Instructify

BY REBECCAH HAINES

As most of you know very well, the day-to-day (not to mention hour-to-hour) tasks of a teacher can be hectic and time-consuming. In addition to actually teaching the warm little bodies in our classes, we have to grade papers, attend meetings, participate in school leadership committees, create bulletin boards, set up for labs, meet with students, plan future lessons, prepare for and administer tests…the list seems endless. As if that isn’t enough, we’re also faced with the critical task of communicating with parents about their students and the classroom in general. Thankfully, the internet has made this task a little less time-consuming for teachers and parents. This article will discuss the many tools that can help you design a website to keep parents in the loop.

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BY BILL FERRIS

We’re looking for a few brave K-12 teachers to write more feature content for us. These features will show how to accomplish a specific instructional goal by using nontraditional methods (usually some nifty free technology). Please see some of our past features for examples.

Requirements:

You must be a practicing K-12 teacher or media specialist.

Though Instructify is based out of North Carolina, you needn’t be.

If we hire you, we’ll pay you $200 for each feature, upon publication. You’ll also have the opportunity to write shorter application-review articles for $25 each.

Please send the following to Bill Ferris, editor, at instructify[at]learnnc.org:

1. A pitch for a feature article you’d like to write. Your pitch should focus on the learning objective you’re trying to achieve first, the technology used to achieve it second. FYI, features must be at least 1,500 words, so make sure your proposal reflects an article of that length.
2. Two writing samples. Content similar to what we publish on Instructify is preferred, but feel free to send anything that shows off your writing ability. (Note: not poetry)
3. Your resume.

I’ll check my email on Monday, May 24 at 8 a.m. If I’ve received your application by then, I’ll consider it. If I haven’t, I won’t. Your interest is much appreciated, and I look forward to working with a few of you very soon.

Photo credit: Looking Glass on flickr

BY BILL FERRIS

This week’s MBTN features an express flight to Mars, Web 2.0 project ideas, alternatives to book reports, and online sites where you can learn a new language. Read about all of it after the jump.

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There are few places on Earth that seem to me more remote than Greenland.  Not to mention cold.  And dark.  During the winter, the sun really does not even rise.  Sounds like a place for your next vacation, right?  Thanks to NASA Cryospheric scientist Lora Koenig, you can experience winter in Greenland without making the actual trip and braving the minus-50 degree Celsius temperatures.  She spent this past winter in Greenland blogging about her experience.

As you read her weekly entries, you can come to understand some of the important work she is doing in Greenland.  She collected time measurements of snow surface temperature, microwave brightness temperature, and snow surface height.  These measurements all help with ongoing projects that NASA has involving several satellites.  In her entries, Lora tells you about her work and what life is really like in the winter in Greenland.  Even better, there are lots of pictures and a summit webcam and weather station!

In a classroom, this site could be utilized in different ways.  As part of a geography class, it could be used to highlight the different geographical features that exist in Greenland.  Your class could take a virtual field trip while immersed in the personal stories of the author.  In science, this website could be used to highlight important aspects of the  process of scientific inquiry.  This blog provides a great view into what it’s like to actually work as a scientist.  Using the weather station data, a math class could create graphs that track daily temperatures, and could even use other resources to add some local data comparisons to their graphs.  This blog opens up a new part of the world to your students.

As long as you can get past the chilliness that will seep into your bones as you peruse the site (I think I need to go put on a sweater), you’ll find at least a few ways that this resource could be useful to you and your students.  -REBECCAH HAINES

Winter Camp: A Blog from the Greenland Summit

Summit Camp Webcam and Weather Station

Related stuff:

Learn about hibernation

Meet Me at the Corner: Virtual field trips for kids, by kids

Every once in a while, I’ll hit “Save” on one of these here Instructify posts, only to have a glitch somewhere in the system log me out, thereby destroying my eight-paragraph screed about how cool Android phones are. Refusing to take the cosmic hint that the world doesn’t care what I have to say, I now copy all my text before saving. Just Ctrl-A to select everything in my text window, then Ctrl-C to copy it (of course, the right-click menu can accomplish the same thing). If things go awry, I can just start a new post and paste my post (Ctrl-V) into the window verbatim.

If you’ve given blogging assignments to your students, this little trick could save you a lot of cries that the cloud ate a student’s homework. This is also good to remember if your school’s internet connection is less than reliable. Four keystrokes and about one second of time could save you and your students a lot of time and effort rewriting. -BILL FERRIS

Photo credit: Jamison on Flickr.

20 Kids * 20 Kites * 20 Minutes
From the Big Wind Kite Factory in Hawaii, this link provides a complete rundown of instructions and supplies to get 20 of your students building kites and getting them in the air in 20 minutes. Sounds like a cool springtime project for an elementary art class.

Top 10 Tools for a Free Online Education
Want to learn programming? Maybe you’d like to learn to play an instrument or speak a language. Lifehacker has 10 great tools you or your students can use to learn cool new skills.

10 Must-Try Social Media Sites for College Students
While Instructify’s audience is predominantly K-12, a lot of your students will head off to college someday — possibly in a few short months. These 10 sites can help them thrive in their new learning environment by helping them find internships, stay organized, or maybe just find a ride to class.

20+ Must-Read Education Technology Blogs for Teachers, Students, and e-Learners
If Instructify whets your appetite for even more ways to bring nifty tools into your classroom, check out this list, which is pretty much what it sounds like. The fact that they’ve omitted Instructify is clearly just an oversight. -BILL FERRIS

Photo credit: .mands. on Flickr.

25 Item To-Do List Everyone Should be Doing - If you’re not already making to-do lists in order to be the most productive you can be, maybe now is the time to start. This list from BANDBMAMA’s Blog is a great place to start. Such helpful items as taking a walk to smiling at others can really make your day feel great and productive.

9 Things Every New Blogger Should Know -Blogging doesn’t have to be difficult. If you and your class aren’t blogging already, don’t get overwhelmed before you even start. There are a few things you should know before you get started, however. This list is a good place to start, as it illustrates a few of the crucial things to producing a blog that’s approachable and engaging. Check out these tips and more from Blogging Agenda.

10 Ways to Eat Natural - I’ve been doing my best to start eating more healthily lately. I’ve stopped eating fried foods and cut down on other processed items, and I’m honestly feeling a lot better already. Eating healthy and natural doesn’t mean you have to completely restructure your diet, however. If you abide by a few of these tips from Health.com, you’ll find that eating natural foods might be easier than you think.

10 Most Popular DIY Sites -  Do you like to get your hands dirty and create from scratch? Does the look and feel of something that you’ve made all by yourself give you a thrill? Do you simply just like to make things with your own hands? Well, there are plenty of resources on the web for you to find ways of doing-it-yourself when it comes to making projects with things at your disposal. This list of the 10 best resources might even lend you a great opportunity to do some fun projects with your students. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Photo credit: Arbron on Flickr.

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

Instructify is looking for a few more writers. If you’re a K-12 teacher or media specialist who likes blogging, technology, new media and creative approaches to teaching, we’d like to hear from you.

As a blogger for Instructify, you’ll find and report on nifty web apps, tools, time-savers and ideas that teachers can use in their classrooms. You’ll be paid on a per-article basis. You won’t be able to quit your day job, but you won’t be writing for free, either.

If you’re interested, please send your resume and two writing samples to instructify[at]learnnc.org.

We’ll accept applications until March 16, 2009. Good luck! -BILL FERRIS

Photo credit: sbpoet on Flickr.

I wasn’t able to get back to the NCTIES conference today, but I’ve still got some material from Thursday. Tammy Worcester talked about a topic near and dear to my heart in her presentation “Cell Phones in the Classroom.”

Worcester began by asking us if we had our phones with us. In most social situations, this question is followed by “Please turn them off,” but she said we’d be using them during the presentation, so we should get them ready. I did, eager for an opportunity to show off my geektastic Android phone. (I kept hoping someone would notice it so I could bore them about how cool it is. Nobody noticed, which is probably for the best.)

Worcester first demonstrated GOOG-411, which Instructify has reviewed before but is worth bringing up again. It works like a free, automated 411 service. Ask for a business or business category, say your city and state, and Google will connect you for free. As a bonus, you can say “text” and Google will send you a text message with the business’ address and phone number. Slick, huh?

Speaking of Google, check out their SMS page for how to get lots of info by sending a text message. You can send a text message to 466453 (GOOGLE) to get weather updates, word definitions, movie showtimes, all kinds of stuff. For a full list of Google phone fun, no matter what sort of smart phone you use, head to  www.google.com/mobile.

If you have email on your phone, try making blog posts via email on your Blogger account (other blog services may also have this feature, but I’m unaware — let us know if they do!). On the Dashboard, if you click on Settings and Email you can set up an email address that, if you send an email to it, will post your emails directly to the blog. You’ll probably want to keep that address a secret, but Worcester set up a demo blog and gave us the address so we could try it out. If you’ve got a camera phone, it’ll also post pictures. This would be handy for a photo assignment for students — ask them to take a picture about, say, an indigenous animal and post it to the blog with comments, for example.

Worcester also pointed out the mobile podcasting service Gabcast, which lets you make a podcast directly from your cell phone. It costs around $10 for 100 minutes of recording time, which isn’t bad but you can probably find a free service somewhere online.

Finally, Worcester covered Poll Everywhere, a service that lets you set up live polls in which students (or whoever) can vote via text message. You can embed the poll results in your blog, website or PowerPoint presentation. Poll Everywhere is free so long as you have 30 or fewer poll respondents. However, those 30 people can take as many polls as you’d like to set up. Alice Mercer covered this one back in July, but once again, a friendly reminder never hurts.

All in all, it was a very informative presentation that explored what cell phones can do for education. So even if I didn’t get to show off my geek phone, I now know a few new tricks it can do. -BILL FERRIS

For more info, check out Tammy Worcester’s website

Online handouts from her NCTIES session (which technically aren’t handouts, but are technically useful)

Related stuff:

Ask the readers: phones in class

Top 6: Using cell phones in school

Use cell phones to poll your students

Google Local Voice Search: Dialing 411 Just Got a Little Longer

Photo credit: Milica Sekulic on Flickr.

I’m at the NCTIES conference in Raleigh. The intro session featured Vicki Davis of the Cool Cat Teacher Blog. Renowned for using nifty tools in her teaching, she shared a great philosophy for integrating technology into your classroom: focus on what you want to DO, and THEN pick your tools. Deciding you want a blog because that’s what everybody else is doing isn’t going to lead to a good learning experience for students.

In my first morning session, Wilson Diaz from Chapel Hill High School talked about how using the Google suite of apps (Docs, Groups, Calendar, etc.) helped him with both parents and students. He hit all the high points, such as using Google Docs for collaboration and such. However, he also noted that by using Google as a class information tool, it stopped parents from calling him with the same old questions. You know the ones — “If I only knew Little Johnny was having problems, I  could have done something sooner!” or “Little Suzy told me she didn’t have any homework.” And so on.

In addition, Diaz said he uses Google to post assignments and due dates. That means, for example, if a kid loses a worksheet, he or she can download it immediately, rather than wait until after school to stop by the teacher’s room. It was a nice presentation on how to use a series of tools to eliminate headaches from the teaching process.

Overall, I enjoy NCTIES because it’s more hopeful than other conferences. It focuses on possibilities rather than problems. Don’t get me wrong, people discuss problems here all the time, but the solutions — usually creative and incorporating technology in ways that will engage students — sound like opportunities rather than obstacles. -BILL FERRIS

The 15 Strangest College Courses In America
“Underwater Basket Weaving” is apparently a real class. So is “Philosophy and Star Trek,” “The Science of Harry Potter,” and “Arguing with Judge Judy: Popular ‘Logic’ on TV Judge Shows.” These are actual courses that award actual credit, from universities you’d actually want to go to (Georgetown and UC-Berkley, for instance). Show these to your principal, and maybe your proposed syllabus for “A Study of Physics in Warner Bros. Cartoons” won’t sound so bad.

Top 50 Free Open Courseware Classes to Design Better Web Sites
Web design is a useful, highly marketable skill a lot of high schools don’t teach. Fortunately, you can help out some of your more web-savvy students with this guide to free courses that can develop their design skills. Maybe they’ll show their gratitude by redesigning your school’s website.

38 ways to find great edublogs
With so many educators out there who blog, how do you find the good stuff? Blog by Carol presents this list of 38 ways to find great edublogs, such as checking the Edublogs awards, using Technorati authority, and the time-honored method of asking people you already trust which blogs they read. Of course, if you need a place to start, Instructify isn’t too bad.

Top 5 Quiz Generators for Online Educators
Why do the grunt work of putting a quiz together yourself when you can find a handy piece of software to do it for you? Web 2.0 Teaching Tools brings you five time-saving methods for putting quizzes together online. Now you’ll have more time to read some of those great new edublogs you found. -BILL FERRIS

25 Books to Read Before Age 25 - So, I missed the boat on some of these; nonetheless, I think I knocked out most of the list during high school. If your students don’t already have to read the books on this list for their required summer reading, or if they are just avid readers, you might want to give them a head start before they hit 25. There are some surprising selections on this list from University of Washington’s The Daily, including Chuck Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters (a personal favorite).

100 Best Creative Writing Blogs - For your students who are interested in writing and blogging, here is a valuable resource from Best Colleges Online of 100 blogs to help them develop craft, get published, and practice editing. Personally, I wish I had this kind of resource available when I first started creative writing, so be sure to let your creative students know about these best o’ the best before they even get to college.

5 Unique and Inspiring Educational Nonprofits - I get excited to see insightful and original blog posts like this one from Razoo. Moreso, I get excited to see unique non-profit organizations doing great things for education. I’ve already mentioned one of the five, 826 National, but the others on this list are just as inspiring and original as Eggers’ efforts. Check out Spark and Soliya to explore things that your students might already be interested in, like foreign affairs and travel.

11 Tips on Setting Goals and Achieving Them - Goals are important no matter what stage in life you’re in. Dumb Little Man brings us this list of 11 simple ways you can get started on achieving what you set out to do. Goal setting starts as simply as “writing them down” and “making an action plan,” then stick-to-it-iveness will help you prevail.  -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Photo credit: Jo Jakeman on Flickr

Too often, developers think that just changing the fonts on a tool to Comic Sans will make it educator-friendly, when, really, there are a lot of big things to think about when designing for K-12 education. Because the developers of Edmodo are IT folks who’ve been working in public K-12 schools, they clearly understand that font choice is not the priority when it comes to making a usable, useful tool for kids and teachers. Ease of use and excellent privacy controls set Edmodo apart from the pack when it comes to free, online learning management tools. Edmodo has been called “Twitter for schools,” and while microblogging is part of the feature set, there is a whole lot more to Edmodo than 140 character text messages.

Edmodo allows you to post (and grade!) assignments, files, images, videos, and links, as well as post messages to your class, or to certain students in your class. You can have multiple groups (perhaps you teach several sections of students, or maybe you just want to use it for a single classroom’s group projects) that students access by being provided a code — not a complicated email-required signup process. Everything you do on Edmodo defaults to private, with an option to make anything public. The public page has an RSS feed, and would be a great way to broadcast important upcoming events (Field trip! Final exams!) in another way. Users can even set up Edmodo to send updates to their cell phones.

As you’d expect from a site created by two guys who really care about both technology and education, support is fantastic. They are available for demos or troubleshooting (when you create an account, you are automatically added to the Edmodo and support groups) and it’s not a corporation with canned responses, but folks who have a personal interest in making sure the service works the way it should. For more information, you can read an interview with the founders at Open Education, and an interview with a teacher using it in a North Dakota classroom. -GRETCHEN SCHAEFER

Edmodo

Related stuff:

Professional development is just a “tweet” away

Start a video conversation with Seesmic

Social networking and social studies collide with iCue

First off, if you enjoy Instructify, you probably already know of a few other education blogs out there, but I found a few more that will make a nice addition to your RSS or Google Reader. Here is a handful, in no particular order.

Adventures in Educational Blogging - Written by Susan Sedro, who describes her blog as “A modest attempt at discovering if social technologies such as blogs and wikis can make teaching and learning more relevant and effective.” A modest attempt, maybe, but Sedro has some fun musings on the ways Web 2.0 is a valuable tool in our schools. A former 5th grade teacher and now Singaporean ex-pat, Sedro’s humor and knowledge come through in her writing. In a recent post, she muses: As you could predict, many students forgot to complete step 8. Fortunately, most of them did remember to paste the photo name and URL onto the photo sources form, so it was easy to locate the photo again and save it to their computer. Check out Adventures in Educational Blogging for a fun and easy-to-relate-to series of posts by someone who gets it.

2 Cents Worth - David Warlick, author of Raw Materials for the Mind: A Teacher’s Guide to Digital Literacy, Classroom Blogging, and creator of Citation Machine, gives his 2 cents on this blog for educators and those interested in literacy in a rapidly changing world. Warlick is transparent and open about his opinions and ideas, which makes him a compelling read and someone to keep on your radar. He’s got some interesting theories, and blogs about his travels as a speaker and classroom technology advocate. He also has a podcast worth a listen called Connect Learning.

Is Our Children Learning? - Yep, you read that right, it isn’t a typo. The title of this Bronx teacher’s blog is taken from a quote of our not-for-long president Georgie W, back in ‘00 “The question is rarely asked: Is our children learning?”  This blog is less heavy handed in theory and practice, but has some great musings from the day-to-day life of a teacher “Ruben” and his experience in the NYC school system. Here’s a tidbit to give you an idea of Ruben’s big-city teaching life: Apparently, her friends told her they saw a spirit in the bathroom and she was scared that she could die. When she told her mom about it, her mom told her she had seen a spirit before too. How exactly do you respond to something like this?

High Techpectations - Another cleverly named teacher blog, this one is also about technology in the classroom and beyond, but is voiced by Lucy Gray, who serves as the lead technology coach at the University of Chicago Urban Education Institute. Lucy’s blog is full of great resources and insights, including a peek into her own life as a mother of two. She’s raising her own kids in a Web 2.0 world, and seems to have a grasp on technology as it pertains to education. She’s also got a great web presence on various social media sites from Twitter to Digg, you can find her by the name elemenous.

DetentionSlip - This blog is dedicated to news on the education forefront, because it’s important to know what’s going on in schools other than your own. Presented with a semi-snarky and often humorous voice, this blog is a great resource for gathering education information no matter how strange or unlikely it seems. This is a blog more for in-the-know teachers and parents though, so it might be best to keep your younger students from reading some of it. The pictures accompanying the often-ridiculous posts will keep you cracking up, though.  -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Photo credit: NightRPStar on Flickr