A colleague sent me this interesting article about how a researcher has found out that cows like to graze and sleep facing either north or south. Yes that is very interesting! He even discovered that deer like to do the same thing! But what I find most interesting about this article is not the grazing or sleeping habits of the animals, but how the researcher discovered this fact that no farmer or dairy owner has ever - in the history of the Earth realized!
He originally wanted to see how humans sleep when in tents at campsites, but he had difficulty finding those images in Google Earth...yes, you heard me right...GOOGLE EARTH! I guess the tree cover was too much for him to look through. But, he noticed on nearby dairy farms the sleep and grazing patterns of cows were easy to spot because of the open fields.
Google Earth is an amazing software. It only updates its images every few years. For example the house we moved from in Florida is not showing the pool we installed in 2004. However, our house here was updated since we moved here in 2006. Don't expect great picture quality if you are looking for cows (trust me, I tried) I could see things that made me think, "Is that a cow or a bush?" But I am sure this researcher had very detailed and maybe even better quality screens then I do!
eSchool News recently had a post about gaming programs in education (link below). This is a subject that has interested me for quite some time. My masters project was "How do We get Students in a Technology Rich World to Use Higher Order Thinking and Problem Solving Skills" and one of the aspects that work sited was the world of gaming. 