Instructify

Pencils? Check.

Notebooks? Check.

Online word processor application? Check.

In addition to standbys like pens, pads, and the ever-popular Trapper Keeper, today’s learners need a new set of school supplies, too.  These tools enable students to take advantage of the new learning possibilities the Web has to offer, such as making research easier, or finding better, cheaper ways of doing what they’re already doing.

In that spirit, here’s my top 10 new-school school supplies (all of which, by the way, are completely free).

1. OpenOffice — Why pay a bunch of money to Microsoft when you can get top-quality, MS-compatible programs for free? The OpenOffice suite packs a word processor, spreadsheets, presentation software, graphics software, and a database program. The open-source OpenOffice can do pretty much anything Microsoft Office can do, except drain your bank account.
2. A Cell phone — Whether it’s for podcasting, conducting surveys, or staying organized, the cellular phone has a huge amount of educational potential for those who know how to use it.
3. Remember the Milk –Back in my day, I wrote inky scribbles on my palm to stay organized. Today’s kids have Remember the Milk, which can keep track of assignments, activities, chores, and all applicable due dates and priorities. It also has fewer smudges.
4. Diigo — Invaluable for research, Diigo lets students bookmark and annotate webpages so they won’t forget why they bookmarked a page in the first place. They can also read other folks’ notes or annotations for further insight. Like any good Web 2.0 tool, Diigo lets them share their bookmarks and annotations with friends, too.
5. BibMe — Once students have found some great sources on Diigo, how do they cite them? Nobody has the time or energy to leaf through their MLA style manual to find the proper citation format for a newspaper article or whatever. If your students can muster the effort to enter a title, author, or ISBN number, BibMe will do the hard part and churn out a citation pre-formatted for the bibliography. If only the entire research paper process was this simple.
6. Google Docs — Does many of the things OpenOffice does. Google Docs also adds a collaborative element, as multiple students will be able to edit a document, spreadsheet or presentation.
7. OpenDrive – No more excuses about hard drive crashes. OpenDrive offers 1GB of storage online. Students can sync it with files on their hard drive for backups, collaborate with friends on projects, or use it to store their ever-expanding music collection. And for the time being at least, it’s free.
8. VoiceThread — A slideshow with a soundtrack, VoiceThread lets students tell stories visually as well as textually. Easily upload video, audio, even record narration via their cell phone (I told you those things were handy), with any luck VoiceThread will replace PowerPoint.
9. Adobe Photoshop Express Beta — If you thought Microsoft Office was expensive, check out the price tag for Adobe Photoshop. Fortunately, Photoshop Express Beta performs most of the photo editing functions students will need without costing a cent. They don’t even have to download anything. Now that’s express!
10. PB Wiki — Wikis are great for class projects and to cross-reference other pieces of information. And PB Wiki makes setting up a wiki a breeze, even if you don’t know a wiki from a blog.

As with any top 10 list, I had to exclude other worthy applications. Now’s your chance to tout your favorites (or to tell me what a jerk I am) in the comments. -BILL FERRIS

UPDATE: Okay, so cell phones aren’t exactly free. However, your students probably own them already, and most of the educational uses for them won’t cost you anything to implement.

Photo credit: jgodsey on flickr

Do you remember as a school age child taking trips to the art museums to see great works such as Van Gogh’s “Starry Night”, Seurat’s “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte”, or Da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa”? Yeah me neither. What a great trip that would have been. Don’t let money or geography prevent you from providing this opportunity to your students. Take them on a virtual field trip to The National Gallery of Art for a first-class artistic experience.

Students can stroll through the Sculpture Garden with a child-character named Gordon. As they wander through the garden then can view actual art sculptures and read Gordon’s description of the sculpture from his perspective. This is a great way for students to generate their own questions and conclusions on the art work.

After leaving the Sculpture Garden, your students can tour the artwork in the gallery by viewing art work of famous artists such as Tissot, Rogier van der Weyden, Heade, Leonardo da Vinci, Monet, O’Keeffe, and many more. In addition to viewing their work, this site provides information on the artist along with descriptions of their art work and questions to ponder as you view it. Once your students have toured the artwork they can give their own artistic abilities a try by visiting the Art Zone. There students can interact with and create many different types of art. From still life to abstract art to collage and mobile pieces, the sky’s the limit. -MONIQUE ST.LOUIS

The National Gallery of Art

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Let me preface this by saying that I love Flickr. I love it so much, in fact, that I pay an annual fee so I can upload an unlimited amount of photos and use all the other neat features that come with a “pro” account (you wouldn’t think that the “replace photo” function would come in handy very often, but it does!).

That being said, searching for images on Flickr can prove rather frustrating. Not only do the results sometimes seem irrelevant, but so many times I’ve been looking for an image to accompany something I’m working on — an article, a powerpoint presentation, etc — and I finally find the perfect image, only to realize that it’s not under the Creative Commons license. Frustrating!

Enter FlickrStorm, a neat little application that lets you easily search for images on Flickr with an advanced feature that looks only for those under specific Creative Commons licenses. It also finds more related and relevant images as it searches for more than just what you enter into the search field. FlickrStorm is an easy and thorough way to find images you need, without the frustration! -LAUREN FROHNE

FlickrStorm

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Ever see those motivation posters (you know the ones I’m talking about), and wanted make one of your own? Whether your vision was serious, sarcastic, or just silly, your dream can come true with Big Huge Labs Motivator poster generator.

Okay, so you can express your inner angel or devil with this toy, but how is it useful in the classroom? It’s a chance for your students to express their creativity. If they are doing a unit on persuasive writing (my sixth graders have a unit on perseverance),  this is a great  for projects on that theme.  However you use it, for good or ill, it’ll look great, plus you can order up posters to tack up on your walls. -ALICE MERCER

Motivator: Create your own customized motivational poster

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Teachers and students from across North Carolina learned the Alice programming language this summer during a workshop and camp at Duke University with support from the National Science Foundation and IBM. Alice uses simple commands to animate student-created movies and video games. According to the workshop organizer, Dr. Susan Rodger from Duke University, “Middle school students don’t really know what computer science is about. Alice is changing that by attracting both boys and girls with its virtual worlds storytelling and interactive capabilities. Our workshop showed that Alice can be used for problem solving and presentations in different disciplines such as math, science, English, art, business, and history.”

Students and teachers alike were drawn to the visual format. Tom Robertson, a middle school mathematics and technology teacher from Asheville, said, “This summer I had the opportunity to observe middle school students using Alice to build creative 3-dimensional interactive worlds. They were completely engrossed in the task at hand: computer programming. Clearly, Alice was providing a technology experience that went beyond the typical PowerPoint presentation.” Janie Torain, a business teacher from Person High School in Person County, agreed. She noted that students in her class will use Alice Programming software to explore multimedia production while creating presentations in a ”FUN-damentally’ different and more enjoyable way than ever before.”

Teachers from many disciplines beyond technology and career education connected with Alice. Math teacher Bridgette Scott created a world for teaching the coordinate plane. Math teacher Cheri Grantlin from Durham plans to integrate Alice into creating engaging class starters. Nashville science teacher Alisa White noted Alice’s assessment possibilities. She said, “Worlds created by middle school students effectively promote interdisciplinary understanding, problem solving and learning fundamental concepts in life, earth, and physical science within a short period of time. It is a great assessment tool.”

Humanities teachers recognized Alice as a way to encourage student creativity and engage students with literature. According to Person County teacher Andrea Payne, “Alice slows the thinking down and helps a child think about ‘thinking about.’ Storyboarding takes thoughts from abstract to concrete. This is how screenwriters do it: they storyboard.”

For students, the most important aspect of Alice was the opportunity for self-expression. Jesse, a middle school student at the camp, said, “It’s interactive; that’s cool. It’s open - you know - there’s a lot you can do with it.” Brittany, another middle schooler, was looking forward to using Alice for projects. She said, “I like that you can actually create your own ideas and express yourself and have fun with it.”

Teachers who are interested in Alice can download free middle school lesson plans and materials from the Duke workshop. -DR. SUSAN RODGER

Note: This article was put together by Dr. Susan Rodger and several teachers attending the Adventures in Alice Programming Workshop held at Duke University in June and July 2008.

Alice (free download)

Free Alice lesson plans for middle school

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It’s a good thing they didn’t let me design the Instructify site. We probably would’ve ended up with a generic graphic of a chalk board on a background of brown and light blue, one of about three color schemes I know looks good.

If you have art students as inept as I at choosing colors, LaurenMarie at Creative Curio reminds us that picking good color combinations is as easy as looking at your trusty color wheel. I felt pretty foolish when the article reminded me that you can find complimentary colors simply by looking at opposite sides of the color wheel.

This is helpful advice for students in your painting class or who are experimenting with Web design. If you’re not an art teacher, it’s equally handy for choosing which color of paint matches your couch, or just trying to put an outfit together when you get dressed in the morning.

The problem with everybody having access to programs like Photoshop is that it convinces artistically talentless folks like myself that they’re graphic designers. Maybe if more of us n00bs learned the basics of color and design, the Web would be a better looking place. -BILL FERRIS

The Color Wheel and Color Theory via Creative Curio

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Lights, camera, video…in the classroom? You betcha! If you think kids like watching videos, wait until they start making them. Creating stuff is at a higher level of Bloom’s Taxonomy than bubbling in a test sheet. But where to begin?

This handy and easy-to-understand guide from Education.com on producing an educational video is a great place to start. It breaks the process down into pre-production, production, and post production, step-by-step. You don’t need a lot of fancy equipment, as most digital cameras today have a video mode on them (my experience with Flip has been fantastic). I would add only one point to this otherwise superb article - for editing there is a free resource for Windows users in Movie Maker. It is not the most stable program (in the interest of disclosure, I have had Adobe Premiere Elements lock on me too, just not as often), but I’ll share a resource that should help you with these problems, PapaJohn - Movie Maker 2 - Issues-1.

A few other resources to help you out are Mathew Needleman’s excellent Video in the Classroom.com site. If you think your kids are too young, wait till you see what he’s done with 2nd graders. If there is an NYU Film school for videos in education it’s the AFI (American Film Institute) which does a lot of workshops teaching educators how to effectively help students make interesting, high-quality videos. -ALICE MERCER

Producting an Educational Video via Education.com
PapaJohn - Movie Maker 2 - Issues-1
AFI ScreenNation
Video in the Classroom.com — Integrating Video Production in the Elementary Classroom and Beyond

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Photo Credit: Stacy Lynn Baum on flickr

Lights, camera, action! Looking for a way to bring your students’ book reports, science/social studies projects, or writing projects to life? Let them create a Claymation Movie.

Claymation is a type of stop motion animation created by moving an object in very small amounts and taking a picture between each movement - think the California Raisins or Wallace and Gromit. You then run all of the pictures together at a fast pace to create the illusion that the object(s) are really moving.

Thanks to the low cost and high availability of digital technology, you can create your own claymation movie with only a computer, digital camera, tripod, and clay. You start by placing a clay figure(s) in front of a backdrop. A cut-out box works great for this. You take a digital picture then move the object(s) a very small amount and take another picture. You continue in this sequence until you have moved the object(s) through all of the motions to tell your story. To liven up your movies or create more drama, incorporate props with your clay object(s). You then insert the digital pictures into a program like Movie Maker. You can make the duration of each photo frame as short as necessary to give your clay figure(s) the illusion that they are moving when you play the movie. If you want to enhance your Claymation you can add narration by using Audacity or add some sound effects by using Sound Dogs. -MONIQUE ST.LOUIS

Claymation Movie - Shooting Hoops, courtesy a 2nd grade student in Burke County, NC

You want me to draw a picture for you? Well, I’ve got the programs to do it. Who doesn’t want more self-expression? Who has longed for something more interesting than MS Paint? Here, dear readers, are alternatives!

1. art.com artPad will let you paint with two tools, a brush (which you can change the size on) and in an homage to Jackson Pollack, a paint can that you can use to splatter paint from.
2. Flash PAINT will give you a grid to work on (nice for linear work), and you can change the paint/pencil depth create a realistic pencil or watercolor effect.
3. offtype.net has the easiest interface, and starts you immediately on a canvas. This one is great for young ‘uns, or folks with limited computer skills. Oh, you can also embed (put a copy) of the drawing canvas in your blog or Webpage.
4. Cubescape will give you a three dimensional option, PLUS you get to blow up (as in explode, not expand) your work, or replay its construction.
5. viscosity - it’s difficult to describe what you are creating here. Imagine a multi layer pudding in a clear bowl, and swirling a spoon through it moving the layers and colors. That’s sort of what you end up with. Anyway check out the example above. It’s really easy to use, and the results are interesting.

art.com artPad
Flash PAINT
offtype.net
Cubescape
viscosity

I’d like to credit Larry Ferlazzo for tipping me off to most of these. -ALICE MERCER

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There are few artists more suited to use in the primary and elementary classroom than the late Keith Haring. Many of you may not know who Keith Haring is, but you’ll recognize his quirky and iconic “men” (see the example above). His work was used for a number of public campaigns benefiting children and AIDS, from which he died in 1990. Now that work lives on at the website, Haring Kids.

Haring Kids is wonderful not only because of the art (which is kid friendly), but the writing is also suitable for early readers. The site boasts a variety of activities. First, kids can find animations of typical Haring figures. What’s the Story? is a great writing prompt for language arts. You can also find e-Cards, printable coloring sheets, and games (like Hangman and tic-tac-toe), all of which are rendered in Haring-script and with his figures. The art and project sections show examples from children.

This site is great for both art and language art instruction. So add some (primary) colors into your classroom with Haring Kids. -ALICE MERCER

Haring Kids

In any given classroom you’ll find lots of different talents and interests, and it can be difficult for one teacher to find the time and resources to address them all. And, with school budget cuts hitting arts departments hardest, schools in general have fewer resources to let kids explore their talents and and give them a much-needed creative outlet. So, wouldn’t it be great if a virtual utopia dedicated exclusively to the visual and performing arts existed in which your student could run wild with their creativity?

Believe it or not, this utopia of the arts exists! Artopia is a free, interactive Web-based arts experience designed for middle school students that lets them explore the arts, including: theater, sculpture, dance, music, painting and media arts. Your students can go behind the scenes of a theater, learn about choreographing dance performances, create storyboards, get behind the soundboard in a music studio, view important paintings and works of art, and so much more. And, on top of all that, they can even watch performances and write critical reviews of them. There’s so much to do and see in Artopia, and luckily your students can keep track of it all with their own virtual portfolio, which they can access by registering and logging into the site.

Artopia also offers a special area for teachers with downloadable lesson plans and classroom materials that tie in with the activities on the site, making this a great way to let your students’ creativity shine and also encourage them think critically about art.

So cater to all the artistic talents and tastes that co-exist in your classroom, maybe they’ll even find some common ground in Artopia. -LAUREN FROHNE

Artopia

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Plautus once said, “No guest is so welcome in a friend’s house that he will not become a nuisance after three days.” He obviously never met Flat Stanley.

If you haven’t met him, either, Flat Stanley is a little guy cut out of paper, sent to young students from other children in schools the world over. The program works like this: students make their own Flat Stanleys and take him around with them, keeping a journal of their activities (went for ice cream, cleaned their room, etc.). After showing him a good time, the kids mail Flat Stanley and a copy of the journal to another school. These students there take Stanley out on the town, too, jotting down what they do, before sending him back home again, often with souvenirs and pictures. As someone who enjoys travel, I’ve never been so jealous of a paper doll.

The Flat Stanley Project is basically a souped-up pen pal program. Thousands of schools participate every year, and the only costs are paper and stamps. As the Flat Stanley website says, “By sending a Flat Stanley it’s as if the senders and the recipients have a mutual friend - a little flat guy they can both talk about.” The Flat Stanley Project is a fun way for your students to interact with kids from far-away areas, and they can associate a face with their new friends, even if its only made of paper.

You can sign up your class to send and receive Flat Stanleys at the Flat Stanley website. It’ll be a fun class project, and you’ll never have a more considerate guest. -BILL FERRIS

Flat Stanley

You might have read this review of the Read*Write*Think Activities which described a “veritable playground” of fun, and instructionally sound activities. In case you have not taken the time to check this site out, I wanted to share one of the fantastic activities available on the site, Bio-Cube, that had some of my fourth grade students engaged, writing, and loving it. And best of all, at the end they got to make “art” from their work.

What is a Bio-Cube and where can you get them? Bio-Cube is an online flash (animated) application where students (or even you, dear teacher) fill in details about a character, or themselves - who doesn’t love to talk about themselves? It then formats what you put in, and when you print it out, it has a template with easy-to-use instructions to cut it out and glue it together in a cube. It’s writing, it’s math, it’s awesome. Check it out! -ALICE MERCER

Bio-Cube
Bio-Cube Lesson Plan for Teachers
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Back in February, Jeremy blogged about Doodle 4 Google, a contest where students redesigned the Google logo based around the question, “What if…?”. The entries are in, and you can now vote for your favorites. The winning drawing will replace the usual Google logo on May 22.

If you missed the contest deadline, you can still take advantage of the lesson plans Google has made available for the project. The contest’s central question, “What if…?” can be a springboard for lots of creative ideas beyond just the Google logo. For example, I think the Instructify banner at the top of this page would be a great choice. -BILL FERRIS

Doodle 4 Google - Vote

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Ever have that student that just can’t seem to get a concept (especially in mathematics) without concrete examples? How about the ones that do better when they make something, rather than taking notes and doing calculations? That probably describes 50-85% of some classrooms. Well dear readers, we have some tools for you.

Are you teaching about symmetry and reflections? Kaleidoscopes are a great way to teach students about these concepts. Myoats is a great online tool for this. It lets users create kaleidoscopic images with 1 to 16 lines of symmetry. You can even save your creations as an image file. There is also a library of images created by others that you can use as examples.

Tessellations are great for visually showing patterns, and Math Cats’ Tessellation Town! is easy enough for primary kids to start building. It gives you a choice of different tiles to work, and you can start clicking away.

Do you have tappers and drummers in your class? Spring is their season, so let them go to Phil Tulga’s Playing Fraction Pies to get all those phat beats out of their system, AND learn about fractions.

So give the right side of your kids’ brains a workout during math with these fun and easy-to-use sites. -ALICE MERCER

Myoats
Math Cats’ Tessellation Town!
Phil Tulga’s Playing Fraction Pies

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