60 Excellent Free 3D Model Websites 3D printers have immensely revolutionized the art and manufacturing industry. With advancements in the 3D printer technology, it is now not very difficult to own one, even in your home or office. Moreover, you don’t have to be an AutoCAD engineer to design a 3D model for your needs, as this job is taken up by numerous 3D model websites. So, either you want to create 3D furniture, a mechanical component, or even human or animal figurines, here are 50 of the best free 3D model websites to cover up all your needs. Take a look. 10 Cheap and Affordable 3D Printers to Buy 10 Cheap and Affordable 3D Printers to Buy There was a time when 3D printers were a novelty - but not anymore. Pikbest Pikbest offers thousands of 3D models that are presented under various categories like decoration, wedding, appliances, bathroom, kitchen, furniture. GrabCAD GrabCAD Community Library offers 2.8+ million designs and models including CADs, thanks to its largest community of designers, engineers, and students. Cults
Maker Movement.pdf Google self-driving car has no steering wheel or brake If you're uneasy at the idea of riding in a vehicle that drives itself, just wait till you see Google's new car. It has no gas pedal, no brake and no steering wheel. Google has been demonstrating its driverless technology for several years by retrofitting Toyotas, Lexuses and other cars with cameras and sensors. But now, for the first time, the company has unveiled a prototype of its own: a cute little car that looks like a cross between a VW Beetle and a golf cart. "They won't have a steering wheel, accelerator pedal, or brake pedal ... because they don't need them," Google said Tuesday in a blog post introducing the unnamed electric vehicles. Unlike previous models, these cars won't have human drivers monitoring them at all times. The cars' speed for now has been capped at 25 mph, allowing engineers to minimize the risk of crashes during testing. Inside, the spartan cars have few dashboard controls, no glove box and no stereo.
The Future Of Education Eliminates The Classroom, Because The World Is Your Class This probably sounds familiar: You are with a group of friends arguing about some piece of trivia or historical fact. Someone says, "Wait, let me look this up on Wikipedia," and proceeds to read the information out loud to the whole group, thus resolving the argument. Don’t dismiss this as a trivial occasion. It represents a learning moment, or more precisely, a microlearning moment, and it foreshadows a much larger transformation—to what I call socialstructed learning. Socialstructed learning is an aggregation of microlearning experiences drawn from a rich ecology of content and driven not by grades but by social and intrinsic rewards. Think of a simple augmented reality app on your iPhone such as Yelp Monocle. This is exactly what a project from USC and UCLA called HyperCities is doing: layering historical information on the actual city terrain. So look beyond MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) in thinking about the future education.
British Museum now lets you 3D print its artifacts using Sketchfab Why visit a museum halfway around the world, when you can check out 3D scans, and print them from your own home? Sketchfab, a platform that lets users publish and share 3D content online, unveiled on Thursday an option for users to make their files downloadable. Under Creative Commons licenses, a user can either publish 3D content "for display and download" or "for display only," Sketchfab said in a blog post. The company also announced that it is hosting the "first downloadable collection" of the British Museum in London. Colossal marble bust of Zeus by britishmuseum on Sketchfab If artifacts are not your style, Sketchfab also has other content in its extensive database, such as Christmas decorations, 3D printable cases for Nokia, HTC and Apple smartphones, as well as objects created by Microsoft, including a mustache-shaped cookie cutter. Sketchfab currently offers more than 200,000 3D objects, but not all uploaded files are immediately downloadable.
48 Ultra-Cool Summer Sites for Kids and Teachers A good majority of northern hemisphere and international schools are winding down the 2011-2012 school year and doors will be closing as the students and teachers take off on their summer adventures. Here is a list of great sites for kids and teachers to keep you happily productive and learning this summer. These are in no way in any order of personal preference or coolness. Happy summer! 1. If your students like The Magic Tree House Series (and let’s be honest, who doesn’t?) 2. Can’t afford that summer vacation schlepping around Europe? 3. ReadWriteThink creates a lot of great educational resources. 4. Spell With Flickr is a simple site that allows you to enter any word and it will create a photo representation of that word using pictures from Flickr. 5. Freeology is a fantastic resource for teachers to download pre-made, or create a plethora of free graphic organizers, forms, calendars, certificates, worksheets, and more! 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. CELLS Alive!
Astronauts getting 3-D printer at International Space Station Now Playing NASA awards 'space taxi' contract to Boeing and SpaceX CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – The 3-D printing boom is about to invade space. NASA is sending a 3-D printer to the International Space Station in hopes that astronauts will be able to one day fix their spacecraft by cranking out spare parts on the spot. The printer, made by a Northern California company called Made in Space, is among more than 5,000 pounds of space station cargo that's stuffed into a SpaceX Dragon capsule that was supposed to lift off before dawn Saturday. Besides real-time replacement parts at the station, NASA envisions astronauts, in the decades ahead, making entire habitats at faraway destinations like Mars. "If we're really going to set up shop on Mars," we have to do this, Jeff Sheehy, NASA's senior technologist, said Friday. At Kennedy Space Center, the company showed off a number of objects made by its 3-D printers. It was designed to operate safely in weightlessness inside a sealed chamber.
Documentary 'Print the Legend' Goes Inside the World of 3D Printing The genesis of and challenges to the 3D-printing revolution are subjects that take center stage in a new documentary called Print the Legend. From directors Clay Tweel and Luis Lopez (Freakonomics), the film sets out to act as a "'time capsule' of a nascent industry," Tweel told Mashable. "The result is both a look inside a compelling new technology, and hopefully, a story about the challenges of growing any type of business, and facing the moral dilemmas our marketplace presents." That it is. Tweel said he knew "nothing" about 3D printing when he walked into the doors of MakerBot nearly two years ago, but working behind the scenes has taught him much about the industry. Print the Legend is now in theaters across New York and Los Angeles, and is also available on Netflix. BONUS: What Is 3D Printing and How Does It Work? Have something to add to this story?
The Best 3D Printer for Schools and Education This 3d printer is much, much easier to use, maintain, and set up than other printers. It will also print faster and more accurately than anything else you will find in this price range. Here are seven reasons why an Airwolf 3D printer is the best 3D printer for schools: Airwolf 3D Printers are fast. Our 3D printers are very dependable. These 3D printers can take a lot of abuse and still operate flawlessly. The only maintenance required is the occasional lubrication of bearings or tensioning of belts. Our machines are very user friendly and are backed by exceptional customer support. Airwolf 3D Printers are affordable. Airwolf 3D printers are in 100’s of primary and secondary classrooms around the world, including M.I.T., USC Roski School of Fine Arts, Cerritos College, Florida State University, Jenkins Middle School (CO), Huntington Beach High Schools (CA).
Five Future Trends That Will Impact the Learning Ecosystem As summer reflections on the past school year turn into aspirations for the next year, it's important to keep in mind the big picture of change in education. Five shifts in how we think about schools and education in general will help to regenerate the learning ecosystem, and will provoke our imagination about new possibilities for teaching and learning. 1. Democratized Entrepreneurship Democratized entrepreneurship will spread an entrepreneurial mindset among learners, educators and communities, accelerating a groundswell of grassroots innovation. Entrepreneurship is no longer reserved for those few with the resources to buffer risk and the social capital to access expertise and guidance. To take advantage of this trend: Begin to cultivate an edupreneurial mindset of experimentation, risk-taking, learning from failure, creative problem-solving, and market awareness in your classroom, and expand it to your school and district. 2. 3. 4. 5.
The Inside-Out School: A 21st Century Learning Model The Inside-Out School: A 21st Century Learning Model by Terry Heick As a follow-up to our 9 Characteristics of 21st Century Learning we developed in 2009, we have developed an updated framework, The Inside-Out Learning Model. The goal of the model is simple enough–not pure academic proficiency, but instead authentic self-knowledge, diverse local and global interdependence, adaptive critical thinking, and adaptive media literacy. By design this model emphasizes the role of play, diverse digital and physical media, and a designed interdependence between communities and schools. The attempted personalization of learning occurs through new actuators and new notions of local and global citizenship. Here, families, business leaders, humanities-based organizations, neighbors, mentors, higher-education institutions, all converging to witness, revere, respond to, and support the learning of its own community members. The 9 Domains Of the Inside-Out Learning Model 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.
BYOD (in a post-DER world) Inanimate Alice → “…set in the early years of the 21st century and told through text, sound, images, music and games.” Inanimate Alice, the story of Alice and her imaginary digital friend Brad, […] Charging Windmills: My Reading in 2014 → “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.” No laughing matter… → Satire, has long been humanity’s answer to limited, ignorant public policy. My Kindle Review → I’ve now read a book on my Kindle and feel the time has come for a brief review.
The MOOC Quality Project MOOCs represent the latest stage in the evolution of open educational resources. First was open access to course content, and then access to free online courses. Accredited institutions are now accepting MOOCs as well as free courses and experiential learning as partial credit toward a degree. The next disruptor will likely mark a tipping point: an entirely free online curriculum leading to a degree from an accredited institution. MOOCs are moving from an early entrepreneurial stage into the reality of more and more educational institutions. Gaining participants, visibility and a growing community worldwide in many occasions the question rises to the surface: Are MOOCs the new model of online education for all? The MOOC Quality Project, an initiative of the European Foundation for Quality in E-Learning (www.efquel.org), addresses the latter question not by trying to find one answer which fits all, but by trying to stimulate a discourse on the issue of Quality of MOOCs.