preclectic.com

October is Energy Awareness Month. Many teachers don’t realize that the U.S. Department of Energy’s very own Federal Energy Management Program (FEMP) provides helpful materials and ideas for promoting energy-saving practices. The Department of Energy also has a site designed for educators that’s worth exploring. Make a point to explore the site’s You Have the Power campaign resources.

Another way to make the concept of energy conservation more relevant to students is to help them simulate what it’s like to operate an electrical grid. Deciding who gets power and how it’s delivered involves a great deal of both creative and critical thinking (not to mention an appreciation for and the skilled application of math and science). Thankfully, the Mathematics, Science and Technology Education (MSTE) program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign collaborated with the Information Trust Institute (ITI) NSF Trustworthy Cyber Infrastructure for the Power grid (TCIP) project and created some powerful instructional resources for pupils in middle and high school that explore and illustrate key concepts about how and why the power grid works the way it does. Once students play with the Power Grid simulation applet, they’ll continue coming back to tinker with it time and again.

Related links:

• What do you know about energy efficiency and renewable energy? The U.S. Department of Energy has a website for these topics, too! Check out EERE. While you’re at it, swing by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Younger students will enjoy EERE’s partnership with Tinkerbell.
• Freelance science journalist Maggie Koerth-Baker recently contributed a BoingBoing post entitled Power to the People about NPR’s engaging, interactive U.S. power gridmap. It’s good to know where our power comes from as well as how we’re using it.
• Have you heard about Google PowerMeter?
• Ever heard of the Global Energy Network Institute? This progressive organization believes that everyone on the planet should have access to ecologically sustainable energy. GENI focuses on linking renewable energy resources around the world using international electricity transmission.
• Ever wonder what power cords look like in other countries? Ningbo Yaosheng Electric Co., Ltd (of Ningbo, Zhejiang, China) has a rather interesting collection of world power cord/plug specifications.
• It’s a small world. Lots of people–teachers and students included–are traveling from place to place these days. Many are bringing along laptops and other, related devices. Sooner or later they’ll have to recharge. I hope these educators and pupils take the time to research electricity around the world.

environment, government, science, virtualization electricity, energy, power, powergrid

A wonderful (free) virtualization software package called VirtualBox gives educators a way to better meet the needs of learners across a variety of operating systems. Although pupils have a great deal in common with one another, they also have differing abilities, needs, and learning styles. Beyond their personalities and intellectual potential, they often have access to and make use of computers with different operating systems. Despite the fact that all of the students in a classroom or group may frequently employ web-based resources such as Google Docs to collaborate and learn together, they’ll eventually want to do work individually on computers that have resources uniquely designed to meet their own personal tastes.

For example, suppose there’s a teacher who wants to give her learners more choice in how they complete their work. This teacher knows that the students gravitate toward differing operating systems. One student prefers doing his assignments on a Windows machine, while another is dedicated to completing work on her Mac OS X laptop. A third, more adventurous pupil, after nobly rescuing a surplussed PC destined for a landfill, is happily anticipating learning with a Linux-based desktop. The teacher decides to foster the choices made by the learners. She installs VirtualBox on her own computer to see the applications her pupils are using and how the operate.

VirtualBox is remarkably useful as it runs on Windows, Linux, and Macintosh machines. It also supports a large number of guest operating systems. This means that a math teacher using a Mac with VirtualBox loaded on her machine can actually install and run other operating systems (such as Windows and Linux) at the same time. If one of her students prefers using a Windows-based math application such as GraphCalc to complete his assignment, the instructor can see that program in action within a Windows-based environment on her Mac! This powerful means of meeting the needs of pupils is free.

open source, productivity, virtualization free, open, opensource, os