Instructify

BY BILL FERRIS

See the history of United States foreign relations. The State Department has launched the Office of the Historian website, chronicling U.S. foreign policy throughout our nation’s history.

The site is full of historical documents, photographs, and milestones. As you might expect, there’s a lot available. You can sift through all that history by searching according to presidential administration, theme, or by country. (more…)

BY BILL FERRIS

All writers need editors. Lots of writers have their own editors inside their heads. Some of these editors enjoy telling writers they’re no good, and that they’re wasting their time. The National Novel Writing Month Young Writers Program lets kids tell that internal editor to shut up so they can get some work done.

First, a little background: National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo) occurs every November, challenging authors of all skill levels to pen a novel of 50,000 words in only 30 days. The exercise is designed to get people to start creating for the fun of it without the pressure of trying to craft the next great literary classic. Last year 119,000 writers took the challenge. I did this myself in 2002 and found it to be a fun (and exhausting) exercise.

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BY BILL FERRIS

In our never-ending quest to help teachers get valuable video content in front of their students’ eyeballs, we’ve found this offer: you can download WinX DVD Author and WinX DVD Ripper for free during October. Normally selling for around $30 each, these programs allow you to burn pretty much any video file — MOV, MPEG, AVI, WMV and FLV are supported, among others — directly onto a DVD disc. You can also create your own fancy DVD menu. Eh? Eh?

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BY BILL FERRIS

Do you like birds? Perhaps more to the point, are you teaching a unit on birds? If so, make All About Birds the next site you visit. Created by the Cornell Lab or Ornithology, All About Birds strives to be “the Web’s best and most comprehensive resource for North American birds, bird watching, and bird conservation — accessible to everyone for free.” It’s a lofty goal, but if this site didn’t achieve it, I can’t imagine anyone else has.

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BY BILL FERRIS

Scribblar makes student collaboration really easy. It presents users a large white canvas and arms them with an array of pencils, line and shape tools, and colors. Students can add images easily as well, either by uploading photos or by inserting snapshots of websites. These functions are all very intuitive, even for folks without a lot of graphics experience.

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BY BILL FERRIS

As teachers, we’re tasked with molding students into intelligent, productive citizens. That includes more than just homework. Volunteering is a wonderful trait to instill in students, and at the very least, looks great on a college application, too. You can help your students get involved in their community by directing them to Serve.gov.

At Serve.gov, students can find hundreds of volunteer service opportunities within a few miles of home. They can search by their service interest area, enter their zip code, and they’ll get a Google-Maps-Enabled list of results with details, dates, and driving directions.

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Cornell’s Round Robin blog is for the birds (sorry)
Round Robin: The Cornell Blog of Ornithology has a lot of fascinating bird content, including video, audio, and images. The blog has articles about migration, learning flight calls, even an obituary for Ithaca, a 37-year-old golden eagle.

What are parents afraid to tell you?
It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas parent-teacher conference season. A lot of parents will be meeting you for the first time, leading to all the hazards of first-time interactions — awkwardness, shyness, and occasionally, tension. TheApple.com’s list of 10 Things Parents Won’t Tell Teachers provides several unspoken irritations of parents.

See the sun up close at The Sun in Motion
One of the first lessons I learned as a kid was not to look at the sun. Extreme astronomer Gary Palmer wants you to disregard that advice and take a good long look into that burning ball of hellfire via the safety of your computer monitor at his site, The Sun in Motion.

Share questions, notes and ideas with Wallwisher
Wallwisher gives your students a set of interactive sticky notes they can use to post questions or ideas. Once you set up your Wallwisher account, you’ll get a shareable URL. Students can post their comments and questions simply by double-clicking the wall and typing their notes. They can also add pictures, links and images.

Through the magic of the interweb, you can watch Bill Ferris’ and Jason Don Forsythe’s  presentation at the LEARN NC 2009 Fall Interactive Conference. “Technology integration with Instructify,” along with the other eight terrific sessions, is available right now on the conference’s session archives page.

Really, you ought to catch the other sessions, too — there’s stuff on project-based learning, putting together a professional development plan, blended learning, and lots more. All videos include a replay of the conference’s ongoing live chat, with all the supplemental links, ideas, and witty banter therin.

Technology integration with Instructify (19:49)

LEARN NC Fall Interactive Conference 2009 — Session archives

Related stuff:

Attend LEARN NC’s 2009 interactive conference virtually

BY BILL FERRIS

Wallwisher gives your students a set of interactive sticky notes they can use to post questions or ideas. Once you set up your Wallwisher account, you’ll get a shareable URL. Students can post their comments and questions simply by double-clicking the wall and typing their notes. They can also add pictures, links and images.

If you have a digital projector, you could display Wallwisher at the beginning of class so students can post questions about their homework. It’s also a handy tool for brainstorming or sharing notes, especially if kids are working on a group project from two different locations.

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BY BILL FERRIS

One of the first lessons I learned as a kid was not to look at the sun. As lessons go, it was a pretty easy one to learn, since ignoring it kinda hurts. Extreme astronomer Gary Palmer wants you to disregard that advice and take a good long look into that burning ball of hellfire via the safety of your computer monitor at his site, The Sun in Motion.

(more…)

BY BILL FERRIS

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas parent-teacher conference season. For a few parents, this is just a formality, the latest conversation in a year-long dialogue. Of course, a lot of parents will be meeting you for the first time, leading to all the hazards of first-time interactions — awkwardness, shyness, and occasionally, tension.

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BY BILL FERRIS

“Birdies are friends!” That’s what my two-year-old son says. He even thinks an owl lives in the ceiling fan in his room. If that’s not a ringing endorsement for the avian kind, I don’t know what is. He especially loves the “birdie book,” a book from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology that plays the songs of 250 birds.

Given how much he likes the book, I’m a little nervous about showing him another great bird resource from Cornell. Round Robin: The Cornell Blog of Ornithology has a lot of fascinating bird content, including video, audio, and images that my little boy will probably want to look at all day long. (more…)

BY BILL FERRIS

Happy Monday, dear readers. To ease you back into the work week, I thought we’d begin with a fun ice breaker. (Well, I think it’s fun. Your actual fun may vary.)

Consider the tattoo in the picture. Someone, quite possibly a mad scientist, has gotten the entire periodic table tattooed on his arm. For the sake of argument, let’s assume it’s a real tattoo.

Now say you’re a science teacher about to give a test on the elements. Do you make this student cover up the tattoo? Why or why not?

Photo credit: o2b on Flickr.

Make and share three-minute screencasts with Screenjelly
Screenjelly, the latest free screencasting application, counts on simplicity to differentiate it from its competitors. It’s a little light on features, but by eliminating options such as choosing the size of your recording window (Screenjelly records the full screen automatically), it makes it easy to just start recording.

ToonDoo makes creating comic strips easy
Just because all your students aren’t artists, that doesn’t mean they can’t create their own comic strips. ToonDoo makes it easy to create a comic by using stock characters and scenes.

Examine energy issues at Powering a Nation
Powering a Nation, a multimedia project from the University of North Carolina School of Journalism and Mass Communication, looks at the cost of our current energy situation, the possible alternatives, as well as the consequences of making the sorts of wholesale changes that green energy would bring.

Memidex bookmarklet makes word definitions leap off the page
When I’m reading content on the web, I hate to have to stop what I’m doing to look up a word. Here’s guessing that you and your students do, too. Rather than navigating away from the page in search of a definition and running the risk of then getting distracted by something shiny, try this new browser bookmarklet from Memidex.

Trivia games abound at Sporcle
As schools move away from rote memorization of facts, what happens to those kids who like to rattle off the state capitals or list all the presidents? They can put their knowledge of educational trivia to good use at Sporcle, a site filled with countless list-style quizzes that will exercise kids’ knowledge of…well, just about everything.

BY BILL FERRIS

As schools move away from rote memorization of facts, what happens to those kids who like to rattle off the state capitals or list all the presidents? They can put their knowledge of educational trivia to good use at Sporcle, a site filled with countless list-style quizzes that will exercise kids’ knowledge of…well, just about everything.

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