Instructify

As a comedian, I know how hard it is to bomb in front of an audience. Its a terrible feeling, really, and there’s nothing quite like the humiliation you experience when no one is laughing at your jokes. Teaching a group of teenagers or pre-teens can feel a lot like bombing on stage; no one is interested in what you have to say, and judgment pours out of every glare. You might even get heckled.

In both teaching AND comedy, I recommend keeping the humor alive. You’re probably saying “but I’m not funny” or “I can’t tell jokes” or “I can’t possibly connect with my students in a way that will keep them entertained and yet present the subject matter that they will retain for an exam.” Well, stop saying those things, because you sound ridiculous.

Instead, take some time to read these articles – Teaching With Humor – as presented by The Israeli English Teachers Network. Chances are likely that nothing you read will make you a funnier person, but the articles will help you understand how to use humor to help you become a better, more engaging teacher. Humor can be used on all sorts of levels in teaching, whether it be through cartoons and comics to illustrate your lessons, or sparking the imaginations of your class through insightful comedic banter. Whatever the case may be, you need to stop being such a fuddy-duddy and bring some funny into your classroom. If all else fails, go take an Improv Comedy class – I recommend it. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

(photo credit: Maryanne Ventrice on Flickr)

Teaching With Humor

Does your school block YouTube? If you’ve ever tried to access, say, a video of a lunar eclipse for class and found it locked away behind a firewall, you know how frustrating that can be. KeepVid has a solution. If you know the link to the video you want, just enter it into the KeepVid website and it’ll create a flash movie version you can download to your computer.

To play the movies, you’ll need to download the Free FLV Player. Don’t worry, it’s a small download, and it won’t cost a thing. Now you can finally access that solar eclipse video, plus anything else YouTube has to offer. Take that, Draconian security measures! -BILL FERRIS

KeepVid

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All Educational, All the Time–TeacherTube

Okay, grade school teachers! Have you been looking for a way to incorporate the importance of environmental stewardship into lesson plans for your younger audiences? Would you be even more interested if I told you that you could be teaching math at the same time? If either of these is true, then today is your lucky day!

Rainforest Maths is a site dedicated to math lessons with an environmental theme for grades K through 6. Kindergartners, for instance, can practice their counting skills by calculating the number of exotically-colored bugs on a tropical leaf, and 5th graders can learn Functions by playing the colorful Frog’s Function machine, a perfect combination of fun and learning.

We all know the importance of the world’s rainforests with their hidden natural medicines and how the majority of the world’s plant and animal species can be found there. Working elements of the rainforest into your everyday lesson plans is a unique opportunity to plant the seed for future care and understanding of this vital resource.

These environmental lessons may be subtle and the math lessons fun, but they open the doors for continued learning and exploration that will benefit your students for a lifetime. -DAVID BARGER

Rainforest Maths

Odysseus may be hopelessly lost, but you and your students don’t have to be. Thanks to Google Lit Trips, you can follow the story from above with all the clarity of Zeus. With the satellite imagery and smooth-sailing style of Google Earth, these tours of the greatest road trips ever written will help your students put what they’re reading into perspective.

There are Lit Trips for all grade levels, from Make Way For Ducklings by Robert McCloskey to Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. The maps are handy enough on their own, but they’re also accompanied by contextualizing photographs (a picture of a dust storm for the first chapters of The Grapes of Wrath for instance) and often discussion questions as well.

There are plenty of epic journeys not up on Lit Trips yet, so if you’re excited about the tool and feeling ambitious, make it a class project to develop one. There has already been a trip developed by a first grade class, so how hard can it be?

A word of caution: beware the allure of detours! I started off following Steinbeck’s Joads to California and ended up on the opposite coast hovering over my parents’ house. -MARIELLE PRINCE

Google Lit Trips

Today is the last day to submit your best educational mnemonic device to our contest. The best entry wins a Philips GoGear MP3 Player.

Post your entries in the comments section by midnight. We’ll announce the winner next week!

Need some inspiration? Check out this old favorite on the elements of the periodic table. -BILL FERRIS

Contest: Win an MP3 Player by Sharing Your Best Mnemonic Device

My most vivid memory from geometry class was when the teacher told us about the poor kid who was careless with his compass. I think the phrase, “You have no idea how much fluid is in the human eye,” explains why I majored in English instead of math.

That’s why I’m glad there’s a geometry site like Math Open Reference, which is loaded with interactive visual aids, and nothing sharper than an isosceles triangle . Each Java-based visual does a great job of explaining geometric concepts so even a mathophobe like me can understand them. You can manipulate polygons, examine 3D renderings of a cube, even read up on famous geometers like Euclid.

Math Open Reference aims to be a free online math textbook, starting with high school geometry. While the rest of the math department eagerly waits for Math Open Reference to get around to calculus and algebra, you geometry teachers can taunt them with this smörgåsbord of helpful tools that will help your students wrap their heads around these polygons and polyhedra. And the only eye injury you’ll have to worry about is from staring at the site too long. -BILL FERRIS

Math Open Reference

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Not to toot my own horn, but at a very young age, I was identified as AG (Academically Gifted). I spent my first few years in school in a separate class with other AG students, doing artsy things, solving puzzles and doing lots of creative writing. I think, for the most part, this was very helpful in my academic development. I often noticed, though, that I felt very out of place as I progressed in school. I felt somehow disjointed from many of my peers, and so I often only put in the bare minimum amount of effort to get me by. Nonetheless, I’ll be forever grateful for those teachers who were willing and able to provide me with instruction that gave me the stuff I needed to succeed and later go on to college and finally apply myself in the capacity I knew I was capable of. Sure, I’m smart – but we all know that; its the next generation that we need to keep an eye on.

TeachersAndFamilies.com brings us this guide – The Exceptional Child – to help identify and nurture gifted students at an early age. There are charts and resources to help parents and educators explore what makes a child exceptional and how to nurture them in both the home and the classroom. Be sure to check out the guide of ways to make gifted students feel less ostracized by their peers. Additionally, there are links to other resources on the web to help facilitate the education of gifted and exceptional children. If you suspect you might have a baby genius in your home or classroom, take a look here and see how to prepare yourself and the budding Einstein. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

The Exceptional Child

According to the Census Bureau, the 300 millionth American was born sometime in October, 2006. A lot can change in the time it takes to generate that many folks, too. In fact, we have gained 100 million of those people in just a shade under 40 years. Factmonster brings us this list via the U.S. Census Bureau about just how much things have changed since our population has increased exponentially. Presented here are factoids for the milestone years, 1915 – 100 million, 1967 – 200 million, and 2006 – 300 million.

You’ll find data such as prices of new houses, price of milk per gallon, average household size (decreased), Tuberculosis death rate (decreased), and median age of the population (increased). These facts can be helpful if you are studying U.S. history, or any sort of social studies for that matter. Take a look here to get a reality check as to how much we’ve grown in less than a century. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

(photo cred: rightee on Flickr)

300 Million Americans

Learn the workings of the solar system by building your own. With My Solar System you can see how suns, planets, moons and comets interact.

You choose the number and size of heavenly bodies in your solar system. And size matters – make your sun too big, and watch a planet crash into it (which is kinda cool, actually). Make a planet too small and its moon will ditch it to just revolve around the sun instead.

My Solar System also has preset solar system alignments, which are definitely worth checking out. My favorite – the slingshot, where a planet is revolving around the sun, minding its own business, then gets caught in another planet’s gravitational field. Next thing it knows, it’s getting flung into deep space because that meddling planet #2 doesn’t have enough gravity to hang onto it. So tragic. So fun.

Your students should enjoy My Solar System whether you’re an elementary teacher studying the planets for the first time, or if you’re a physics instructor demonstrating gravitational pull. And don’t forget to discuss the ethical implications of creating planets specifically hoping they’ll collide. -BILL FERRIS

My Solar System

It’s not too late to enter our Mnemonic Device Contest. Submit your best educational mnemonic device in any subject by Friday, February 29 for a chance to win a Philips GoGear MP3 player.

If you need inspiration, here’s a song that’ll help you remember the US Presidents.

We’ll announce the winner next week. Just click here and post your entry in the comments. -BILL FERRIS

Contest: Win an MP3 Player by Sharing Your Best Mnemonic Device

No, not that Apple, this is The Apple – a place for teachers to get together and share online. The Apple is a wonderful resource that I’m sorry I haven’t found before, but there’s no time like the present, I guess. Here, you can get all kinds of useful teaching information including lesson plans, news, videos, and photos. You’ll need to register for a free account, but once you do, you can not only peruse the forums and interact with teachers from all over the globe, but you’ll have the ability to share your own teaching secrets as well. Not only that, but you can stay up to date on the latest in education news and read stories directly related to teaching and teaching methods.

Interested in becoming a teacher? Looking for relocation opportunities? Check out The Apple’s jobs section and post your resume or search for employment. There’s a guide for those of you looking to break into the teaching field, and a School Finder to locate the best places to get accredited for the subject areas you want to teach. There’s more content here than I have words to write about, so chances are likely that you can find something interesting about teaching that you didn’t know already. Take a bite of The Apple, you deserve it. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

The Apple

Email was supposed to make our lives easier. It was supposed to open up new opportunities for learning, to communicate with students, even an easier way to assign and turn in homework. If only your school didn’t have that strict no-email policy.

If you want to add email to your teaching arsenal, talk to your administrators about Gaggle. Gaggle is a free email program tailored for teachers and students, and is perfect for schools who don’t want to spend big bucks to add server space, administer accounts, deal with spam and cyber bullying, and all the other headaches that come with student email.

You can monitor all messages and keep an eye out for inappropriate messages, cyber bullying and the like. You can also give Gaggle a list of blocked words, so if your students have a penchant for saying “doo-doo head,” you can block those messages. You can also revoke email privileges for students who abuse the system. Best of all, you can control all incoming messages, so you don’t have to worry about angry calls from parents because Little Johnny received a great business offer from a Nigerian banker.

Gaggle is ad-supported, but you can upgrade to (that is, pay for) a subscription service that’s ad-free. But it’s not like students haven’t seen commercials, so Gaggle is a good way to get your class online for free. -BILL FERRIS

85 Resources for Fiction Writers – As a writer, I feel its important to know as much about writing as possible. Thusly, the elements of fiction writing bleed into other kinds of writing quite easily. Also, the more your students know about writing fiction, the more the y will understand what they read, right? Check out this great list from Here to Create.

Websites to Learn About Web 2.0 – If you are still uncertain about what Web 2.0 means exactly, then these sites compiled by 21st Century Connections will clue you in. (Apparently, it has something to do with something called a “blogosphere” and might be a lot better than the first version of the Internet.) Some of the sites are quite useful for your day to day life, and all of them will make sure you get the most out of “your” Internet.

8 Ways to Put Off Procrastination Until Tomorrow – I like to think of our quaint little blog as being more important than just offering advice and tools to make teaching easier, but hopefully, making your life easier and more productive as well. Procrastination is one of the killers of productivity, so its important to eliminate it with extreme prejudice. There are probably lots of ways to cut down on procrastinating, but here are A Miracle a Day‘s 8 ways for the time being. I’ll think of some more later.

10 Top Websites for Brain Training – If you want to be a mental ninja, you’re going to have to take some mental karate first. SocyBerty gives us this compilation of brain exercise based sites so you can get your mind into the gym. There are tons of fun games and activities here, so your students will no doubt appreciate the fun whilst whipping their brains’ butts into shape. – JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

(photo credit: flattop341 on flickr)

I’m about to make a bold prediction: computers will play a big role in society in the future. Remember, you heard that here first.

And since learning computers is so important, give your students a chance to acquire advanced technology skills like programming and Web design and development. If you have any aspiring programmers or Web designers in your midst, they’ll definitely want to know about Microsoft DreamSpark. College students can download professional-quality development tools such as Microsoft Visual Studio, and XNA Game Studio 2.0, which students can use to build games for Windows and their Xbox 360.

You have to be a college student to get these for free. While that excludes a lot of your students, this offer is perfect for your graduating seniors, as well as any grads from last year who you still keep in touch with. Hey, if you’re completing your student teaching, or you’re getting your masters, this stuff might be for you, too.

I know this probably sounds like crazy talk, but trust me. Computers are gonna be huge. Huge, I tell you. And now that you’re wise to this new trend, you may as well clue your students in about it, too. -BILL FERRIS

Microsoft DreamSpark

Nom nom nom Bookglutton.com
Bookglutton.com is a site that’s bringing this idea of community to the already thriving e-book world. If you read a book through the site, you can have a real-time chat with someone in the same chapter or on the same page as you.

Let’s Have Some Phun: Physics Gets Creative for Young Learners
Phun lets kids create shapes out of thin air that collide with one another. Use chains and springs to connect or, my favorite, send one object smashing into another.

Papa’s Got a Brand New Deal: The New Deal Network
The New Deal Network is the one stop shop for all your New Deal needs, folks. Teaching a lesson in your U.S. History class about FDR and his grand plan to turn the Great Depression topsy-turvy? The New Deal Network has the photographs you need to spice up your lectures. Wait – don’t stop there, friend – because NDN’s got historical documents up to its electronic ceiling.

Art and Science Collide in the Periodic Table Printmaking Project
The lines between art and science blur in the Periodic Table of Elements Printmaking Project. Ninety-six printmakers from around the country joined forces to create prints for every element on the periodic table.

Stop Registering for Every Site that has Content You Want: BugMeNot
BugMeNot is a compendium of dummy logins for many compulsory registration sites, from the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune to YouTube and IMDB. All accounts have phony names and personal data.