Great Circle Mapper 

This video is a big hit with my 8th grader but I don’t know how I could possibly learn this song. It gets a ‘LOL’ from him and his friends and it is a great improvement over this intellectual perspective:

It’s nighttime in Paris.

There’s a big, big boat in the Panama Canal.

Haze in Egypt looking at the Pyramids at Giza.

It’s January in Alaska and a beach without ice pans is a welcome sight. Here’s Maui. (sigh)

Close to home I can gaze at Mts. McKinley and Foraker, if it’s clear. Today, it’s not.

The list has lots of sites. Sydney, Yellowstone, London and so on. Enjoy!

Interactive Internet sites have made all that even more fun and easy to teach. Here are just a few examples of the many, many that are available:

• Sheppard Software has flash games for U.S. geography.
  
• TagMaps explores the world using maps and flickr images.
• PurposeGames.com has just about every imaginable geography map game. As a bonus you can register and keep track of scores.

But here’s a new twist on interactive geography, the Traveler IQ Challenge from TravelPod. The idea is to pinpoint locations on a map but the score is based on how fast you can do it and how close you are in kilometers to the exact location. It starts simple like finding Beijing or Washington D.C. But once you think you’re pretty smart you’ll have to find the Terra Cotta Warriors in China or something in Libya that I’d never heard of. In the ‘Expert’ level it asked for Kodiak Island, piece of cake for an Alaskan. But I was totally stumped by Bouvet Island, Norway which is in the South Atlantic.

Here’s a tip: it’s easier to pinpoint places with a mouse than a touchpad on a laptop and a bigger screen is nice, too. Also, there’s a Traveler IQ Facebook app to challenge your friends.

So, practice a few times and see how well you can do. I’ve managed a 125 after several tries.

HT: Thinking 2.0

The Secret Life of Machines is a collection of videos and cartoons from the Discovery Channel TV series by engineer/cartoonist Tim Hunkin. There are quite a few machines presented including the washing machine, video recorder, word processor and 15 more. Each presentation has Hunkin’s cartoons and a video in four formats. I had the best luck downloading the videos rather than streaming. The 3gp format plays perfectly on my Motorola SLVR cell phone. There’s also a larger format for iPhones.

HT: Makezine

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Folks have been voting online for several months now and Saturday, 7/7/07, in Lisbon, Portugal the Foundation announced the new list at a star-studded stadium affair. Joining the Pyramids of Giza in this highly uncontrolled and unscientific vote are:

• Chichén Itzá, Mexico
• Christ Redeemer, Brazil
• The Great Wall, China
• Machu Picchu, Peru
• Petra, Jordan
• The Roman Colosseum, Italy
• The Taj Mahal, India

These are some pretty cool places and so are the also-ran finalists. The New7Wonders website offers resources and ideas for teaching some of which can be used at home. Google Earth Blog has posted a tour of the sites in Google Earth. One can also participate in the new project to select the Natural Wonders of the World.

There are different lists of different wonders of the world. It all seems pretty fluid apart from the Old 7. Anyone can have their top seven list. How about your child?

UPDATE: Vibrant posts Seven Wonders of the Tech World. Includes one that is a code to be broken.

Just when I thought I had teaching geography down pat this shows up in Digg. National Geographic has determined that, nope, it’s not the Nile anymore but the Amazon River that is the longest in the world. A team of Brazilian scientists have pinpointed the Amazon’s origins in the Peruvian Andes, some 176 miles farther upstream than previously thought. It’s the geographic equivalent of moving the finish line and one can imagine those who love the Nile crying foul.

I only know that all those textbooks, Geography Bee questions, fact sheets, trivia games and crossword puzzles are now WRONG!