Today, I literally stumbled upon the following web site, AERA ~ Ancient Egypt Research Associates. This is the official web site of AERA and as they point out on their home page it provides a window into the “work of Dr. Mark Lehner and the international team of the Giza Plateau Mapping Project”. It is a well designed site that is easy to navigate.

It features a rich array of textual and visual resources that would be ideal for any teacher and students interested in Egyptian archaeology and the rich history of ancient Egypt. There are links to four key areas of the web site: Projects, Specialists, Artifacts and Resources.

The projects cover such topics as the The Sphinx Project, Giza Plateau Mapping Project, The Lost City of The Pyramids and the How Old are the Pyramids. Each project is documented in excellent detail and well supported with photographs, maps and diagrams.

The specialist projects consider problems such as the feeding 20,000 workers and the significant role of stone tools in Egyptian society. The artifacts sections contains excellent photographs of related Egyptian antiquities and the resources provide links to publications and related sites on the Internet.

There are many primary and secondary source materials for students to explore. Teachers of the Preliminary Ancient History Course in NSW could take one of the projects and evolve it into a customised case study. Of course teachers of Stage 4 History in NSW could also take full advantage of this excellent web site when teaching the junior history course to Years 7 or 8. I have added a link to this site on my dedicated pages for Year 8 History, Year 11 Ancient History and Year 12 Ancient History.

—————-
Now playing: Philip Glass – From Egypt
via FoxyTunes

Recently I received an email from Joe McNulty regarding the technology tips on my own site and his extensive suite of technology tips. I reproduce components of his email here for you so that you may learn of his efforts in this area. Joe had mentioned that as a computer teacher at Newtown Middle School in Pennsylvania, USA, he was being asked many technology questions by his peers. As a result he began sending out daily tips to his colleagues and this has evolved into a web site with 180 tips.

The site is known as 180 Technology Tips. The tips are all listed on the opening page. You can also subscribe to receive a daily tip. It is well worth your exploration and Joe mentioned that the site already has about 2500 subscribers which is quite amazing. Joe has allowed me to link to his resources. Thank you Joe for the tip!

—————-
Now playing: David Bowie – Suffragette City
via FoxyTunes

I was perusing the news section of Bowie’s web site and spotted a couple of photographs of Bowie using a Mac, not unlike the one that I am using to generate this blog post. I am a bit of a fan of the old Bowie and a bit of a fan of the Mac. Seeing both in the same image is a bit of a thrill for this old fart. I have seen photographs of Bowie using one of the coloured iMacs some years back. He was in Moby’s flat at the time. I managed a mention on his web site once. Another thrill for the old fart.

Bowie has been quite an innovative user of the net although he has been quiet of late. Via his web site, which has been around for 14 or so years, he has organised events where fans can contribute to album artwork, select tracks for live albums and even contribute to the lyrics of songs for his albums. One winner even had the chance to sing backing vocals on the track. He was releasing .mp2 files on his web site back in 1996. I had a dial-up connection and any chance of downloading the tracks was impossible so being a rather audacious yet quick thinking individual I drove to the offices of an ISP near my home. I asked if they could do me a favour and download the tracks for me. They did. Not bad, eh? I must have looked so pathetic in their eyes.

I took some photographs of Bowie way back in 1978. I was using a small ‘instamatic’ camera. A friend took some much better photographs with a proper camera. Were you alive then? All of the photographs are here.

David Bowie. Live at the Sydney Showgrounds, November 25th, 1978.
Have you got a tape of this show?

To the webmaster of Bowie’s site, on the off chance that you are reading this, for goodness sake remove those rather unpleasant Google Adverts off the web site.

This afternoon Shao Ping, Kelly and I paid a visit to Ruby’s at Bulli. It is located on the headland between Bulli Beach and the beach at Sandon Point. It is a nice place for a bite to eat or a cup of coffee. I went for a walk down to the shore to photograph the rock platform as it was low tide. Some of my snaps are included below. Photographs taken during a previous visit can be found here.

Doug Belshaw’s excellent post, The Map Is Not The Territory: the changing face of the edublogosphere, generated an idea that a list of significant blog posts should be created so that bloggers new to the field can receive valuable insights and good exemplars of education blogging. Well, this morning, or last night, Doug posted that the project had begun with the help of Scott McLeod of Dangerously Irrelevant fame.

Scott has created page for such blog posts at the wiki Moving Forward. You can add links to significant and thought provoking blog posts to the wiki. Doug specified three practical and I feel rather sensible guidelines when creating an entry. They are as follows:

1. Don’t spam the wiki by adding lots of links to your own blog. That’s not cool at all.
2. If you don’t think a blog post should be included, use the strikethrough formatting feature and explain why.
3. Include only those that talk about pedagogically-oriented concepts and ideas, not just those that talk about cool ways to use Web 2.0 tools.

This is a good idea. Newer bloggers can dip into these posts. Perhaps a second wave of discussion will be generated as original thoughts are given a new beginning. They can give all of us a chance to focus on where we are at and what we are about.

I added a post by Clay Burell, On Leaving Teaching to Become a Teacher.

I simply tagged this post Teaching. That is what it is about.