Instructify

Being educators, we are often conservative, especially when it involves the law, as copyright does. This has led to a growing concern about missed learning opportunities due to caution because teachers are avoiding doing anything with copyrighted materials, or not allowing their students to produce content using copyrighted material.

American and Temple Universities have been working on this and have a report coming out about the cost of copyright confusion in education. I recently attended a session at NECC given by Kristen Hokanson on this topic. This discussion brought up a concept that is really central to educational use of copyrighted material, and that is transformation. A big part of what makes it fair use is that you’re not just “copying” the work of others, but remaking it into something of your own. One of the best examples is the Fair(y) Use Tale video produced by Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society. This video takes snippets from Disney cartoons to teach about fair use. Because it’s both education AND satire, it’s covered by fair use.

I was first introduced to this concept when I did a case-study discussion (a favorite way for lawyers to discuss and educate about legal points) about a potential fair use I had in a classroom project. Transformation is not often discussed, but it’s an important concept for fair use.  Get to know more about it. -ALICE MERCER

Transformative use resources

Stanford University guide to Fair Use in Education check out the section on the “transformative factor”

Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society Fair(y) Use Tale

It’s Elementary: Copyright–It’s the Law

Related Stuff:

Copyright in education, part 1: Fair use

Photo credit: PugnoM on flickr

Tired of teaching from the text book? Having a hard time fitting environmental science instruction into the school day? Well EcoKids can change all of that!

EcoKids is a Canadian interactive website created to engage students in environmental activities. This site is full of resources for teachers such as lesson plans, printable resources, and helpful links. It even has specifically designed lessons for ESL (English as a Second Language) students using the different environmental themes. Teachers can access information on Wildlife, Climate Change, Energy, The North, Waste, Land Use, and Earth Day to initiate any environmental or science lesson, or provided a great follow up to an end-of-unit study. This site even has a Fact of the Day that teachers can use to initiate classroom discussions or writing activities about the environment. Looking for an environmental project for your classroom or school? You can visit different links on the site that show different types of environmental projects students and schools are involved in for ideas.

Students can access the site and engage in games to practice what they have learned in the different areas of Wildlife, Climate Change, Energy, the North Pole, and Land Use. The games integrate the environmental themes with reading, math, science, problem solving, and social studies. Students can work on their writing skills by responding to questions posted periodically on the site, or commenting on the blog. -MONIQUE ST.LOUIS

EcoKids

Related Stuff:

EEK! – Environmental Education for Kids is Nothing to be Afraid of

Join the Environmental Kids Club

Environmental Arithmetic: Rainforest Maths

Crack The BioDaVersity Code

FEMA for Kids

Does Anybody Know Exactly Who Can Prevent Forest Fires?

This site, and others, feature lots of great places for your students to create content, and to locate materials like audio, photos, and videos to mashup, or include in their own creations. We have reviewed sites that have photos that have a creative commons license, but what if the picture or audio clip you want to use is copyrighted (not in the public domain, or licensed in Creative Commons)? Now we’re going to talk about legal concepts, but since we aren’t lawyers (we just may pretend we are in our classrooms), this is not legal advice, yahda, yahda…

First the good news: there is a legal concept called “Fair Use” that allows educators to use snippets of copyrighted material. Fair Use applies to educators, journalist, and satirists (us and Jon Stewart, yipee!). It says you can use copyrighted materials, BUT the use is governed by these four principles:

1. Purpose and character of the use - Why are you using this material?
2. Nature of the material - In what form are you using the material?
3. Amount of the portion used - How much of the original work are you using?
4. Effect on the potential market - Does your use hurt the original owner financially(1)

Now the not-so-good news. Naturally enough, the law on this is purposefully vague to leave it up to the courts to decide on a case-by-case basis. I know it’s never been my dream to be a Supreme Court test case (maybe a nightmare). Because of this, there have been two responses by educators, we play it safe and avoid the use of copyright protected materials, and/or we have come up with some “rules of thumb” to guide our use of copyrighted materials (e.g. you can use 10 seconds but not more than 10% of copyrighted audio, you can excerpt a paragraph from a chapter, etc.).

I’m going to finish up this article with a list of some guides that give some rules of thumb, but I will be following up with another piece about different approaches to this copyright conundrum. -ALICE MERCER

(1) Tony Jongejan’s Presentation on Copyright at NECC 2008 - Where I got the principles listed above

TechLearning Copyright Guideline for Administrators - A guide with a handy-dandy chart from Hall Davidson

Related Stuff:

Download Free Copyrighted Books with WOWIO. Yes, it’s Legal.

When I was a lad, I hated when math story problems used metric units. Sure, the rest of the world is able to adequately measure stuff despite using the metric system, but I prefer good old American units like inches, pounds, or Fahrenheit. Like Grampa Simpson said, “The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car gets forty rods to the hogshead and that’s the way I likes it!”

At some point, however, your students will need at least a cursory understanding of base-10 measurement, whether they plan to be scientists or mathematicians, or if they just want to take a drive through Canada. Next time your lesson plan calls for them to go metric, let your students know about the World Wide Metric Conversion Calculator. This site will take your miles and ounces and convert them to kilometers and grams. It can even change them back, with no ill effects from the transformation.

Maybe World Wide Metric will make your students more trusting of the metric system than I was growing up. They may end up liking the metric system enough that they start using metric time. -BILL FERRIS

World Wide Metric Conversion Calculator

Related Stuff:

Visualize Measurements with SensibleUnits

That’s a Lot of Pennies: The MegaPenny Project

15 Awesome Tutorial Websites You Probably Don’t Know About
A couple weeks ago I decided to take up juggling. Right away I was amazed at the high quality tutorials I found online. If you have a random hobby you’d like to try, or you’re looking for a project during these summer months, check out this list of sites.

100 Unbelievably Useful Reference Sites You’ve Never Heard Of
Here’s a great big list of sites you can use to find everything from literature to library references to health care. You can also find fun stuff like the Dialectizer, which can translate your text to sound like Elmer Fudd. Who doesn’t need that?

10 Brain Training Tips To Teach and Learn
Keep your brain fit for optimum learning potential. The folks at SharpBrains have these ten tips to turn you and your students into efficient thinking and learning machines.

Video Toolbox: 150+ Online Video Tools and Resources
Need to edit a class video project? Want some advice on how to create a video podcast? Or do you need to convert video to a different file format? Mashable has all that and more in this great post. -BILL FERRIS

Photo credit:  zen on flickr

With IDEA, kids with an IEP (which qualifies them for special education services) aren’t relegated to the classroom at the far end of the yard. Many are in classrooms like yours and mine. Yeah, I took a class in “mainstreaming,” but I can always use some new ideas and resources. Here is a quick list of resources for all educators that will help you with all your students.

This post is about resources for differentiating instruction. I recently attended a session on this topic at NECC done by Bill Dolton. He began with the question, is differentiation about having individual lessons for each student? I share this because the answer was, “no.” Many teachers think they will have to have to do individual lesson plans, which is not possible with 30+ students in a class. Instead it’s about giving students some choices, and this term wasn’t used, but scaffolding (which technology can be great for). As he puts it, the goal of DI is not to”cure” or resolve student learning differences, but to harness or cultivate them.

Mr. Dalton has a wiki (an editable Webpage) chock full of resources. The nice part is that these resources are not just a hot list of sites, but articles on how and why to differentiate. Most are in friendly, easy to understand language (e.g., lots of pieces are from Edutopia).

I will also take this opportunity to share a series of posts that Mathew Needleman wrote on the how, why, and when of differentiation. -ALICE MERCER

Tech4D.I. » home

NECC 2008 Reflections from Sessions on Day 1 | The Blog of Ms. Mercer

Teaching English abroad: What to know
“When I was not sure which path my career would go, I very seriously considered teaching English in Japan…I scoured the Web and found plenty of resources available to answer my questions about where to begin planning my travels abroad to share my English skills.”

Special ed [heart] Jott
“I wanted to highlight a couple of uses that are especially suited for Special Education. When you see them, you may get some other ideas about how to use this tool.”

Keep your synonyms simple with Thsrs
“…the brains behind the Ironic Sans blog (creators of the addictive 50 States in 10 Minutes game) have come up with Thsrs, an online thesaurus that only suggests synonyms which are shorter than the word you look up. Enter ‘flabbergasted’ and it suggests ’surprised,’ look up ‘inconsequential’ and you get ‘unimportant.’”

Get 1GB of storage for free with OpenDrive
“OpenDrive is like an online hard disk for backing up data or sharing files with others. Collaborate in real time using OpenDrive’s Collaboration Pro feature. You can also sync with uploaded files, so if you update your novel-in-progress, OpenDrive will save your changes both on your computer and in the copy you’ve squirreled away online.”

Can’t get your school district to pony up the cash for an expensive interactive whiteboard with a clicker system? Well, you can take care of the whiteboard part of that set-up here, but how to get the response system? Thanks to the folks at Poll Everywhere, all your students need is a cell phone.

• You can set up a poll with different responses.
• Then, have your participants send a text message to “41411″ with their vote (Cast ####) as a text message.
• You’ll then get results that you can share (on your Wii-remote interactive whiteboard).

Another online tool for polling using cellphones is Wiffiti, which shows results as a as a really neat visualization (shown above). Here’s how:

• Set up a screen at Wiffiti, then have participants call in
• Send a text messages to 25622 (this also spells 2LOCA).
• Start your message with the at sign ‘@’ and the screen code, for example txt: @myscrn2 Hello everybody!
• Sign your messages, txt name John Doe any time, and it will remember your name.

Wiffiti is better for open ended responses situations.

So stop confiscating your student’s cell phones, and start putting them to use in the classroom. -ALICE MERCER

When I got my first computer before going to college, it amazed me with its massive 366MB of memory. How would I ever use all of it? That computer cost nearly $2000.

Since then, hard drives have gotten a lot bigger and a lot cheaper. Want proof? OpenDrive Beta will give you a gigabyte of storage for free.

OpenDrive is like an online hard disk for backing up data or sharing files with others. Collaborate in real time using OpenDrive’s Collaboration Pro feature. You can also sync with uploaded files, so if you update your novel-in-progress, OpenDrive will save your changes both on your computer and in the copy you’ve squirreled away online.

Years from now we’ll laugh at the idea of a paltry gigabyte of storage. Until then, feel free to marvel at OpenDrive’s massive amount of memory. And you can’t beat the price. -BILL FERRIS

Related Stuff:

Send Files and Keep Your Dignity at drop.io

Back up Your Data with Mozy

Back that Thing Up: Backup to Email

Take note, history teachers. The National History Education Clearinghouse is about to make your lives a lot easier. There you can find reviews of history websites, strategies and best practices, lesson plans, plus professional development resources.

Like a lot of history sites, The Clearninghouse is big on using primary sources rather than just textbooks and lectures. One article,”The Power of Primary Sources: How Teaching American History Grants Changed My Classroom” talks about how primary sources…well, changed that teacher’s classroom and got students engaged. The site’s creators realize exploration and discovery are what makes history seem fun. Indiana Jones probably gave a lot of lectures as a teacher, but it’s the action sequences that the movies focus on. Learning by doing can get students to care and, dare I say, actually get excited about history class. -BILL FERRIS

National History Education Clearinghouse

Related Stuff:

Crack the Case with HSI: Historical Scene Investigation

Access Primary Sources Online with the Perseus Digital Library

Get Up Close and Personal with the Past at EyeWitness to History

When I was a student, I would only use the thesaurus to look up bigger, more intelligent-sounding words, so I could trick my teachers into thinking that I was really smart (in retrospect, it most likely didn’t work). With age, though, I’ve gotten much wiser and I’ve learned to value using simpler words in my writing. Like George Orwell once said, “Never use a long word where a short one will do.”

With this philosophy in mind, the brains behind the Ironic Sans blog (creators of the addictive 50 States in 10 Minutes game) have come up with Thsrs, an online thesaurus that only suggests synonyms which are shorter than the word you look up. Enter “flabbergasted” and it suggests “surprised,” look up “inconsequential” and you get “unimportant.” Perfect!

So you might ask yourself, why would I ever need a shorter word? Well, aside from the sage advice of our dear friend George up there, the ways in which we communicate are continuously evolving. And, with the onset of micro-blogging platforms, like Twitter, and the widespread popularity of text messaging, keeping your thoughts clear and concise is crucial.

And, Thsrs makes a great tool with which to share this sentiment with your students — who I’m sure are bombarded everyday by excessive “txt msg” LOL OMG shorthand — to improve both their writing and their communication skills. Steer them in the right syntactic direction with shorter, simpler words and fewer ridiculous abbreviations — and make Mr. Orwell proud! — LAUREN FROHNE

Thsrs

Related Stuff:

Find Some Answers at Ask for Kids

Word Central is Awesometastic

Choke on Your Own Hubris as You Fail to Name All 50 States in 10 Minutes

The world can be a dangerous place. Aside from the business in Iraq, there are problems in Darfur, Chechnya, and the Basques and Spaniards aren’t exactly friendly these days, either. If you teach history or social studies, you can show your students where the hot spots are with World Conflicts Today. Click on the site’s world map and find out the specifics on conflicts around the globe. Find out about key figures, the politics involved, and even get a quick overview with handy PowerPoint presentation.

World history is built on conflict. World Conflicts Today gives you the skinny on the big ones. Hopefully, by learning the issues behind these skirmishes, we can learn how to prevent them in the future. -BILL FERRIS

World Conflicts Today

Related Stuff:

Relive the Carnage of American Conflict…With Food

Condense Centuries of Hostility into Ninety Seconds with Maps of War

Remember that scene in The Shining when the elevator doors open up and all that blood comes flooding out? In your case, imagine the sliding doors of a Staples or OfficeMax and instead of blood imagine paper and post-it notes pouring out. And your desk was sitting directly in the path of the avalanche.

I shouldn’t have laughed when you called your desk “organized chaos.” I was just trying to be polite. It wasn’t that funny and I’ve heard people say it before, but it’s pretty uncomfortable for both parties when jokes sink like lead balloons. But the worst part about my laughing at your description is that I fear I may have enabled you to continue spending so much of your workday in such a cluttered mess. Let’s face it: your work area is a mess and all of your colleagues are starting to talk.

For your sake, for everyone’s sake, pay a visit to MyStickies.com. You can finally get rid of some of those post-its you have all over your monitor. MyStickies lets you post a sticky note directly on the web page you visit, which really helps you pinpoint what’s important to you on the page. Do you have a million pages bookmarked in your browser? And, like me, sometimes you can’t remember why you bookmarked it to begin with? This will help remedy that mess too.

So, please, clean up your workspace. You don’t want to look like some caricature from a Dilbert comic. And maybe you’ll be free to personalize your space once everything is Clean and Relaxed. –NICK YINGLING

MyStickies

You may already know about Jott, a fantastic cell phone service that will convert your voice to text. You may have wondered, “how is this useful for me besides giving me another way to make a shopping or to-do list?”

I wanted to highlight a couple of uses that are especially suited for Special Education. When you see them, you may get some other ideas about how to use this tool. Please leave a comment below to share them.

Jott for documentation

If you are a administrator, resource specialist, or some other provider of services that demand you document your interactions and interventions with students, Jott can save you a lot of time. Here is an example: at my school, we have been implementing RTI (Response to Intervention) the new federal special education (IDEA) model. This involves a lot of documentation of interventions. I introduced my administrators to Jott. Now, after an intervention with a student, they step out to the hall, call Jott, leave a message, and voila - their message is converted to text, and sent to their email, leaving a paper record. I’ve heard of social workers, and others using it in a similar manner. It’s really great for field notes.

Jott for differentiation

One trick I recently learned is that the speech to text goes both ways on Jott. You can have RSS feeds from news sources, or your class blog to Jott, and it will turn it into an audio feed that students can phone in to Jott and hear. This is great for students who have an audio delivery accommodation on their IEP. Instructions for how to do this can be found by scrolling down to Step 6 Mobilecast. -ALICE MERCER

Slideshare on using Jott for RTI documentation

Cellphones in Learning blog

Cell phones in learning wiki

Related Stuff:

Note To Self: Make More Notes To Self

Have you ever needed the answer to some pressing question, but found yourself no where near a computer and yielded only a cell phone to get your answer? I know I’ve been there many times, especially when traveling, and while you can sometimes text message search engines (or call a web-savvy friend), you can’t always get the answer you need. After being in such a predicament, I’ve often resolved to finally getting a smart phone, but now I don’t have to!

ChaCha  is a service that allows anyone with a mobile phone to text 242 242 (CHACHA) or call 1-800-2CHACHA and ask any question in conversational English and receive an accurate answer as a text message within a few minutes. It basically makes any cell phone a “smart phone,” and the idea is genius really: they don’t use a search engine algorithm with automatically generated responses, but rather a network of knowledgeable human “guides.” And since ChaCha uses people to respond with answers, you can easily reply with follow-up questions as if you are exchanging messages with a friend.

So let’s say you can’t remember who Gabriel falls in love with in Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd (it’s Bathsheba Everdene, by the way), or you need a quick weather update, or you just need to find the closest vegetarian restaurant to your current location, you can just call or text ChaCha and get a great answer quickly.

The service is totally free, too (except for any text message or minute fees  that may apply based on your cell phone plan), so you don’t have to worry about encountering any hidden costs when you get your phone bill. So make your cell phone a bit smarter, and maybe make yourself a little smarter while you’re at it!

ChaCha

Related Stuff:
How to use your cell phone for education: Mobile podcasting
Power up Your Phone with gWhiz