Google has announced/released its "experimental first step in the world of online education." 

Course Builder is Google's open source solution that they hope you will use "...to create your own online courses, whether they're for 10 students or 100,000 students. You might want to create anything from an entire high school or university offering to a short how-to course on your favorite topic."

The need for sustainable energy solutions is a concern that is brought up frequently for the United States. President Obama expressed his desire for more clean energy projects home while campaigning in Nevada. One of the options that he discussed was geothermal energy. Nevada is currently working with geothermal energy and has realized the benefits of clean energy and lower utility costs. 

If you haven't seen these "Crash Course in World History" videos, you owe it to yourself to check them out immediately! I learned more about the Industrial Revolution in that 10 minute video than I did in a full college course.... or at least it was more memorable this way!

These videos are a brilliant example of how to engage 21st century learners:  

Colonial Williamsburg offers an online/on-site history activity for kids called RevQuest.

More here.

You can now watch the keynote by Robert Stephens at the Minnesota e-Learning Summit in July. It's worth the time - he's got some strong opinions. Plus, he's funny!

(Thanks to Paul Wasco for the link!)

Last week, the Northern Lights team hosted 12 teachers to help us resolve the challenge of delivering supplemental classroom resources to teachers. 

Questions we asked:

Staff from the Minnesota Historical Society had the opportunity to present and attend the 2012 eLearning Summit Conference at Northwestern College in St. Paul July 25-26, 2012. The conference was attended by a wide variety of people in K-20 Education.  MHS staff mainly focused their presentations on the K-12 audience with sessions on MHS' History Live Program-Interactive Video Conferencing and Northern Lights Curriculum meeting the needs of a digital citizen. 

Staff from MHS attended the Minnesota e-Learning Summit last week. Not quite as big as ISTE, it was a smaller, local sharing of ideas and resources.

We presented sessions about the development of the digital version of Northern Lights and about "History Live" - our interactive video conferencing project.

Attendees at the session about Northern Lights brought up many good questions and ideas about how others are developing digital texts.