The Scout Report -- Volume 22, Number 8

In honor of Black History Month, the National Education Association (NEA) has assembled a multitude of lessons and resources on the topic of African Americans in the United States. Here educators and other interested parties will find lesson plans, activities, printables, and more - all sorted and organized by grade level: Grades K-5, Grades 6-8, and Grades 9-12. For example, in Musical Harlem, a lesson plan designed for grades K-4, students listen to clips of jazz to identify the styles and musicians associated with the Harlem Renaissance, while in another activity, Notable African Americans from the 18th century to the present, students between fifth and 12th grade play a Jeopardy-style game to test their knowledge of famous African Americans. Readers will also find Background Resources that cover a broad spectrum of subjects, from social studies to sports, excellent Quizzes to help educators assess what their students are learning, and numerous Audio & Video aids to help bring the lessons to life. [CNH]

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These lesson plans from the Metropolitan Museum of Art will take educators and their students into the heart of the collection of this world-renowned cultural institution. Here educators working with students between kindergarten and 12th grade will find lesson plans on such topics as Ancient Mesopotamia, Animal-Inspired Masks and Masquerades, Architecture and the Natural World, and many others. Each lesson plan outlines specified Goals, reference both National Learning Standards and Common Core Standards, offers Questions for Viewing, highlights Objects in the Museum's Collection Related to the Lesson, and much more. For instance, the lesson plan focused on Buddhist and Hindu Art from India seeks to teach students how to identify similarities and differences between Hindu and Buddhist sculpture. The lesson meets a number of National Learning and Common Core standards related to Visual Arts, World History, and English Language Arts, its questions focus on a particular sculpture, and it includes an activity in which students sketch a Buddha figure and a Shiva figure and then compare them. [CNH]

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This overview of the National Science Foundation's Research on astronomy and space is packed with big ideas about the cosmos. Readers may like to begin by exploring The Big Questions on the landing page, such as "Where did it all come from?" or "What is the universe made of, and how does it work?" From there, the Astronomy & Space News section updates readers on the latest in groundbreaking research, such as how stars "adopt" stray cosmic gases, the ins and outs of galaxy clustering, and information about the "most luminous galaxy" in the universe, among many other topics. Educators may also like to navigate to the Classroom Resources, which features an annotated list of Astronomy & Space Classroom Resources, such as links to the Bad Astronomy blog, and many valuable sites with lesson plans, activities, and other learning resources. [CNH]

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Cartoons for the Classroom is an excellent resource for high school educators who are looking for ways to use the visual rhetoric of political cartoons to highlight issues in current American politics, civics, and cultural life. Lessons are published every week or two. Each tackles a particular issue, featuring two cartoons on the topic and a list of Talking Points. These usually include provocative questions to spur classroom discussion. For example, in the How did Flint's water get poisoned? cartoon, one of the talking points asks, "Switching water supplies to save money resulted in lead contaminating the water in Flint, Michigan. What do these cartoons blame for the disaster?" With over 300 lessons to choose from on topics ranging from political candidates to the stock market to the debate over drone strikes, this site presents political ideas in visually stimulating and intellectually compelling formats. [CNH]

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These educational resources from the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Ocean Service (NOS), and the United States Department of Commerce will be a welcome find for educators teaching earth sciences to elementary school students. Here readers will find visualizations, videos, interactive games, lessons, posters, presentations, and audio archives on a broad range of ocean related topics. Educators may like to scout the site by grade level or by media type. The Lessons section is especially robust, with over 100 professionally structured lessons on such topics such as Aquatic Food Chains, Climate Change, Coral Reef Habitat, Island Formations, Humpback Whales, Ocean Geography and Geology, and many more. Each lesson features a descriptive introduction that outlines the approach and learning goals, clarity about the targeted age group, reference to National Standards and Hawaii State Standards, and in-depth descriptions of learning activities. For teachers introducing students to the life of the ocean, this website will not disappoint. [CNH]

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Steve Spangler started creating do-it-yourself, at-home science projects for kids in 1991. Since then, he has appeared on Ellen, the History Channel, the Food Channel, the Today Show, Good Morning America, and many other television networks and shows. He also has a YouTube channel where he introduces experiments for free, with well over 200 at the time of this writing. Here readers will find one- or two-minute how-to videos describing how to make a sugar kaleidoscope, perfect fake blood, a musical straw, ink, magnetic slime, vampire slime, an ice tray battery, a coin tower, a homemade lung, a magic color changing flower, and many, many more - all utilizing simple chemistry and ingredients that most kids can find around the house. The videos are also arranged by categories. Under the Playlists tab, readers will find lists such as Science with Sugar (6 videos), Food Science (20 videos), Summer Science Fun! (33 videos), Chemistry (55 videos), and others. [CNH]

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This collaboration between the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford, the British Library, the Shakespeare Birth Trust, and the National Archives, which was convened by the Folger Shakespeare Library, is perhaps the largest collection of primary-source materials related to William Shakespeare. The exhibit concentrates its considerable erudition on documents contemporary to Shakespeare's life and times. The Documents have been organized into four categories: Playwright, actor & shareholder (205 items); Shakespeare the poet (67 items); Family, legal & property records (186 items); and 17th century legacies (33 items). In addition, within the Exhibition section, readers may filter the documents by useful tags such as Repository, People, Plays & Poetry, Decade, Medium, and Highlights. Readers may also sort the collection by Oldest to Newest or Newest to Oldest. For educators looking for primary resources to enliven their lesson plans - or for anyone with a strong affinity for the the English language's greatest wordsmith - this website is unparalleled in its depth. [CNH]

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As the official journal of the Society of Neuroscience, JNeurosci: The Journal of Neuroscience holds a special place of honor in the brain science community. Published weekly, the periodical manages to uphold an impressive standard of quality, exhibiting an impact factor of 6.344 (meaning the average article is cited about 6 times), and an impressively short turnaround between author submission and editorial feedback, making for increased relevance of published research. Recent articles have included examinations of the synaptic alterations, investigations into the minutia of the dorsal hippocampus, and an exposition on Goal-Directed Decision Making with Spiking Neurons. Readers who are not members of the Society, or part of a large library system with access to academic journals, will want to scout for the tags (red in the current issue, yellow in archived ones) that indicate which items are Free Access Articles. While the number of these featured articles changes each week, readers can rely on a hearty archive of freely available reading on groundbreaking neuroscience topics. [CNH]

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The Travel section of the Smithsonian magazine is informative and inspiring. Here readers will find scenic train rides, Patagonian mountain peaks, museum galleries, and the hidden oases of Central Park - all captured in eye-popping, color-rich photographs that make readers want to book a flight and pack a bag. Recent articles have covered the new pop-up museum in Philadelphia that is attempting to bring the stories of African American women to life, a grandson's journey to retrace the steps of his grandfather's trek to the Himalayas, and a few notes on the bustle of a Nigerian marketplace and African art museum. Readers who are looking for travel inspiration - or for a quick escape from the quotidian - will find pleasure and wonder in this beautiful compilation. [CNH]

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The Getty Research Institute (GRI), which was founded in 1985 at the bequest of industrialist J. Paul Getty, works to further the understanding of visual arts through an impressive research library, the publishing of scholarly works, and various electronic databases. This site showcases some of the GRI's important holdings. Here readers will find epistolary archives, collections of artistic ephemera, and the papers of important painters, sculptors, curators, and others who shaped the American art scene. For example, the Harald Szeezmann Archive and Library presents the influential curator's correspondence with major artists and scholars, while the link to Philip Otto Rugne's Times of Day offers readers a glimpse of these four exquisite prints, along with erudite annotations. Readers with an interest in a wide range of artistic periods will find much to appreciate on this excellent site. [CNH]

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According to this site from the World Health Organization (WHO), the work completed on tuberculosis between the years 2000 and 2014 has saved over 43 million lives. In fact, TB mortality has been halved since the year 1990. On this site, readers will find reports on the WHO's Global Action Framework for TB Research, as well as the post-2015 strategy to end TB. The expansive Areas of Work section is also worth a visit, as it includes detailed information on Detection and diagnosis, Treatment and care, Preventive care, Drug-resistant TB, TB and HIV, TB and children, and many other important topics. In addition, the TB Data tab includes the Global tuberculosis report 2015, an excellent visualization of Tuberculosis country profiles, and other informative gems. [CNH]

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The Northwestern University Library's World War II Poster Collection contains 338 posters issued by the U.S. government in an attempt to garner support for the war effort between 1941 and 1945. To view the posters, select "Search the Collection" from the landing page. The items will then appear in rows, ten to each page. Readers may like to scout the posters at random, where they will find advertisements for war bonds, reminders of the dangers of fascism, exhortations for citizens to conserve resources, and many other examples of propaganda efforts. For example, one poster features a young girl holding a photograph of a man in uniform. The caption reads "What you're making may save my daddy's life," and was presumably designed to help inspire workers in a munitions factory. The site may also be browsed by creator, date, subject, and unit, as well as with the excellent search engine. [CNH]

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The Free Music Archive (FMA) is a precious gem for readers who thrill to the sound of non-commercial, freely available, multi-genre music. Featured blog posts greet readers on the landing page and often include live and studio recordings that can not only be scouted online, but downloaded for free. For instance, the February 12, 2016 post, "Highlights from the 2016 Zlatne Uste Golden Festival," boasts eight beautiful Balkan folk music tracks and a video of a raucous dance party. Readers may also search the site by genres, which include Blues, Electronic, Hip Hop, Jazz, Rock, Classical, Experimental, Instrumental, Old Time-Historic, and others. Finally, true music geeks may like to explore the archive using the dropdown list within the Curators tab, which features such venerable music aggregators as WFMU, Music for Video, Radius, and other observers of the contemporary music scene. [CNH]

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Slate magazine, which was founded in 1996 by former New Republic editor Michael Kinsley, is usually known for its coverage of current affairs, politics, and culture. The Vault, however, is a different animal entirely. Here readers will find exegeses of awkward early 20th century infographics; they will be introduced to George Washington's lifelong passion for mapmaking; they will come to understand how one company revolutionized American libraries with a new bookcase design; and much more. The Vault, then, is a repository of fascinating historical ephemera, in equal parts compelling and anomalous, delightful and strange. The editors post new articles about twice a week. Readers looking for a keen eye for historical oddities and insights will find much to appreciate on this vividly intellectual site. [CNH]

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Theorizing the Contemporary, which is curated by the Society for Cultural Anthropology, is one of those daring, amorphous intellectual experiments that can be hard to categorize. The site itself claims to "engage the contemporary through theoretical critique, analytical innovation, paradigm-making or breaking." Here readers will find a series of posts on "The Lexicon for an Anthropocene Yet Unseen," which includes topics such as Cosmos, Distribution, Dream, Ecopolitics, Hyposubjects, and Nature, among others. Adventurous readers may also enjoy the series "The Politics of Ontology," which includes wonderings about What an Ontological Anthropology Might Mean, as well as posts about Onto-Methodology, Practical Ontologies, and others. [CNH]

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Founded in 2000, the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project is a long term documentary editing effort headed by faculty and staff of the history department at George Washington University. The mission? To "return ER's voice back into the written record." The Project has received support from the National Archives, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the George Washington University, as well as private donors. Currently the site is primarily text - transcriptions of Roosevelt's speeches, newspaper columns, and other written work. Although there is a section titled "Online Documents & Videos," we were unable to locate any video, and only one (rather low quality) audio file when we visited. In addition to the online versions of Roosevelt's columns "If You Ask Me" and "My Day", there is a mini edition, "Eleanor Roosevelt, John Kennedy, and the Election of 1960," a digital volume that is primarily correspondence between Ms. Roosevelt and Kennedy between 1958 and 1961. The mini edition is extensively cross indexed, providing biographies and background of people and events mentioned in the letters, and was published with the Model Editions Partnership, a consortium of universities mounting digital versions of historical documents. There are also freely available teaching guides, lesson plans, and case studies on this site. [DS]

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Scoopt.it is an excellent service for readers who would like to curate their own content about a particular topic on the web. Conducting a web search for existing Scoop.it pages (The psychology Scoop.it, for instance, has been viewed over one million times and is updated multiple times per day.) provides a sense for what Scoop.it can do. Signing up for a free Scoop.it account (there are also premium accounts, at cost) requires an email, Twitter, or Facebook account. Once an account is created, the site will ask users for topics or keywords of interest, searching the Internet for scoopable content. Readers may also scoop content they come across themselves, gradually building a site of curated information on a favorite topic. [CNH]

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The world of contemporary communication is a world of images. No blog post is complete without a snappy pic to exemplify a point. Business reports need graphics, Christmas letters need photos of smiling children, and of course we all know that a Facebook post without an image will have little chance of getting noticed. But how do we adapt our images to the perfect size, shape, and quality for the particular purpose we have in mind? Image Optimizer is built for just that. Using the service is simple. Just upload a an image file, and then optimize by Quality (minimum file size, very small file size, small file size, normal, high quality, and best quality), by Max width, and by Max height. Then optimize in seconds and download the file back to your computer. [CNH]

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