A friend of mine, Olivia Fermi, will be giving a talk about the Neutron Trail project she has been working on for a number of years now. Olivia is a great public speaker and I would strongly recommend you attend this very special event. It will take place on January 19th at Instituto Italiano di […]

I have had an opportunity to attend a regional NSTA conference in Seattle Washington. There have been lots of amazing speakers there and as I am not a member of an organizing committee there I had a chance to relax and enjoy the conference. I happened to attend a number of amazing events. One of […]

As I am thinking of the benefits of technology for education, I cannot skip mentioning The Great Courses company, also known as The Teaching Company. This company videotapes the very best lectures and distributes them as DVDs or audio files. The first time I encountered them was listening to the lectures on the History of […]

I haven’t been contributing consistently to my blog this term, as I have been very busy. However, today I have to report that I think I have a good excuse for being silent. On Saturday November 5, 2011 we (our Education Student-Teachers, graduate students, faculty and staff) at the Faculty of Education held our second […]

I am very excited to announce that this year once again we will be holding a very special mathematics and science event at the Faculty of Education during the Celebrate Learning Week. And the event is: Mathematics and Science Fair 2011. It will take place on November 5th and is open to evertybody, but you […]

Google First Global Science Fair Prizes have been announced and the winners are… click here to find out. I am very proud to report that many of the top winners are girls. I happened to look through their projects (published online) and was amazed at their level. North American students dominated the list of the […]

It would be interesting to know what the creators (the major brains behind it: Fermi, Oppenheimer, Einstein, Bethe, …)  of the atomic bomb would have thought about the consequences of their brain child. Unfortunately none of them is alive and recent developments in Japan and not so recent (25 years ago) in Chernobyl, continue to […]

A few nights ago as I was driving to buy some groceries, I turned on CBC Radio and stumbled on Ideas – an evening program with Paul Kennedy. I find most of the programming on Ideas very interesting, but this one surpassed all my expectations… “Wild Journey: The Anne Innis Story”. Maybe I was initially […]

A student of mine today draw my attention to the following statistics: http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/u-s-teen-mobile-report-calling-yesterday-texting-today-using-apps-tomorrow/ American teens (ages 13-17) on average send or receive a whooping number of 3339 messages a month. I am not sure if this stats is relevant to Canadian teens, but I  would presume, there must be similarities. However, in Canada, the use […]

Many years ago I was teaching an introductory physics course using Paul Hewett’s Conceptual Physics textbook. There I read about the Eratosthenes’s experiment that allowed him to measure the radius of the Earth. This happened more than 2000 years ago (see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes) … Eratosthenes’s ingenuity drew my attention – to measure something so big […]