Instructify

BY REBECCAH HAINES

Let’s say you’ve just begun a multimedia project in your techno-savvy classroom. You want your kids to use the latest tech tools to create a wonderfully creative product. Inevitably, this involves adding video clips to whatever they’re creating – blogs, wikis, what-have-you. As great as YouTube is, it really isn’t something you can just let kids go and run searches on at school (that is, of course, if you can get it at your school). So what’s an awesome, “technorate” teacher like yourself to do? Well, next time, try ZuiTube.

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BY BILL FERRIS

It’s time for the 2009 Edublog Awards. Below are Instructify’s nominations. I’ve undoubtedly forgotten some of your favorites. If you’d like to nominate some deserving educators yourself, head to the Edublog Awards homepage to learn how.

Best individual blog: dy/dan
Dan Meyer makes math sound fun. That’s coming from an English major.

Best individual tweeter: @web20classroom
Steven W. Anderson always has lots of great tools to share, and we’ve gotten a few article ideas from him.

Best student blog: studenthacks.org
Productivity tips geared toward students. It’s geared toward a college audience, and may or may not still be active, but it has lots of useful resources to help kids get through the rigors of homework and student life.

Best resource sharing blog: Free Technology for Teachers
Lots of handy tools to make teaching more fun.

Most influential blog post: dy/dan — What I Would Do With This: Groceries
Because of this post, I’ve reclaimed an hour from my life from standing in grocery lines. Oh yeah, you can use it in your math course, too.

BY BILL FERRIS

Just because you don’t know web design doesn’t mean you can’t have a nice-looking website. Wix lets you create a Flash-based website from one of their many templates, or build a site from scratch. Here’s a sample site I made in about five minutes. Wix templates allow you to create sub-pages, upload photos, and incorporate animations into your design.

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BY BILL FERRIS

iRubric is a slick way to create and share rubrics for assignments. Like Rubric Machine, you can create a rubric for an assignment in minutes. The interface is fairly intuitive, and made more so by a helpful series of how-to videos posted on the site.

Of course, one of the primary advantages to an online rubric application is the ability to share and adapt existing rubrics. At iRubric, you can find hundreds of rubrics developed by fellow teachers, all organized according to subject and grade level.

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Learn to type at TypingWeb
If there’s one foundation skill kids need for the 21st century, it’s typing. It only makes sense that kids develop a good working knowledge of the keyboard beyond the hunt-and-peck method. They can do that without signing up for a typing class at TypingWeb.

apostrophe.me takes the confusion out of using apostrophes
Do your students struggle with apostrophes? Or is that apostrophe’s? Aaugh! Lucky for them, there’s a handy chart available on the web that shows how those flying commas work. Go to apostrophe.me and check out “How To Use An Apostrophe,” which is exactly what it sounds like.

Google offers scholarships for minority and special-needs students
Google, apparently fed-up with the stereotype of programmers being a bunch of pasty white dudes, is trying to open up the computer science field to women, minorities, and special-needs students with a series of scholarships. These $10,000 scholarships will go to qualifying students who intend to pursue computer science in college.

Map out your classroom with Classroom Architect
You could use mind-mapping resources such as Gliffy to create your new floor plan digitally, but why not use a purpose-built application to do the work for you? Classroom Architect from 4teachers.org lets you drag and drop your desks, tables, chairs, TVs, and whatever else you have in your classroom without breaking a sweat.

Write, edit, collaborate online for free: Zoho Writer
Longtime Instructify readers know there are a bevy of free and web-based word processors out there. Only a few of them, however, are powerful enough that I wouldn’t miss Word. I dare say that Zoho Writer is one of those few.

BY BILL FERRIS

A lot of schools and families shell out big money to Microsoft every year for MS Word. It’s my word processor of choice, but I’ve been lucky in that it came pre-installed on my computer. If I had to actually find a word processor on my own, I’d face a real dilemma: on one hand, I’ve gotten really used to Word’s format, as well as the level of formatting I can do on documents. On the other hand, I’m a cheapskate.

Longtime Instructify readers know there are a bevy of free and web-based word processors out there. Only a few of them, however, are powerful enough that I wouldn’t miss Word. I dare say that Zoho Writer is one of those few.

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BY BILL FERRIS

Who doesn’t love moving furniture? The answer, of course, is pretty much everybody. Changing up the floor plan for your classroom involves moving desks, rugs and shelves around until you achieve feng shui (or you just say “good enough” and give up), or killing a few trees as you sketch up then toss out flawed, not-to-scale maps of possible layouts.

You could use mind-mapping resources such as Gliffy to create your new floor plan digitally, but why not use a purpose-built application to do the work for you? Classroom Architect from 4teachers.org lets you drag and drop your desks, tables, chairs, TVs, and whatever else you have in your classroom without breaking a sweat.

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BY BILL FERRIS

Google, apparently fed-up with the stereotype of programmers being a bunch of pasty white dudes, is trying to open up the computer science field to women, minorities, and special-needs students with a series of scholarships. These $10,000 scholarships will go to qualifying students who intend to pursue computer science in college.

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BY BILL FERRIS

Do your students struggle with apostrophes? Or is that apostrophe’s? Aaugh! Lucky for them, there’s a handy chart available on the web that shows how those flying commas work. Go to apostrophe.me and check out “How To Use An Apostrophe,” which is exactly what it sounds like.

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BY BILL FERRIS

If there’s one foundation skill kids need for the 21st century, it’s typing. Yeah, it seems basic, but in a computerized society, pretty much everything is done on computer. The keyboard is how we interact with computers and the internet, and therefore, much of the world. It only makes sense that kids develop a good working knowledge of the keyboard beyond the hunt-and-peck method. They can do that without signing up for a typing class at TypingWeb.

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You’ve got a couple more days to apply for a Planet Connect environmental grant
The $1000 Planet Connect Environmental Grant deadline has been extended until November 15. If you read our post about last year’s grant, you know it’s awarded to the best solutions proposed by students to solve environmental problems.

Download chemistry podcasts at ChemPod
The most recent episode features two Nobel-Prize winners chatting about ribosomes and the reprogramming thereof. Count on developments involving the usual heavy hitters in chemistry, including DNA, RNA, MIT, and the GFP (that’s green fluorescent protein, a discovery that netted Martin Chalfie a Nobel Prize — do you see a trend in the quality of guests this program gets?).

Stop by Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood on the web
When I was a kid, I always wanted to go to Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Like actually go there, meet Speedy Delivery, check out the Trolley, all of it. If I’d only had the good sense to be born twenty years later, I could have paid a visit via the internet to the excellent Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood website.

Build your own typefaces with FontStruct
The most obvious use for FontStruct would be as an art project — students can really exercise their creativity, as well as learn about typography, an important skill for any future graphic designers. World-language teachers can get in on the act, too. FontStruct lets you develop letters for several different alphabets, including Katakana (Japanese), Bopomofo (Mandarin Chinese), Arabic, Hebrew, Bengali, and others.

BY EMILY JACK

In Europe in the early 1600s, witch hunts were common practice and people were burned at the stake. Health care included bloodletting and surgery without anesthesia. And expeditions to the so-called New World were launching a new era of cruelty and genocide. But even during those dark times, a scientific revolution was underway that would change the way humans understood themselves and their place in the world forever.

It was 1609 when Galileo Galilei turned his telescope to the skies and began the observations that ushered in modern astronomy. 400 years later, the International Astronomical Union and UNESCO have declared 2009 the International Year of Astronomy to honor Galileo and to celebrate the advances in astronomy since his time.

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BY BILL FERRIS

As the perpetrator of some of the worst handwriting in a fifty mile radius, I’ve grown to love choosing the right font. The right typeface can produce the sort of artful lettering my hands can’t. Or so I thought. FontStruct lets me use my hands (by way of my mouse) to create my own fonts that I can download and use. Oh, okay, so it’s not exactly handwriting, but it’s the most legible thing my hands have ever produced.

FontStruct works via a grid method. Simply fill in the grid with blocks of various shapes to form each letter. Some of the existing fonts on the site allow you to clone them, so you can get a better look at how the magic happens. There are a lot of shapes to try out on the grid, and creating an entire alphabet will take some time, but isn’t it worth it to have your own custom-built typeface?

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BY BILL FERRIS

Are you one of those forward-thinking teachers who uses smart phones and text messages in class? Do projects like a 21st Century scavenger hunt make you excited? I’m going to go ahead and assume the answer is yes (a bold assumption I know, but please humor me) so I can tell you about textPlus, an app for the iPhone and iPod Touch that lets you send unlimited texts for free.

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BY BILL FERRIS

When I was a kid, I always wanted to go to Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Like actually go there, meet Speedy Delivery, check out the Trolley, all of it. If I’d only had the good sense to be born twenty years later, I could have paid a visit via the internet to the excellent Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood website.

Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood on the PBS Kids website lets you look at classic clips from the show. Elementary kids can watch video field trips in which Fred Rogers takes in a performance by Yo-Yo Ma, visits a museum, and guides kids on a trip to the doctor’s office for a checkup. Kids can read stories, play games, and build a neighborhood of their own.

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