netTrekker Blog

WildEarth TV

View live streaming video capturing activity in several wildlife preserves in Africa. You can view profiles of WildEarth’s crew and animal “characters,” vote on your favorite videos, view archived webcasts, and browse the WildEarth blog to read about behind-the-scenes happenings.

Today’s Site of the Day offers a very fun look into Africa’s wildlife and efforts to conserve the continent’s animals and resources.  I especially like when the chat corresponding to the video turns to food and dinner prospects – just as the footage is showing lions or a hyena deciding whether or not to eat a monitor lizard.

Click here to login to netTrekker and access the Site of the Day.

Login to netTrekker before midnight (eastern) today to access the netTrekker Site of the Day and add it to your “My Portfolio” for easy future reference.  After midnight, the new Site of the Day will go up and you’ll have to look for today’s site using netTrekker’s search tool. Need help with My Portfolio? Easy, handy instructions can be found here.

Not yet a netTrekker subscriber? Visit www.nettrekker.com and click on the Free Trial link at the top right of the page for 14 days of complimentary access to netTrekker.

Tags: Africa, site of the day, wildlife

Werewolves + Volterra =New Moon

How many of you are thinking about skipping school on Friday so you can go see the movie New Moon? Are you trying to figure out a way to make it a classroom field trip? A potential way to study what’s bound to be an upcoming classic? With so many movies out there based on books, I thought it would be fun to take a look at how you could use these in the classroom with netTrekker resources, and we’ll begin with New Moon.

I have a knack for remembering silly little facts, but not important enough facts to be considered a contestant for Jeopardy. Awhile ago I was in the bookstore and saw an apple made out of alabaster that was made in Italy. Since Italy is one of the places I want to visit someday, I decided to look up Italy in netTrekker and also Volterra (although I doubt that I’ll ever want to visit a region that is now at least literally known for their vampires). I found it interesting that the setting of the most powerful (or so they claim) Vampires in Meyer’s world is that of Volterra, especially when I learned that Volterra is special in being a rare location of chalky alabaster. (You can find alabaster all over Europe, but only the chalky form in Volterra). This form of alabaster looks like marble (but is softer) and is either translucent or white in color. Hmmm, sounds like certain vampires I’ve read about.

If the vampires, art, and European geography are not your thing, you can always look up werewolves and Indian legends of North Pacific tribes. (A search on the Quileute tribe itself does not bring up any results yet.) By doing this search I found an interesting site that shared information about a variety of Indian tribes that included information on Jacob Black’s tribe and LaPush. Stories of their trickster can be compared to other folklore from various regions, or you can compare the livelihood of these tribes to their region.

Find more videos like this on netTrekker Village

This summer I used Twilight for a weeklong Integration Class for Language Arts Teachers. We created Google Earth Lit Trips, linking to My Portfolio’s in netTrekker and created Digital Stories. Twilight was a great series to base lessons on. Above is my version of the Digital Story (complete with misspelled word) as a potential student sample.

To learn more about integrating netTrekker into your project based, literature classroom, contact your Account Manager. We’d love to come conduct an integration training with you in the near future!

Charters of Freedom: Constitution of the United States

You can almost smell the mothballs and feel the crackly parchment of the most important historic document in America!  Ok, maybe not, since page two of the U.S. Constitution was unveiled in its new encasement on September 15, 2000.

This comprehensive overview of the U.S. Constitution places the document in context with two other founding charters of American democracy and government: the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. Today’s Site of the Day also includes access to digital facsimiles of the Constitution and all amendments with transcripts.

Click here to login to netTrekker and access the Site of the Day.

Login to netTrekker before midnight (eastern) today to access the netTrekker Site of the Day and add it to your “My Portfolio” for easy future reference.  After midnight, the new Site of the Day will go up and you’ll have to look for today’s site using netTrekker’s search tool. Need help with My Portfolio? Easy, handy instructions can be found here.

Not yet a netTrekker subscriber? Visit www.nettrekker.com and click on the Free Trial link at the top right of the page for 14 days of complimentary access to netTrekker.

Tags: Constitution, site of the day

Thanksgiving

All over Facebook, my friends are posting a daily post of what they are thankful for.Today, my son’s school held their annual Student/Parent Thanksgiving Luncheon. My teacher friends are busy updating lesson plans for this holiday. Turkeys and baking goods are popping up all throughout the grocery stores. These posts and events, are inspired by the upcoming national/federal holiday of Thanksgiving.

How many of you know the history of Thanksgiving? The first Thanksgiving was declared by George Washington in 1789. It was declared in September before the recess, and celebrated on November 26, 2009 as a day of “publick thanksgivin’”. Each President after George Washington continued to declare a date for the nation to give thanks, with the date always varied. President Lincoln however needed order to the date, so he established that the day of thanksgiving will be the last Thursday of each November. President Franklin D. Roosevelt however looked at the “economic” calendar and realized that the last Thursday of November cut the shopping time for the Christmas holidays, and therefore he moved it to the second to last Thursday November. But not everyone agreed with this, and so not all states celebrated on the same date, which just caused confusion. So Congress got together in 1941 and after many considerations, set the day of thanksgiving as the fourth Friday of November.

Wait a second? You thought the first day of thanks was celebrated with the Indians and Pilgrims? Actually, that would be correct as well. In 1620, the Pilgrims landed and tried to build a life for themselves in a deserted Indian Village. If the Indians didn’t come back in 1621 and witnessed the poor shape the Pilgrims were in and offered them help in learning how to farm and be sufficient, there’s no telling where the Pilgrims would end up. So later that year, the Pilgrims and the Indians sat down to a three day feast to celebrate their friendship. It’s a shame that the relationship with the Indians did not last as long as it could have.

But the day of thanks and friendship also are marked back to early Greece, other parts of history, and throughout religion. The more and more I read the different websites in netTrekker, the more I found about this day that we get to celebrate thanks. It’s more than turkey, football, and getting up early the next morning to shop the big sales. If you conduct a search in netTrekker you too can find the entire scoop.

Share your favorite way of celebrating Thanksgiving on netTrekker Village.