The Scout Report -- Volume 22, Number 6

The Periodic Videos team at the University of Nottingham has assembled a tremendous resource for Chemistry teachers and students using the TED-Ed platform. Here readers will find 103 lessons - one for every single element on the periodic table. Take, for instance, the lesson on Helium (He), which has been viewed more than 540,000 times. Readers may begin with the approximately five-minute video, then proceed to the Think section, where multiple choices test what students have learned from the video. Selecting Dig Deeper links readers to YouTube videos, also produced by the Periodic Videos team, which present such topics as the shortage of helium, how to combine hydrogen and helium, and the chemistry of the sun. Readers may also customize any one of the 103 lessons on the site to their own needs in the classroom. [CNH]

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With the evaluation of historical scholarship in constant flux due to digital innovations, librarians, historians, and other scholars are in need of clear guidelines for how to assess the merits of digital scholarship. This publication from the Digital History Working Group at the American Historical Association (AHA) provides just such a rubric. Composed by established scholars from Princeton, Stanford, and other universities, this text defines the challenge of evaluating digital projects, outlines the forms and functions of the developing field, elucidates the particular roles and responsibilities of departments and scholars in the digital age, and clarifies the role of the AHA. For historians and others concerned with the evaluation of digital resources, these guidelines will provide clarity and a way forward. [CNH]

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It's no secret that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) offers hundreds of free courses online via its MIT OpenCourseWare program. While classes range from overviews of the Romantic poets to the intricacies of electrical engineering, few are as popular - and as much fun - as this class on how to create video games, which was taught and recorded in the fall of 2014. Here readers will find a clearly articulated Syllabus, including a link to the optional textbook, Challenges for Game Designers. From there, readers will want to proceed to Lecture Slides and Readings, where they will find freely downloadable PDFs of projects, activities, and other documents, as well as readings, available in the form of PDFs and web links. The highlights of the course, however, are the 27 recorded lectures. Typical topics include meaningful decisions in games, elevator pitches, focus testing results, usability, and many others. [CNH]

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The Harvard College Writing Center has compiled this detailed collection on the basic elements of the scholarly essay. Advanced high school students and lower division undergraduates might benefit most from the resources assembled here, which cover a comprehensive outline of how to research, write, and edit an essay, starting with How to Read an Assignment and progressing through an Overview of the Academic Essay, Developing a Thesis, Outlining, Transitioning, and other topics, before culminating in tips on multiple sections on the revision process. Each of the 18 sections contains helpful suggestions, such as (from the first section, How to Read an Assignment), "Beware of Straying" and "Consider the assignment in relation to previous and upcoming assignments." [CNH]

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Math teachers rejoice. The mathematics section on the Annenberg Learner website is bursting with lessons, news, interactives, and other helpful resources. Readers may like to begin by searching out their particular field of study from the list, which includes Numbers, Geometry, Math History, Statistics, and a giant section called Algebra, Trigonometry, and Calculus. Each section includes a list of various Available Programs. For example, clicking on Statistics calls up Against All Odds, Epidemiological Studies, Interactive: Statistics, and Mathematics of Population Growth, each of which connects to a unique lesson, online textbook, or other resource. Educators, in particular, may like to explore the Interactives, where they may browse or search through the 168 interactives here on a wide range of topics, or the Lesson Plans, which consists of 17 age-graded lesson plans. [CNH]

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The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) has assembled a virtual bounty of poetry-related lesson plans on its well-organized website. Here readers will find 20 different lessons plans for students between the ages of six and 18. For example, A Bear of a Poem: Composing and Performing Found Poetry, was developed for students in kindergarten through 2nd grade, and provides teachers with an overview, featured resources, information on standards, resources and preparation, and an instructional plan, among other helpful structures. Other resources include Weaving the Threads: Integrating Poetry Annotation and Web Technology, a lesson plan for middle schoolers, and Discovering Poetic Form and Structure Using Concrete Poems, which is targeted to high school students. [CNH]

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Island Studies, which is managed by Dr. Godfrey Baldacchino, a professor of sociology at the University of Malta, serves as an Internet repository of island-related research material. Within its folds, readers will find links to several of Dr. Baldacchino's projects, including research on how bridges between island and mainland communities affect the economies and social fabrics of islands; a project dedicated to the study of the economic and political systems of the world's sub-national island jurisdictions; and a study of how islands in cold water areas build tourist industries. Readers may also explore the Island Studies Journal, which has been publishing online, for free, since May of 2006. Articles vary, but have featured such interesting entries as a case study of Pitcairn Island, which was settled by mutineers from the HMS Bounty in the late 18th century and is now nearly uninhabited. [CNH]

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This educational site from the Office of the Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives describes the inner workings of congress in a manner both engaging and edifying. The site contains material for all ages, sorted broadly into four categories: Young Learners, Grade School, Middle School, and High School. For instance, this first section contains visually stimulating topics that will help young children as they learn what congress is and how laws are made. In addition, educators may especially be interested in the For Teachers section, which features lesson plans, teaching tips, links to various web resources, and other items on a variety of topics, from The Role of the House to Women in Congress. [CNH]

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The Brooklyn-based Sketchbook Project is a crowd-sourced library of over 34 thousand artists' books from more than 135 countries. On the site, readers may like to read about the project on the About page before navigating to View, where they may peruse the sketchbooks themselves. Here readers will find a number of Random Books to be scouted, as well as two separate search features to find specific items of interest. In the first, readers may search by keyword, such as artist name, locations, mediums, interests, or tags, among other possibilities. The second is set up for browsing by themes, such as "A day in the life," "City Lights," and many others. The sketchbooks themselves, of course, are the main event on the site. From playful to glum, from heartfelt to sarcastic, the sheer variety of possibility is what stands out most on this original, delightful site. [CNH]

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The statistics on suicidal behavior in the United States are not heartening. In 2013, more than 40 thousand people successfully completed a suicide attempt; the number of people treated in emergency rooms was ten times that amount. In fact, it is estimated that suicide attempts cost the economy over 44 billion dollars every year. This site from the Center for Disease Control provides welcome information on what some commentators are calling a public health epidemic. Here readers will find free and reliable fact sheets and other documents, which includes "The Relationship Between Bullying and Suicide: What We Know and What it Means for Schools" and "Recommendations for Media Reporting on Suicide." There is also a trove of information regarding suicide prevention, such as the research on enhancing connectedness. Readers who are looking for ways to understand suicide and its prevention will find much to appreciate on this excellent site.[CNH]

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While the concept of human rights dates back at least to Cyrus the Great, the ancient king of Persia who freed slaves, declared the freedom to choose one's religion, and established racial equality in his kingdom, history is marked by innumerable violations of what the Romans called "natural law." The University of Texas Libraries' Human Rights Documentation Initiative (HRDI) seeks to document human rights struggles around the world in an effort to advocate for greater equity and understanding. Here readers will find sections on the Free Burma Rangers, the Rwandan Genocide, the Guatemalan National Police abuses, and other collections dedicated to exposing and ameliorating human rights violations around the world. While each section is unique (the section on Burma, for instance, is made up mostly of video footage), all of the materials share a commitment to clear and honest documentation. [CNH]

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The brainchild of writer, critic, and curator Regine Debatty, We Make Money Not Art is an edgy, colorful, impish take on the intersection of art, science, technology, and social issues. Recent articles have profiled the post-anthropocentric art of Maja Smrekar, a gloss of Maarten Vanden Eynde's lecture on the dangers of plastic and the hubris of homo sapiens, and a look at how one artist transformed an old Volvo 240 into functional drones. In addition to the pleasure of scrolling through the recent entries on the landing page, readers may also search for items or authors of interest by using an unusually aesthete search engine or by selecting a host of tags such as activism, architecture, design, installation, robots, sound, and vintage wearable. Readers looking for something new in the realm of art and activism will find it on this original and expressive site. [CNH]

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This fascinating project from scholars, students, librarians, and researchers at the University of Delaware chronicles the efforts of African Americans in the years before and after the Civil War, as they convened to discuss justice in education, work, and law at what were called "Colored Conventions." Readers may like to begin with the Conventions tab to explore the primary documents at the heart of the collection: Convention Minutes beginning with 1830 and continuing all the way through 1888. These documents, which are still in the process of being preserved and are therefore not quite complete, have been diligently digitized, transcribed, and cataloged. For instance, readers will find that the minutes from September 24, 1883 feature an address from Frederick Douglas, while the minutes from 1830 include ideas for establishing a settlement for Black Americans in Canada. In addition to the documents featured here, the Exhibits section is well worth a visit, offering details on several Online Exhibitions that have drawn upon the Colored Conventions Project's collection. These include "A Brief Introduction to the Colored Conventions Movement, 1830-1890s" and "Black Wealth and the 1843 National Colored Convention." [CNH]

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Brain Pickings is the creative artifact of Maria Popova, a reader, writer, and critic with a polymath's passion for literature, arts, advertising, communications, and a virtual truckload of other subjects. Recent articles have outlined the meaning of life according to civil rights activist Rosa Parks, showcased the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art's compilation of 11 different writer's advice to young writers, (Umberto Eco: "go step by step"), and noted Simone Weil's important distinction between rights and obligations. Brain Pickings has won numerous awards and receives over a million visits a month. Readers interested in culture, broadly defined, will deeply enjoy Popova's musings. [CNH]

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Luna Imaging specializes in turning archival materials into eye-popping digital collections. They have done work for universities, libraries, and corporations. Now, they have also aggregated more than 70 NASA image collections into a free and searchable resource. With over 100,000 images, categories, which include Highlights, Planets, Robotics, Astronauts, Hubble, Space Shuttle, Earth, and others, make for easy scouting. For example, Earth contains over 100 images of "the blue marble" taken from space, including portraits of forest fires, pictures of the himalayas, and views of the arctic and the Grand Canyon. Readers may also find the Highlights collection especially interesting, with its pictures of the Apollo landing, the Crab Nebula, and Amelia Earhart. Luna Imaging has done a great service for space lovers everywhere with this attractive and easily navigable site. [CNH]

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The premise of ReminderFox is simple: most calendar applications are too complicated. ReminderFox strives to be simple, intuitive, and powerful. This Firefox browser add-on has several advantages over traditional calendar apps. First, once installed, Firefox users are guaranteed to see what's on their calendar and have access to reminders. Second, adding and subtracting reminders, events, and other calendar content is extremely easy. Third, rather than being an additional app that readers might need to check, ReminderFox is integrated into the web browser that they are already using. To install ReminderFox Firefox users may simply select Add to Firefox from the landing page and follow the effortless steps to installation. [CNH]

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Privacy concerns have become a major issue for Internet users, and the privacy of email is no exception. Every email you send is potentially being profiled by advertisers, screened by government agencies, and perhaps even intercepted by hackers who would like to use your personal information for their own ends. Virtu takes care of all that. The extension, which is tremendously easy to install, works with Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and Outlook to encrypt the emails you want kept private. Using the basic service, which is free, readers may click a single button to turn encryption on. The receiver then gets a message explaining what you have done and how to access the key to decrypt and open the email. While this may sound complicated, the process is actually quite intuitive. Virtu also offers more advanced features for five dollars per month, such as HIPPA compliance and the ability to revoke access to emails that have already been sent. [CNH]

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