Online Business Primer

Training your dog is not as hard as you may think. This first video in a series on dog training offers a great starting point to begin your education and help train your pet dog.

Watch the video below and consider making a health donation this year.

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There are some celebrities who will promote just about anything. They just do it for the money. You can’t trust that the products they recommend are any good because they might not even really use them. Then there are celebrities who have real integrity. They won’t promote anything that they don’t use themselves. Cindy Crawford is one of those celebrities.

This hot supermodel of days gone by teamed up with a doctor about ten years ago to promote a Cindy Crawford skin care line. The first clue that the model actually cared about the product was the fact that she worked with a doctor rather than just any old business. The second clue, if you knew her, was that she sought out the skin care products for herself first. She wanted an anti-aging solution of her own. She only wanted to promote the line to others after she realized how great it was for herself.

Of course, Cindy Crawford has a natural advantage when it comes to aging well. She’s astoundingly beautiful in a far above-average way. Nevertheless, it says something about the product that it works for her. And it says a lot about her character that she would not promote a product unless she was using it herself.

Technorati Tags: cindy crawford skin care, natural advantage

A group of fourth graders from Thomas Fleming Elementary School have been busy rounding up signatures for their petition. The petition was not about getting to wear hats in school or extending recess time (all very worthwhile pursuits). This petition which includes a cover page of a hand drawn earth with a handwritten title “Google Earth- We Need Our Earth” has two goals:

• get Google Earth upgraded to the latest version in their school
• get more time to play with Google Earth

I learned about these marvelous and curious students while helping a colleague plan a workshop featuring Google Earth uses in elementary and middle school. I learned so much working with David Davidson, tech integrator in Essex Junction, I’m not surprised that the students in his schools are petitioning for more Google Earth time and resources.

The first thing most everyone does when introduced to Google Earth is find their house. But what next? Everyone needs time to explore a new tool, but with this Google Earth Scavenger Hunt, David has students looking for their school, a very tall mountain, a very long river, or the Egyptian pyramids. Using Google Earths “copy image” feature, the students copy and paste their “finds” right into their Scavenger Hunt worksheet as evidence. Not only do the students explore Google Earth, but the teachers take the opportunity to debrief about search techniques or geography concepts.

David helps teachers at his schools use Google Earth to introduce elements found in different physiographic regions. A simple worksheet like this helps their students make observations about population density, tree cover, urban vs. rural, physical features, elevation, etc of different regions of their state or country.

One teacher who has skillfully layered her overhead transparencies to show students connections when you add data to a map now enjoys using premade layers of volcanoes, earthquakes, populations, tectonic plates to create those “Aha” moments.

David, his teachers and their students do not limit their Google Earth uses to the classroom. Students at Hawiatha Elementary School recently completed a community walk with sketchbook in hand to draw sketches of historic buildings in their town. Completing a Google Maps and Google Earth Version of their Community Walk not only allowed students to complete their sketches after the tour, but also gave parents and community a window into the activity.

With the use of a camera and GPS and a pioneering teacher, David helped the students at Westford Elementary School create a virtual multimedia map of the trails in their backyard. Although, creating waypoints is probably not an entry level skill, with the right support the students made a significant contribution to their community.

David is exploring new features such as Google Earth Sky or Google Earth Ocean to expand the activities he helps teachers create to places below and above the earth’s surface. He’s also pondering the possibilities that Google Earth’s TimeLine View will bring to the classroom as it allow you to move back in time.

About the only place David had not taken his students and teachers to using Google Earth, was to the world of make believe. “Finally I have something to add to the planning session,” I thought as I described how a group of 7th graders used Google Earth to go beyond the boundaries as defined by today’s political maps, and create their own country. After hearing Jim Moulton challenge students at a leadership conference to take on the role of bringing new tools into their classrooms, four 7th grader students in St. Albans Vermont asked their teacher if they could use Google Earth to complete their “Create a Country” assignment (create maps of a fictional country whose characteristics follow the laws of nature based on where you place it on the globe). While their peers created their fictional country using markers and construction paper, these students used Google Earth layers to create maps that showed the physical, political, climate, population, energy uses and more. Their teacher’s appreciation of differentiation and the students practice of leadership skills resulted in a 21st century design for a project that’s been part of the curriculum for years.

After sharing our own experience and examples and highlighting other fabulous examples such as the award winning Google Lit Trips or the inspirational San Francisco Project, Dave and I concluded our workshop by pointing to just a few of the many resources for educators wanting to use Google Earth in their classrooms. And if you don’t find what you want by combing sites like Juicy Geography, Real Word Math, CIA Factbook, Google for Educators, Google Earth Education Community or Google Earth Gallery, you can always use Google’s advanced search feature to search by filetype (kmz or kml) on practically any topic you can think of.

But don’t wait until you find the perfect Google Earth Lesson or have mastered all the features of Google Earth to explore the power of Google Earth in your classroom. Find one idea that looks interesting and explore it with your students -tap their infinite thinking skills and turn them into curious 21st century explorers of our world using Google Earth.

By infinitethinking@gmail.com (Infinite Thinking Machine)

Technorati Tags: teaching tools

When I was sixteen I visited the ocean for the first time.  Little did I know that I would fall in love with it and for the rest of my life, be drawn to the ocean.  This meant that for vacations, work and even the business that I would eventually own.  Yes, the ocean would have a big impact on my life.

I started out working at a surf shop down at the beach, and eventually bought it from the owner as my first business.  Some people might thing that owning some sort of coast accommodation (such as a hotel) would be more lucrative, but you would be amazed at how much a surf shop can make.

I guess I should attribute the success of the shop to the fact that surfing is one of the major coast activities in this part of the world.  But I would like to think that my customer service and perfect location helps as well.

Many people have also suggested that I expand and turn my business model into a franchise, but I don’t want to be greedy.  The biggest thing for me is having the ability to provide my family with the lifestyle that is good, but at the same time satisfying my need to be by the ocean – and that is exactly what my business does.  Why would I want anything more?

Technorati Tags: coast accommodation, coast activities