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You may have heard about this video-sharing site called YouTube, where you can broadcast homemade videos online. You probably haven’t seen these videos, though, at least not at school. YouTube is part of the holy trinity of websites most blocked by schools along with MySpace and Facebook. There are plenty of ways around these blocks, but the YouTube brass may have finally developed something that will make schools think twice about shutting the site out. YouTube EDU is a channel featuring exclusively educational content from top colleges and universities like Stanford, Berkeley, and of course, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (woo!).

On YouTube EDU you can find lectures, full courses, videos of experiments, student news broadcasts, and lots more. UNC’s channel features guest talks by folks like Cory Doctorow and Danah Boyd. YouTube EDU has a lot to recommend it, maybe enough to get your school to stop blocking YouTube. More to the point, your school will like what it doesn’t have — namely, the unedited, self-indulgent junk that runs rampant on YouTube. If YouTube EDU could also cut out the ridiculous comments, there’d be no stopping it. -BILL FERRIS

YouTube EDU

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It seems that every time you turn around these days someone’s encouraging you to complete a DIY project.  Why pay for someone else to do it when you can do it yourself?  Apparently, NASA has the same attitude on its website on Do-It-Yourself Podcasts.

Essentially, this website is a hub for high-quality, NASA-created video clips, audio files, and still images that you or your students can download to mash up with your own files to create a finished podcast (or vodcast).  The topics NASA offers for download are not all-inclusive;  currently you can download media about lab safety, Newton’s Laws, sport science, and spacesuits. Once downloaded, you can use various editing software programs (such as Animoto, which we blog about here, or the video editing software already on your computer such as Windows Movie Maker) to create your podcast.  Once the podcast is complete, NASA gives you permission to publish it in any way you want.  It could be a neat showcase of student work on a class or school website.

If you’re a teacher and you think this is a great idea but don’t really know where to start, the website also offers a DIY Podcasting Blog. The blog has some pre-posted ideas about how to use the website to make podcasts and videos in your classroom and it encourages teachers to share how they’ve used the site in their own classrooms via comments (also, here is a post we did on producing videos in the classroom). Overall, NASA seems to offer a great way to get started with podcasting using some very high-quality multimedia resources. So get your students out there DIY-ing some podcasts and vodcasts. -REBECCAH HAINES

Do-It-Yourself Podcasts

DIY Podcasting Blog

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Reading is an essential skill that every kid should get excited about. Unfortunately, reading is often seen as a chore and busy work by students everywhere. If only we could find a way to harness tools on the web to get kids excited about reading. If only. BookWink is ahead of the curve, fortunately. BookWink is a site that uses podcasts and videos to present reading materials for students in 3rd to 8th grade. Search for books based on subject, grade level, title or author, where you can read reviews of hundreds of books.

You can subscribe to the video or audio podcasts, and for those of you who are new to podcasting, there is a handy and explanatory guide to setting up your iTunes so you can listen to and view all the info you can hope for. If you just want to check out some of the videos without subscribing, you can also look through the archives of previous subjects. The videos feel like a modern day Reading Rainbow, as books are reviewed and explained in groups of various themes such as popularity, Sea Adventures, and Museum Mysteries. Not only does BookWink harness the availability of internet video and audio applications, it’s a great way for students and teachers alike to discover new books that might not fall into the required summer reading lists. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

BookWink

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Some of your students may have family members fighting overseas. If these brave souls are in combat, there’s always the chance they might not come home in one piece (or at all). Sesame Street, which has never shied away from the unhappier parts of life, will air their special episode Coming Home: Military Families Cope with Change on April 1 at 8 p.m. (check your local TV listings).

Muppets Elmo and Rosita, along with guests Queen Latifah and John Mayer, will help kids deal with the consequences of their family members suffering battlefield injuries such as losing limbs, or dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder. Coming Home is designed to help kids cope with a new way of life by asking questions and supporting one another.

The Sesame Workshop recommends kids watch Coming Home with their parents, so make sure to mention that when you mention the program to your elementary students. They might ask you a few questions, too, so it may be good for you to watch this episode as well. -BILL FERRIS

Coming Home: Military Families Cope with Change

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There are many sites and tools to enhance math instruction out there, but there’s a world of difference between a site featuring math facts on virtual flash cards, and one with tools and games that students can use to actually solve problems. Shodor’s Interactivate falls into the latter category.

Interactivate provides a variety of tools and activities to help teach math. From simple spinner applets, to sample dialog of how to teach certain concepts, it’s a great stop for math teachers both old and new.  The applets aren’t flashy, but they get the point across. (And really, how many times have you seen a flashy kids’ site with absolutely no point?) Interactivate provides lesson plans as well. The lessons are aligned with standards for North Carolina, South Carolina,Tennessee, and Virginia, as well as the National Council for Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM). In addition to being linked to standards, Interactivate is also linked to packaged curriculums like Connected Math, MathScape, and MathThematics. All the tools you need to follow the plans are on the site. Have a student teacher this semester? Interactivate’s Lesson Plans and Discussions resources can be great training wheels for a preservice teacher.

Interactivate is free on the web, but if you have a specific need for the resources to be available offline, you can get a CD with your $25 donation to Shodor, an organization whose mission is to “improve math and science education through the effective use of modeling and simulation technologies.”  It’s a good product for a worthy cause. -GRETCHEN SCHAEFER

Interactivate

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50 Ways to Help the Planet – If you want to help the planet, and I’m talking about OUR planet, here (Earth), then you’ll find this list handy. By taking small steps and making seemingly insignificant lifestyle choices, you can make a significant difference when it comes to cutting down on your impact on the environment. Simple decisions like changing your light bulbs to  paying bills online can make a huge difference.

Top 20 Ways to Share a Great Blog Post - So you wrote an awesome blog post. Now, who is going to read it? Make sure you are getting the most exposure you can by using some of these methods from Mashable. Whether you want to bring people to your blog via Twitter or just telling a friend at the grocery store, you’ll need to get the word out there if you want anyone to know your brilliant musings.

10 Misconceptions About Common Sayings – If you’re fit as a fiddle, it doesn’t mean you’re in as good shape as a violin, but it does mean that you are as worthy as an expensive instrument. This and other phrases are commonly misused and butchered every day, so it might be important to know where these sayings come from. So don’t wait on tenterhooks anymore, and check out this list from ListVerse.

5 Traits of a Leader - As a teacher, it is important to know how to lead and stay in charge. Sometimes, though, it takes more than just THINKING you’re a leader to actually be one. Abide by these traits from YourLifeCoach and you’ll be fast on your way to strong leadership in no time. It takes a little confidence and vision to become someone others can really look up to. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Photo credit: Leonid Mamchenkov on Flickr

Unleash your inner mad scientist: Biotechnology mini-grants
The North Carolina Biotechnology Center is offering mini-grants of up to $6000 for biotechnology “equipment, supplies, and educational materials” for K-12 institutions. The website contains links to all of the documents that are needed to submit an application. And we’re giving you plenty of notice. The next deadline isn’t until January 27, 2010.

Instructifeature: Communication in your online course
Every educator knows that a significant component of good teaching is good communication, and most of us are quite skilled in communicating with students who are in the same room with us. But some of the communication cues that we use in brick-and-mortar classrooms don’t always translate to the online environment.

See immigration demographics in detail with Immigration Explorer
America is a nation of immigrants. They’ve hailed from all over the globe, from places like Russia, Mexico, Africa, Europe, and everywhere else except Antarctica (so far). The New York Times has put together an interactive map that chronicles America’s foreign-born population through history at Immigration Explorer.

Old words make a comeback at Save the Words
Every year, there’s an announcement that the dictionary has added new words like “fanboy,” “muggle,” or “air quotes.” Well, to make room for those, they have to drop less-commonly used words like “blateration” (blabber or chatter), “jungible” (that which may be joined) or “jobler” (someone who does small jobs; also, a great name for a Web 2.0 startup).

Convert PDF files to editable documents easily with PDF to Word
PDF to Word, recently out of closed beta and now in open beta, touts itself as “The Most Accurate PDF-to-Word Converter.” There are many PDF to Word conversion utilities, both for pay and for free, available on the web these days, but none of the free tools handled pdf files like PDF to Word does.

Back in 2003 and 2004, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer had between 91% and 96% of the browser market. This number has been shrinking slowly since 2004 when Mozilla’s Firefox was introduced. According to Wikipedia, as of February 2009, Internet Explorer had 67.5% of the market share and Firefox came in at number two with almost 22%. Microsoft, with their latest iteration of their browser, hopes to turn this downward trend around.

I’ve been playing with IE8 since the final version was released last Thursday. It’s fast — lightning fast. In fact, in many of the speed tests conducted by various outlets, IE8 outperformed its browser counterparts. It’s definitely much faster than Internet Explorer 7.

There are many slick features in this latest version worth checking out. Microsoft has implemented Firefox’s idea of a “smart location bar,” which automatically searches through your browser history as you’re typing an address — great for those of us who have visited a page but can only remember a portion of the URL. They’ve also implemented the feature that restores your tabs if your browser crashes, which was sorely missed in IE7. A nice feature with IE8′s tabbed browsing is that each tab is it’s own process, similar to Google Chrome, so if a site crashes on a particular tab, the entire browser will not die on you. Simply close the bad tab and continue browsing. IE8 also does a great job of grouping tabs. When you open a new tab from a particular page, the tabs will change color and Internet Explorer 8 will automatically “group” these tabs by color. This is a handy feature for those of us that like to have many tabs open at a single time.

Microsoft beat Mozilla to the punch with “InPrivate” or anonymous browsing, which will delete any tracks of your web journey when you step back into “normal” mode. Another very interesting and neat, albeit somewhat confusing feature is Internet Explorer 8′s new “Accelerator” feature. Accelerator allows you to select any text on a page, then easily perform everyday web browsing tasks such as mapping or searches without navigating to other websites to get things done. For example, you could highlight an address on a web page, use the “Map with Live Maps” accelerator, then view a map of that address directly on the web page you’re currently viewing. Pretty neat.

Internet Explorer 8 has a ton of great features and is very, very quick, but none of this matters if it cannot display a web page correctly. Once of the very first pages I visited with IE8 was The Whirlwind, my school’s online newspaper. Although the page displays properly in every other web browser according to BrowserShots, a web utility that allows you to see screen shots of any web page in multiple browsers, the site displayed incorrectly in this newest version of Internet Explorer, yet displays just fine in Internet Explorer 7 and dozens of other web browsers. Things are supposed to get better not worse, aren’t they?

Overall, I was very impressed with the speed and additional features Internet Explorer 8 has to offer, but until they figure out a way to display web pages correctly or finally decide to comply with web standards their slowly diminishing share in the browser market will, most likely, continue to decline.

Final Word: IE8 does a good job of implementing many features that are already available in Firefox, either by default or with a plug-in. The “Accelerator” feature is worth checking out and if you have things to hide or are concerned about privacy, “InPrivate” browsing is a must have. I’m a Firefox user and have been for quite some time. Internet Explorer 8 did not impress me enough to make the switch back to IE, but if you are an Internet Explorer user, it would be worth your time to check it out. – JERRY SWIATEK

Microsoft Internet Explorer 8

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Have you ever had a colleague or student send you a file you have no idea how to open? If unfamiliar file extensions like “ODT,” “RGH” or “$S“ make you want to shout “!@#$%” you should visit OpenWith.org, a site that helps you find the program that will open whatever file you have — most of the time with free software. Spreadsheets, images, plugins, OpenWith can find all sorts of file types. Simply search for your mystery extension and OpenWith will find a program that can read it. You can also download a handy desktop tool to make looking up extensions even easier.  It’s an EXE file, in case you were wondering. That’s one file type you shouldn’t have to look up. -BILL FERRIS

OpenWith.org

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There are lot of web search options out there, and not a lot of money in school budgets. Given those two tensions, many districts are looking for ways to save money, and find more “free” options. One of the earliest online tools that my district purchased was NetTrekker, a subscription-based web search service that provides reviewed web sites in its search results. Is it worth the money, or is this a cost schools could reasonably cut? Here’s my input from an elementary perspective.

The Setup:

I ran a search on the word “astronomy.” I used the Elementary page from NetTrekkerDI. To compare, I used Google, Yahoo!Kids (a free, kid-friendly site), KidRex (promising a “Safe Search” version of Google), and MelZoo (which gives a screen-shot preview of the page, great for helping kids figure out if the site is for them). I choose them because these are both subjects that I have had problems locating web sources for in the past.

Findings

Astronomy is one of the few topics where a Google-based search returns something besides a Wikipedia page as the top result, in this case Astronomy.com was returned for all but NetTrekker and Yahoo!Kids. NetTrekker has two excellent sources, Ology, and KidsAstronomy.com, but have duplicate entries for the sites going to obscure pages. The first search result takes you to a hangman game on Kids Astronomy, but there is no high-level result for the entry page on the site. Ology, another great resource, has multiple entries. Yahoo!Kids had a similar random quality to it.

Search results

· astronomy – Google Search

· Yahoo! Kids : Search Results

· MelZoo – Web results for “astronomy”

· astronomy – KidRex

· This is a link to bookmarks for the first page of the results returned from my NetTrekker search, the number indicates the order it appeared in the results.

I got much better results from Google-based search engines (Google and MelZoo) when I added the term “children” to “astronomy”. KidRex appeared to already do this.

The verdict

You don’t always get what you pay for. Much of the elementary content you get for a fee from NetTrekker, you can find elsewhere for free simply by adding the term “children” to your search. There are other bells and whistles on NetTrekker, but some of them (the text to speech function) don’t work well with low-memory computers, such as the ones in my lab. I think the visual previews (from free services like MelZoo) are more useful.

I’ve supported using NetTrekker as one among many tools for students, but even then I noted it’s limitations in not being as up-to-the-minute on all subjects. In addition, kids need to have a broad-based curriculum in using search engines, which includes:

1. using Boolean operators (AND, OR, “-”)
2. evaluating search result entries before going to the page
3. evaluating search result entries after going to the page

NetTrekker attempts to make most of those lessons unnecessary. This is not a good thing for kids because they will be using Google, or similar tools, outside the classroom. -ALICE MERCER

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If you ever studied biology in college, or perhaps even high school, you probably had a chance to perform some fruit fly crosses.  Fruit flies are great model organisms for studying Mendelian inheritance — they’re easy to grow, they reproduce quickly, and they have many easy-to-identify mutations.  Unfortunately, live fruit flies poses problems in your average middle- or high-school classroom.  Their food gets sticky and the flies get stuck in it, you have to use nasty chemicals to put them to sleep before examining them, and worst of all,  once your new adults start emerging, you have to ‘virgin’ the flies every eight hours or so.  This means you have to separate the females into their own vials to ensure pure genetic crosses.  This is no fun in the wee hours of the morning.  Luckily, with the Virtual Drosophila Lab, you can perform easy fruit fly crosses without these problems (and without having to explain to your principal why there is a sudden infestation of escaped fruit flies in your classroom).

In the Virtual Drosophila Lab, as a teacher, you can get your own log-in and set up class accounts.  Then, the students use a class code to create their own student accounts.  After the students have accounts, they can begin making genetic crosses with virtual fruit flies.  There are several mutations from which to choose ranging from your basic dominant and recessive traits, to sex-linked traits, to lethal traits.  The traditional two-week growth period is turned into about ten seconds, and the computer automatically separates your offspring into phenotypic and gendered groups to analyze your data.

In addition to letting students experience more real-life genetics work, this website offers advantages to teachers in the lab report section.  Your students can create their lab reports within the program, entering the data they’ve saved as they go.  And then, you can grade their lab reports right in the program using a pre-made rubric.  Or, if you want, you can modify or enter your own rubric.  The website will also show you the education standards that it meets, and once you have your own teacher account, you can access a printed version of the rubrics and an instruction manual.

All in all, this website makes Drosophila experimentation accessible to educators and students .  You can do it with your middle- or high-school students, and you can avoid the uncomfortable discussion about why you have to virgin the flies at two in the morning. -REBECCAH HAINES

Virtual Drosophila Lab

Teacher Account Creation for Virtual Drosophila Lab

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PDF to Word, recently out of closed beta and now in open beta, touts itself as “The Most Accurate PDF-to-Word Converter.” There are many PDF to Word conversion utilities, both for pay and for free, available on the web these days, but none of the free tools handled pdf files like PDF to Word does. This service handled everything I threw at it.  Many of the other conversion utilities are unable to convert any special formatting or images contained in the PDF files, but it seems PDF to Word had no trouble in handling these items.

Back in January of 2008, Instructify reviewed a free application called Free PDF to Word Converter.  One clear advantage that PDF to Word has over this app, and the many others that are available, is that PDF to Word is online. There is nothing to download or install. This is especially important in many education settings where the installation of software is prohibited. In the one test I tried with Free PDF to Word Converter, I attempted to convert a PDF report from Google Analytics. PDF to Word Converter failed and told me that the file is either corrupt or encrypted (neither is true.) PDF to Word handled the conversion perfectly.

PDF to Word is a far superior product to any others that I tested. The ease of use and the fact that it’s online and free, make it, by far, the best utility available for PDF to word conversion. -JERRY SWIATEK

PDF to Word

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It’s time once again for me to harrangue you about Instructify’s comments policy. We moderate all comments, so if your brilliant reply to one of our posts doesn’t show up right away, we’re not ignoring you. We’ll approve comments as fast as we can (FYI, that usually occurs more quickly during business hours). However, once we’ve accepted your comment, you’ll be automagically approved for all future comments.

Now that you know the score, send us a comment and let us know what we’re doing right, or what we’re screwing up. Or just say hi, that’s fine, too. -BILL FERRIS

Every year, there’s an announcement that the dictionary has added new words like “fanboy,” “muggle,” or “air quotes.” Well, to make room for those, they have to drop less-commonly used words like “blateration” (blabber or chatter), “jungible” (that which may be joined) or “jobler” (someone who does small jobs; also, a great name for a Web 2.0 startup). If you feel this grave injustice will surely bring theomeny (the fury of God) to Merriam-Webster and the OED alike, you should immediately head to Save The Words.

Save The Words lets you adopt one of these cast-off words so that you can use them “in conversation and correspondence, as frequently as possible to the very best of [your] ability.” You can even print an adoption certificate.

If simply using your adopted word isn’t enough, you can order T-shirts with your word emblazoned on the front. But if you really want to bring a word back, Save The Words suggests tattooing your word or using it as a name for your new pet or child. However, you may be better off having each student in your English class picking out a word and awarding a couple extra points if they can work it in to their next essay. -BILL FERRIS

Save The Words

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First of all, thank you for your faithful readership. Nothing pleases me more than knowing that you continue to devour every word that I write. I think its time that you and I took things to the next level. Aw, yeah. Time for a change of pace! I’m going to write faster and insert more strange links for no discernible purpose. Your job is to just keep reading.

But wait, you’re worried that you won’t be able to match my pace and keep up. That’s understandable. I can prattle on about any subject and type for miles, while you only have two eyes and a life outside of reading blogs. Spreeder is just the solution.

Spreeder helps you to train your eyes and brain for speed reading. Essentially, you copy and paste text to the site and it flashes each word in that body of text one-at-a-time for you to read. You can slow things down and speed things up by changing the settings, allowing you to make incremental gains. After you’ve got a pretty good clip going with the words per minute, you can change the chunk size. Now, instead of individual words, you can view small blocks of text all at once.

Even better is that there is a bookmarklet available for you to place in your browser’s toolbar. So the next time you want to read something, simply highlight that text on the page and click the Spreed! bookmarklet. A new page will open up with that text ready to go.

This flashcard-type method helps you eliminate subvocalization, which is when you read words with your internal speech. Pronouns and complex ideas can be stumbling blocks, however. Spreeder’s visualized delivery somewhat glances over punctuation and structure — road signs intentionally put there by the text’s author to clarify meaning, so use caution when showing Spreeder to your students. Spreeder is perfect for reading those blogs about celebs without make-up, not so much on those Bertrand Russell fan-fiction blogs. -NICK YINGLING

Spreeder

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