelanguagelessons - Just what it says, free language lessons.

Geography:
Google Lit Trips - Take a trip through literature with your students using Google Earth.

News:

NPR - While so many newspapers/media outlets are online, National Public Radio provides all of its content online. While no source is unbiased, NPR audits itself to make sure that it is at least balanced.

http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/default.asp - An interesting website that allows you to see the front page from websites around the world. This could be very useful to compare a major event from different vantage points.
Worldmapper: Shows world maps with countries distorted to demonstrate various inequities (e.g. Income of less than $1/day, Population, Internet Penetration,etc.) 

Primary Resources:

World Digital Library - A collection of primary resources from around the world are collected and made public on this site.

Public Domain Resources (texts, audio, pictures, etc): One of my favorite sayings can be found on a bumper sticker, "It will be a great day when the schools have all the money they need and the air force needs to have a bake sale to purchase a bomber.

Until that day, we must use every resource at our disposal to bring the best to our students while working within our means. Thank goodness for the Internet. The following links provide resources to media whos authors have either made their works public domain willingly or let their copyright expire. You can contribute to these sites if you wish.

Authorama - Books

Archive - Various Media

Creative Commons - Various Media

Google Books - Books (free section)

Gutenberg - Books

Justfreebooks - Books

Librivox - Audiobooks

Lit2go - Books
Many Books - Books
Musopen  - Music/Sheet Music
Open Library - Books

Pdinfo - Music/Sheet Music

http://philosophy.eserver.org/ - Philosophy Texts

Search-pdf-books.com/ - Books

After the above statement and after reading this blog, you might get the impression that I stronly support openness of information, and you would be right. While I believe everyone is due what they have earned, I also believe that copyright law is too strict and does not benefit the artists or writers.

Especially with so many of our students downloading music, software, movies, etc that by current law is illegal. It is necessary for them to understand the law as it so directly affects them. Here are some resources to help you: 

Electronics Frontier Foundation - An organization which advocates openness of information and pushes back against unfair or unnecessarily strict copyright law.

Teaching Copyright - Curriculum designed to teach about copyright, open source, and other various laws surrounding this topic. You might wonder why it is necessary to do so, but current textbooks paint an unfair and negative image of open practices. As I said, this issue impacts your students as much as any other in their life.

Recording Music and Sound

Audacity - Record voice and music on multiple tracks with tons of features and effects. Free and Open Source

Tux Guitar - A free and open source tablature and score editor.

UStream - Similar to YouTube but better if you are doing a recurring show. Allows easy uploading and broadcast.

Research

Wikipedia - Scorned by teachers for far too long, Wikipedia has evolved to the point where it is actually more accurate than many encyclopedias. If you do not believe me, attempt to submit something false to it and you will see how difficult the process is.

Zotero - If Internet bookmarks are not enough to capture your research and citations, you should check out this. It promises to keep track of clippings, quotes, books, research all over the Internet in a way that is much more conducive to term papers, dissertations, etc.
NGrams - Find the history and frequency of a word.

Google Earth - Beyond the coolness factor, Google Earth allows you to take you students all over the world, literally. There are resources for Geography, Geology, Geocaching

Internet Public Library - A helpful search for resources of all ages.

World Cat - A library search engine for the whole world. I once had a book delivered to my library from England by using this!

Snopes - Exhaustive resarch into myths, urban legends, and memes. Snopes for Critical Thinking
Timelines of History - Self Explanatory.

Self-Publishing

Blurb - Used by many in our district to create books of student work/research.

Ka-blam - Print up comics, and more! This is the site that the Graphic Novel Project uses.

Lulu - Similar to Blurb, check between the two for specials and pricing.

CK12 - Create and share your textbook around the world. There are currently no humanities resources. Be the first!

Writing

Celtx - Professional yet free software for writing screenplays, comics, and scripts.

Distributed Proofreaders - A site where you could sign up to proofread uploaded texts to public domain sites. Could be useful for students to refine their grammatical skills.

World Data

World Clock - Provides data on a variety of topics like population, crime, food, etc.

Breathing Earth - CO2 emissions by country.

If you have a suggestion, put it in the comments and I will add it to the official list or if you would like more detail on one I will create a specific post/series devoted to it.