I’ve mentioned the Earthviewer app from HHMI before: think of it as a bit like Google Earth, only you can dial it back to any period in the planet’s history. There have been a couple of developments: it’s also available for Android, and it’s added some new features, including tracking for major fossils. So now you can see the long strange journey of Tiktaalik’s bones on the screen.

They’re also making available a lovely big poster of earth’s history. This year, we here at UMM are putting together a teacher training program to be implemented in the summer of 2015, and it’s going to be a lot of work for us — but I’m realizing that HHMI has already done a lot of material preparation that will help a great deal.

I’ve been known to moan in chagrin over all the multimedia garbage that Answers in Genesis provides to corrupt education in this country — you can just pop into AiG’s website and download lesson plans and powerpoint slides to teach creationism. But now HHMI makes them look feeble as well as wrong.