Instructify

Before you start trick-or-treating tonight, check out some of our best posts from October:

More information than you’ll ever need about every country: CIA World Factbook

Grab students’ attention before class with PowerPoint. Yeah, that’s right, with PowerPoint.

Keep track of elections with Gallup

Make screencasts with free CamStudio software

Easy-to-do experiments for the science fair

Read Seth’s Godin’s Email Checklist before you forward that email

Prove it with Evidence: How Do We Know What We Know?

Marketplace explains the credit crisis as an Antarctic expedition

Hot tips for even hotter news writing

Electoral Insanity at USDemocrazy.net

Electoral Insanity at USDemocrazy.net
Clicking on a particular state will reveal relevant state facts, such as the percentage of votes cast for or against George W. Bush in the prior two elections, famous and infamous natives, as well as the state’s overall political climate. Each state is also rated on a scale of one to five for political craziness.

Animate your lessons with Animoto
Animoto automatically generates professional-quality videos that are fully customized with your images and music. The really cool part is that Animoto actually analyzes your images and music and combines them in an atheistically pleasing way that compliments your content.

The Adventure of the Missing Laptop
Adeona is an open source system for tracking the location of your missing laptop. By storing location updates and continually monitoring the location, Adeona amounts to a LoJack for your laptop.

Get your e-mail inbox down to zero
There are just a few key points to the Inbox Zero system, one of which is to “process” rather than “check” e-mail. Processing e-mail consists of clearing out your inbox (and your mind) by taking a small, simple action on every single e-mail. Often, this action is “delete” or “archive.”

Jon White Studio: Great animation & educational treats
White’s site has a bundle of fun videos and interactive segments designed to make learning fun, especially when it comes to understanding our political system.

Many teachers worry about their students’ reliance on Google as a way of finding information. If you can’t get them to become library junkies, you can at least prove to them that how they do research affects what information they find. A neat little visualization tool called Thumbshots.com Ranking can help.The Ranking tool allows you to compare searches on Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and other search engines by displaying a row of dots representing web pages, arranged in the same order that they appear in a particular set of search results. Hovering over a dot will show you a small preview, or “thumbshot,” of the page. One thing you’ll quickly see is that there’s not much overlap: pages that show up in Google results often don’t show up in Yahoo! results and vice versa.

Pages that do show up in both sets of results are highlighted in blue, and blue lines allow you to compare where the pages rank in each set of results. In the Yahoo! results for “water on Mars,” for instance, a 2001 article published on NASA’s website ranks 3rd; the same page ranks only 35th in Google’s results. The Ranking tool also allows you to highlight a particular site so that you can see, for instance, where Wikipedia is in each set of results. Moreover, you can teach your students about the importance of search words by showing them that searching Google for “water on Mars” returns significantly different results than searching Google for “Mars water.”

Once you’ve constructed and conducted a lesson whose moral is “Different searches produce different results,” you might want to explore any number of different search engines. Metasearch engines such as Dogpile and Clusty are search engines of search engines that compile results from several different sources. Search engines such as Grokker, Cuil, and Mahalo display information in dramatically different ways from the big three (Google, Yahoo!, and MSN Live Search). There’s a whole world to search out there, and a whole bunch of ways to search it. –AMANDA FRENCH

Thumbshots.com Ranking

Related links

Instructifeature: Five tips to improve students’ information evaluation

Search visually safely with Redzee

SearchMe visual search

Cuil adds power, pictures to web searches

Be a smooth Boolean operator with Boolify

Jon White is an artist. Not only is he skilled in the ways of character animation, drawing, CSS and HTML, he also knows a thing or two about education. From his bio:

But beyond everything else, what gets my blood pumping are the lightbulb moments. The episodes of clarity, of understanding, and of fun when new ideas and concepts get made real.

White’s site has a bundle of fun videos and interactive segments designed to make learning fun, especially when it comes to understanding our political system. In the first video he presents on the page, White shows how the 1968 Presidential election played out by using caricatures of the candidates to illustrate how topsy-turvy the race actually was. The animation is fun and presents the information in a way that allows users to digest and retain the information.

Not all of White’s creations are entirely educational in the traditional sense of the word, but his creativity and use of time lines and interactive flash elements make for a lot of fun for teachers and students alike. The page is really a chance for White to show off his skills, but honestly, I’m impressed. I wish more web designers would take education more seriously, and Mr. White can serve as a role model. You can also subscribe to Jon’s RSS Feed to find out what he’s up to. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Jon White Studio

Related Stuff:

Relive the Carnage of American Conflict…With Food

Condense Centuries of Hostility into Ninety Seconds with Maps of War

Animated explanations abound at Biology in Motion

Have you ever seen the words “embed” or “embed code” on a web site, and wondered what that meant? Embed refers to code that you can use to create a small version of a multimedia (visual and/or audio based) Web application on another Web page outside the service that it resides on.

For example, you can put (embed) a YouTube video on a blog or wiki page. But first, you have to face the code — don’t worry, it won’t be painful. First, copy the code. Services like You Tube, Slideshare, Flickr, and many others will usually have the embed code on the page for the video (see above for an example. If you see the video or slide show somewhere else, it might list a link to the embed code). Then copy the code.

Next figure out what you want to do with the code — in a blog post, a wiki (Wikispaces, Wet Paint, and PB Wiki all take embed code), or simple web page sites like Jottit.com? You will either look for an embed tool (usually, it looks like a TV set), or if it gives you the option of seeing “Code,” click on that. Paste the code where asked. In some cases (say, embedding You Tube video) you may just need to paste the page URL without all those pesky brackets.  You can also use this trick to add video to Google Earth place marks (just go to the properties page for a place mark, and add the You Tube embed code).

I hope this lets you see how EASY it is to add multimedia to your wikis, blog posts, and other places on the web. -ALICE MERCER

Related Stuff:

How to register students for Web 2.0 tools without an email address

The Wikipedia discussion tab is where it’s at

What is RSS, and Where Can I Get Some for my Little Ones?

We like to post grants for educators here on Instructify. Here are three we’ve mentioned that are still accepting applications, plus their deadlines:

Target Field Trip Grants – November 1 (that’s this Saturday, folks)

Toyota Tapestry Grant for Science Teachers – January 21, 2009

NEA Foundation Grants – February 1, 2009

Photo credit: Cayusa on flickr

When I attended school there was a big push for whole language instruction and very little emphasis was placed on phonics. Now in education the pendulum has swung the other way and we are seeing that phonics instruction is crucial, not only in reading but spelling as well. The English language with all its rules is a tricky one to teach, especially in the areas of phonics. BBC Schools has a great site to help teach and provide reinforcement with all of these tricky phonics patterns.

BBC Words and Pictures is an interactive site that offers many resources in phonics and reading development. Teachers can use this site to initiate lessons and provide extra practice for their struggling readers. You can also find resources parents can use at home. The site offers numerous interactive activities, working with phonemes, consonant vowel consonant patterns, consonant clusters, long vowel patterns, and high frequency words. With each activity, a colorful character with a charming British accent gives students the directions needed to engage them in the activity. The site also makes the proper phonetic sounds for the student. This additional aspect of the site makes it valuable to your ESL learners as well as your non-reading students.

The teacher and parent resource sections are full of printables that can provide students with additional practice. BBC Words and Pictures also offers curriculum relevance to help correlate these activities with your learning objectives. As teachers, let’s make sure our early readers get the phonics foundation needed to become life long readers and proficient spellers.-MONIQUE ST.LOUIS

BBC Words and Pictures

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Get lost in The Stacks

The Caterpillar Exchange: using Eric Carle’s books in your classroom

Eureka! A few clues towards solving The Mystery of the Struggling Reader

Give beginning readers a head start with Starfall

Sometimes you have to take a step back and look at the big picture to fully appreciate something. When that picture is as big as, say, the solar system, you may need to take more than a few more steps backward. Or you could visit the Solar System Visualizer and see everything on your monitor.

This web app lets you view the celestial clockwork of our solar system, including the orbits of the planets (and Pluto, too), plus all the moons and minor bodies floating around out there. Students can zoom in for a closer look at each planet — check out the Spirograph generated by all the bodies orbiting Jupiter. You can even view a few extrasolar systems, such as Epsilon Eridani with its one lousy planet.

A couple drawbacks to the Solar System Visualizer: since the planets aren’t drawn to scale, and the model doesn’t account for bodies’ individual gravitational pulls, it won’t be as useful to older learners in a physics class, for example. But if you’re teaching an elementary science unit, The Solar System Visualizer will help you put our eight-plus-one planets into perspective for your students. -BILL FERRIS

Solar System Visualizer

Related Stuff:

Study the Planets First-Hand with My Solar System

Observe NASA’s Earth Observatory

Feel Younger by Calculating Your Age on Other Worlds

Set the controls for the closest planet to the sun: NASA Mission to Mercury

“Is there any e-mail in your inbox right now that you’ve read but you haven’t done anything about?”

When writer and speaker Merlin Mann asks this question of a packed-to-overflowing audience of Google employees, the world’s most prestigious knowledge workers laugh, ashamed (but relieved) that their dark secret has been brought into the light. You can hear the moment at minute 15:15 in the hour-long “Inbox Zero” video, a recording of a 2007 presentation that adds multimedia sparkle to the “Inbox Zero” series of posts at Mann’s “time, attention, and creative work” blog, 43folders.com.

Teachers, of course, are also knowledge workers, and we get more than our share of e-mail: personal e-mail, administrative e-mail, informational e-mail from listservs and colleagues, e-mail from parents, and, most importantly, e-mail from students. Swing a cat, and you’re likely to hit an educator who has over a thousand e-mails in his or her inbox. Such a mass of messages can cause high stress levels, and Merlin Mann offers compassionate and sensible advice for this 21st-century problem. Mann is one of the technology sector’s go-to guys for productivity, whose enthusiasm for David Allen’s Getting Things Done book has probably influenced the notable proliferation of applications and websites designed specifically to help people implement “GTD,” as Allen’s plan is affectionately called.

There are just a few key points to the Inbox Zero system, one of which is to “process” rather than “check” e-mail. Processing e-mail, says Mann, is “more than checking and less than responding”; it consists of clearing out your inbox (and your mind) by taking a small, simple action on every single e-mail. Often, this action is “delete” or “archive”; sometimes it’s “reply briefly, then delete or archive” or “enter date on calendar, then delete or archive” or “enter task on To Do list, then delete or archive.” Mann’s technology background also makes him a useful source of advice on things like e-mail settings, filters, and templates; and there are in-depth pieces on such advanced topics as how to get rid of an enormous backlog of e-mail with an “Email DMZ.”

So. Is there any e-mail in your inbox right now that you’ve read but haven’t done anything about? — AMANDA FRENCH

Related Links:

Organize your to-do list online with Remember the Milk

Get everything done. Maybe.

Read Seth Godin’s e-mail checklist before you forward that e-mail

Even if you love what you do, work can be a serious drag. Every once in a while, everyone finds themselves in a place where work feels too much like… well, work. Especially when it comes to teaching, it can be all-too-easy to over-think, get distracted or get bogged down with things that don’t actually matter.

How to Make Work Feel Effortless may sound a little bit like one of those commercials that tell you that you’ll lose 20 pounds in two weeks if you pay them $500 (unbelievable but tempting); however, these tips from Zen Habits don’t cost a small fortune and they could actually make your work seem a little less like a chore. These eight tips offer some basic guidelines to keep your mind and body in line, so that you can be a more efficient and happier teacher.

Tip #8 is my personal favorite: “Refuse to do what you don’t want to do.” But maybe I should apply that one in moderation… -LAUREN FROHNE

How to Make Work Feel Effortless

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Get everything done. (Maybe.)

Instructifeature: Get a gold star for productivity

Photo credit: Patrick Q on flickr

Oh, what was that you say? Your third laptop was stolen from you for the third time in a row!? How terribly unfortunate for you… Maybe someone is trying to gaslight you, make you go insane and swindle you out of your rightful inheritance! This whole affair reminds me of a similar crime I once solved. I was summoned to the grim moor outside of the manor of Sit Charles Baskerville…no, wait, that was The Hound of the Baskervilles. No, the mystery I’m thinking of was when I was visiting Hong Kong…no, wait, that one was Rush Hour 2. Okay the point I’m trying to make is that next time your laptop is missing or stolen we can solve the mystery quickly and easily.

Adeona, named for the Roman goddess of safe returns, is an open source system for tracking the location of your missing laptop. Created from research at The University of Washington, Adeona FREE to use. By storing location updates and continually monitoring the location, Adeona amounts to a LoJack for your laptop.

It was also built with keeping users’ privacy in mind: there is no commercial entity involved, the location data is encrypted & anonymous and the location information is available only to the owner. So you don’t have to worry that any secret shadow organizations are covertly tracking your movements. (You should still be concerned about MOLEMEN, however).

As if this weren’t cool and useful enough, Mac users get the bonus of utilizing their Mac’s iSight camera along with some freeware tools provided on the Adeona website. A picture is taken if the dastardly villain uses the laptop! Now you have all the evidence for what criminal prosecutors call a “slam dunk,” or, what NBA players call “the legal system’s equivalent to a particularly powerful, crowd-pleasing method of scoring points.”

This is helpful for students on their own laptops, personal or school-issued. But it might be even more valuable for an instructor—my keen detective instincts suspect that a teacher might keep valuable lesson plans and grades stored on that laptop.

So here we are at last, it is time to solve our mystery and unmask the culprit of who stole your laptops: IT WAS YOU! You stole your own laptop and you’ve been giving me misleading testimony this whole time! No, wait, that was The Ususal Suspects. Ugh, alright, I quit. You should’ve just been using Adeona the whole time. –NICK YINGLING

Adeona

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Get 1GB of storage for free with OpenDrive

Back up Your Data with Mozy

Back that Thing Up: Backup to Email

Let’s face it, PowerPoint presentations and slide shows can be pretty darn boring, especially for students. So wouldn’t it be great if there were a way to jazz up your lessons a little bit with engaging slide show videos without needing lots of technical video editing skills? Well, there is!

Animoto automatically generates professional-quality videos that are fully customized with your images and music. The really cool part is that Animoto actually analyzes your images and music and combines them in an atheistically pleasing way that compliments your content. And you can easily embed your videos on your blog or website, or email them to your students or colleagues.

The possibilities with Animoto are endless. Spruce up your lesson on The Great Gatsby with an introductory video depicting the pop culture of the Roarin’ 20s. Or help your students visualize a science experiment with an engaging and informational video beforehand. Also, check out the ways other educators have used Animoto to add visual energy to their lessons at Animoto for Education. — LAUREN FROHNE

Animoto

Animoto for Education

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Make screencasts with free CamStudio software

Learn to do anything with Yobler

See elements in action with the Periodic Table of Videos

By now, I assume that many of your students are interested in an upcoming event involving two major political parties and several men named Joe (Biden, Six-Pack, The Plumber). I also gather that this country called America is divided into 50 territories, known as “states.” It would appear that these “states” have something to do with determining the outcome of next week’s big event, which is why USDemocrazy.net is so extraordinarily useful.

Developed by the political cartoonist for The Economist and students at the University of Maryland, USDemocrazy.net provides an informative and entertaining look at state politics. The main page of the site is a humorous map of the United States, displaying amusing, alternate names for each state. For example, Wisconsin is called “Cheesehead,” California is renamed “Dude,” and our great state of North Carolina is referred to as “North Barbecue.” Clicking on a particular state will reveal relevant state facts, such as the percentage of votes cast for or against George W. Bush in the prior two elections, famous and infamous natives, as well as the state’s overall political climate. Each state is also rated on a scale of one to five for political craziness.

Whether shedding more light on the intricacies of the Electoral College or highlighting distinctions among neighbors, USDemocrazy.net is a valuable resource for teachers. And even if you’re not crazy about the American political process, it would be foolish to ignore a site as witty and unique as USDemocrazy.net. –JIMI RADABAUGH

USDemocrazy.net

Related Stuff:

Instructify Election Roundup

Grab students’ attention before class with PowerPoint. Yeah, that’s right, with PowerPoint.
For those of you who use PowerPoint (or are willing to, when it’s useful), you might consider creating a series of short slide shows that can run in automated mode as your students are entering your classroom.

NEA Foundation Grants: Who says labor doesn’t pay?
Looking for some money for your professional development or classroom? The NEA has a grant program that could help you out.

Marketplace explains the credit crisis as an Antarctic expedition
The video is a great primer for students trying to grasp how the credit crisis got so bad. Like a real Antarctic expedition, the credit crisis is fraught with peril. Let’s just hope we all don’t get left out in the cold

Hot tips for even hotter news writing
By following these basic tips, the budding journalists in your class will be on their way to becoming expert reporters.

Last year we reviewed Kidipede – History for Kids. Not to be labeled a one-trick insect, Kidipede has just rolled out a science site. Designed for middle-schoolers, Kidipede – Science for Kids offers useful info about biology, physics, chemistry, geology, as well as mathematics, the language of science.

You’ll find articles, videos, plus recommendations for further reading. Each article links to dozens of sub-articles, so if your students are reading about tectonic plates, they can feel free to go off on learning tangents and read up on earthquakes and volcanoes while they’re at it. Kidipede has more bits of information than a centipede has legs. -BILL FERRIS

Kidipede – Science for Kids

Related Stuff:

Uncover Thousands of Years of History at Kidipede

Prove it with Evidence: How Do We Know What We Know?

Learn biology basics at Biology4kids

Easy-to-do experiments for the science fair