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It’s getting cold out there, but that doesn’t mean Instructify is freezing over. Here are some educational lists to keep you nice and warm.

21 Online Student Tools to Help With Research, Communication, and Organization - EduChoices brings us this list of some essential tools to aide in researching and staying on top of things. Your students probably need all the help they can get at this point in the year, as the thought of holiday breaks are distracting them left and right. Check out Grademate for your own grade organization as well as Studeous for online course management.

75 Questions to Ask Yourself - Did I leave the iron on?  might be at the top of your list, but for some more insightful self-queries, check out this list from Lyved. Your students might not consider themselves masters of their own egos yet, but some of the questions on this list might help them get some direction in getting there. Questions like What are my talents? might seem easy enough, but provide some inner understanding nonetheless.

Help Your Children Set Goals for Success - Top Ten Tips - These tips, designed for parents, are applicable for teacher use, too, but if you want to share some with parents, then by all means, I say go for it. One of the more important tips here is to set achievable goals, because Goals need to be set at a level that is more advanced than the level the child is currently working at, but not so advanced that it is unachievable or beyond reach. Well said, via Oxford Learning.

Teach Creative Writing With These 5 Steps - Since I’ve been bitten by the NaNoWriMo bug, I’ve really managed to rediscover my love of writing in a purely creative and uninhibited atmosphere. Though it was my major in college, creative writing was something I never got enough of in school. Do your students a favor and prod them a little using these 5 steps from Bloggeron.

10 Things to Do When You only Have Five Minutes Left in Class - Ack! You’ve come to a stopping point, the kids are restless, and yet there’s no time to start something new! Or is there? The Apple provides these 10 things you can do to keep your students engaged and learning without starting something you can’t finish. Included on the list are great activities like Journal Writing and something called the Toilet Paper Game, which isn’t as weird or gross as it sounds.

- JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Photo credit: HeavyWeightGeek on Flickr)

9 Questions I ask my Students on the First Day of School - Teacher Elona Hartjes believes in the value of making a good first impression. That’s why she asks her students these nine questions to make sure the school year gets off to a good start. She provides some valuable insight, and makes her students think about their successes and wants when it comes to education. Perhaps the most important question on the list: What three things can you do as a student to help yourself be more successful this year?

15 Sites that will Make You Smarter - You’re already plenty smart just for reading Instructify, but if you want to exercise that gray matter even more, check out this list of brain boosting games and memory tools from Tipr. These tests, quizzes and trivia sites can come in handy if you want to relax with some online games that aren’t solitaire, or if you want to get some ideas for keeping your students sharp.

Einstein’s 5 Maxims for Creative Excellence - I’m no Einstein, but Einstein is. Besides that whole “Theory of Relativity” thing, Einstein also had these five pieces of advice for creative excellence. The first is my favorite: Imagination is more important than knowledge. So the next time someone says “you can’t make this stuff up,” prove them differently. List via Ace Online Schools.

7 Actions That Can Help Your Wallet in a Troubled Economy - Times are tough in this economic crisis, so take advantage of these tips to make sure you are managing your money in all the right ways. From Lifehack comes these simple, but effective rules that will help make sure you don’t relive your college days and have to eat Ramen noodles for lunch AND dinner. Perhaps one of the simplest things you can start doing: ignore the news. Just because the rest of the nation is fretting over the economic crisis doesn’t mean you have to buy in to how grim the media makes things out to be. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Photo credit: shootingstarr(isablur) on Flickr

5 Sources for Free and Legal Images -If you blog or use any sort of photography in your presentations, you might want to start thinking about making sure those photos and images are legal for you to use. If you want to skip that step, try using one of these five sources from The Blog Herald. The best part is that they are free, so you won’t have to dole out any hard-earned cash, and you’ll still feel fine about using the images copyright free. Of course, there is always Creative Commons Flickr if all else fails.

Classroom Survival Kit: 25 Items You Need to Have on Hand In Your Classroom - From TeachingChildren.ca, this list includes all of the essentials for teachers, not  necessarily students. Though some of the items sound more like things you might need if you were going to commit a crime (tool box, dice, metal nail file, duct tape), most of the items here are crucially handy to have around. I personally would have never thought of keeping “thank you” cards around until the last minute, but I guess preparation helps.

11 Things You Shouldn’t Leave for School Without- This article from Dumb Little Man is meant for the college-bound, and it is never too early for seniors to start thinking about preparing themselves for success. These are all online resources, so if nothing else, sites like Ottobib.com — an online bibliography — provide resources students of all ages can use.

10 Quick Lesson Ideas for Substitute Teachers - Substitutes have it tough. My own mother substitute taught many classes in my school system, and though she had it pretty easy because many people loved her, most other subs didn’t top the list of people students respected.  These tips from Work Sheet Library should come in handy for any subs out there who might otherwise spend their whole day asking students to “settle down.” My favorite on the list: magic tricks. Nobody can make fun of a substitute teacher who does magic tricks…right?  -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Photo credit: curly_exp(l)osure on Flickr

If you’re finding yourself nervous about the first day of school, you’re not alone.  The first ten days set the tone of your classroom for the entire school year, and the very first day sets the tone for your first ten.

Blogger Dan Meyer ruminates today on the first day of school and making a first impression with students by angling “severe eyebrows at anyone who’d suggest The Jonas Brothers aren’t the best summer band of all time.”  Meyer astutely profiles the kind teacher students want based on his experience as a high school math teacher:

In two sentences, here is the teacher profile that will do you the most good with the most students. Your students want a teacher who is capable of unkindness but who chooses instead to be kind, a teacher who is capable of severity but who chooses levity instead.

They don’t want a cruel teacher, obviously, but neither do students appreciate a teacher made of soft edges and kittens, someone wholly unfamiliar with the unkindness they must endure on a day-to-day basis.

That definition sounds pretty good to me, but one of the best things about Meyer’s blog is that he has developed a smart, thoughtful readership, and some of his readers are disagreeing in the comments section, so be sure to check that out as well.  And while we normally love it when you comment on Instructify, we’ve turned comments off for this post — we hope that if you have something to contribute, you’ll join the conversation that’s already brewing over there.  So, what kind of teacher do your students want?  -ROSS WHITE

The Teacher Your Students Want via dy/dan

Related Stuff:

How do You Manage Your Classroom?

Rethink the Way You Use Your Digital Projector

Make an Electronic Sub Plan

Baptism by Fire: 100 Essential Tips and Resources for Student Teachers
If you or someone you care about is scared to death about his/her first student teaching assignment, this list will take away some of that stress. You’ll find tips on everything from classroom management to lesson plans to resume and interview help.

8 Essential Skills They Didn’t Teach You In School
School’s important, but there are some lessons it doesn’t cover. Your students — and maybe you, too — can try adding a few soft skills to the ol’ resume after reading this list. These skills are useful to folks of any age. I found some I’m already doing (listening to audiobooks while driving or doing mundane tasks) and a few I need to work on (networking). Defining the problem is half the battle, so if you feel you’re deficient in any of these skills, now’s as good a time as any to shore them up.

TED Talks: Predicting the next 5,000 days of the web
The interweb as we know it today is a ripe old 5,000 days old. We’ve come a long way since Prodigy, baby. Wonder what the next 5,000 days hold? Check out this TED Talks video.

TED’s Top 10 Videos - A (Free) Goldmine Of Inspiration
Speaking of TED, they’re an all-around compendium of awesome videos, tantalizing us with what’s possible. Here’s a handy Top 10 list, courtesy of Mike Stopforth, of cool, inspiring TED Talks to get you excited about the coming school year.

Photo credit: Sister 72 on flickr

Top 10 Office Supply Hacks - Get some extra mileage out of the supply closet. Lifehacker has 10 bonus uses for everyday office supplies. Keep snack foods fresh by using binder clips as chip clips. Did some clod write on your white board with permanant marker? Dry erase ink will make it come right off. You’ll want these ideas handy before class starts again.

17 Writing Secrets  - Want to bump your students’ writing from good to great (or at least from middling to halfway decent), Writer’s Digest presents these 17 writing secrets to help students make good word choices, and remind them of the importance of fixing stuff that’s kinda wordy and lame revision.

101+ Web Resources for Students - Courtesy of StudentHacks.org, this list is pretty much what it sounds like. It features everything from dictionaries to Shakespeare’s complete works to resources for the yearbook staff. If your students are looking for some handy Web tools, this is a great place to start.

100 Helpful Web Tools for Every Kind of Learner - Different students learn in different ways. What works for visual learners may not make sense to a kinesthetic learner. If you’re fixing to differentiate your instruction, check out these tools that cater to different learning styles. -BILL FERRIS

Photo credit: MarkyBon on flickr

10 Virtually Instant Ways to Improve Your Life - I’m all for improving my life, but why does it have to take soooo long? Here are ten easy ways to pull yourself up by your boot straps courtesy of Stepcase Lifehack. If you find yourself wanting to change something about your life, then why not start out with the simple stuff like Don’t over-generalize and Don’t take things too personally.

12 Ways to Use Project Censored in Your Classroom - Project Censored is an intiative designed to help aggregate news stories that often go under reported. This guide offers ways teachers can educate their students in fair journalism methods and help them understand the practice and importance of research. There are in-class activities and projects on the list, so if your students are studying media and journalism, this is a good place to start them on the right path.

 101 Scholarships Just For Teachers - From TeachingTips.com comes this amazing list of scholarships available for teachers working their way through college. It might be too late for most of us, but if you have some students who are interested in becoming teachers themselves, give them this list to ease college’s financial burdens. Some are region specific, so all 101 might not be completely pertinent. By the way, be sure and check out some of the other amazing lists on TeachingTips, they’ve got some great stuff there.

101 Things to Do When You’re Bored - I don’t know how anybody could possibly get bored when there are hundreds of Instructify posts to read, but if you find yourself with some idle time, then try out a few of these activities to rescue yourself from ennui. Lists Galore recommends flying a kite, starting a blog, or you know, making a list. - JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Photo credit: Wetsun on Flickr

Welcome to the Carnival of Education Career Fair! We’ve retracted the bleachers and set up the booths on the gymnasium floor so these brave teachers can see what they might be doing if they weren’t teaching (perish the thought).

Motivational Speaker
Mr. D at I Want to Teach Forever agreed to sport a freaking mohawk as long as his students worked hard, which was about three weeks. Sadly, his motivational experiment has concluded. Long live the mohawk.

Camp Counselor
As a kid, my wife got to go to Space Camp and Marine Science Camp. Had Tisha Kulak and American Consumer News been around back then to point out how to save money on tuition to summer research camps, I might’ve been able to go, too.

Productivity Consultant
Instructify-favorite studenthacks.org has some great tips for students who want to learn how to write a research paper.

Pro Athletes
The Jose Vilson uses Derek Jeter as an example of how nurturing students’ talent and leadership ability early on can reap great results.

And over at Jay P. Greene’s Blog, the author talks about the importance of identifying students’ talents, whether they’re a left tackle or potential honor student.

Economist
ESL teacher Larry Ferlazzo knows that money is the international language.

Translator
Melissa B. at The Scholastic Scribe provides a handy-dandy English-to-Eduspeak dictionary.

Director
Mathew Needleman at Creating Lifelong Learners takes a proactive approach to managing disruptive students during a class movie project.

Advice Columnist
Let’s Play Math! has some advice on teaching math to a struggling student.

Detective
OverwhelmedMom gets to the bottom of problems that gifted students face.

Investigative Reporters
The proprietor of a voice from the middle knows the means to discovery is asking the right questions.

In addition, eduwonkette responds to a Wall Street Journal article about the criteria used to evaluate teachers.

Game Developer
Alvaro at SharpBrains shares a few games to stimulate your temporal lobe.

Diplomat
Coach Brown tries to reach an understanding with hostile parents.

Nutritionists
At Homework. Dinner. Life. Angela points out that good nutrition habits ought to be maintained year-round, not just a few days before the test.

Meanwhile, Chanman at Buckhorn Road says all that caffeine students drink can’t be good for them.

Cartographer
Dan Callahan, a.k.a. geek.teacher, harnesses Google Maps for a lesson in community mapping.

Librarian
@EDU takes the work out of student research by pointing them toward Google Alerts.

Politician
Jane Artabasy at Golden Apple Teaching Excellence Network unloads the loaded word of the day, “elitism,” showing it’s nothing to be frightened of - especially in schools.

The folks at Golden Apple also mull over the differences in races and learning styles.

Astronaut
HowDoWhy asks, what is a solar system, anyway? Furthermore, just how big is ours?

Human Resources Specialist
Over at Right on the Left Coast, Darren discusses the sticky situation of a teacher dating an 18-year-old student at a different school.

Mentors
Allison Jones at Entry Level Living wants to revamp the way young people think about leadership.

The folks at the Efficient Leadership Files have some ideas on that as well.

Statistician
Lead from the Start crunches the numbers about the disconnect between teachers and EdSector.

Strategist
Seth Pearce at NYC Students Blog has an intriguing idea on how to overcome schools’ non-stop test preparation.

Lobbyist
PZ Meyers at Pharyngula has some news about a disturbing bill in the Oklahoma legislature regarding religion in schools.

Road Grader
As the great homework debate rages on, Shabam School makes a good case for grading homework.

Kindergarten Teacher (sorry, I couldn’t come up with anything else)
Kiri at Elbows, Knees, Dreams shares her thoughts (and asks for others’ opinions) about early entrance to Kindergarten.

Photo credit: ou_ags on flickr

Assign a Day is an online calendar management system designed for teachers and students. It’s a free service that allows you to create and manage your classroom online and share assignments with your students. The interface is incredibly intuitive and is a great way for you to post current and upcoming tasks. Just register (it’s free to do so, and doesn’t require much information to get started), create a calendar, and begin posting. Set the dates of your assignment and a description and you’re ready to go. The calendar can be viewed in grid or list form, and adding assignments is easy. You can then choose to share your calendar with other educators to edit in case you want to collaborate.

The program isn’t for personal calendars, though, as it is specific for teachers and their students. The whole thing is powered by 4Teachers.org, creators of such tools as RubiStar and QuizStar. This is a great tool for teachers to make sure their students no longer have the excuse “I didn’t know that was due today!” -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Assign a Day

Not indicative of its title, Worsely School in Canada has an impressive array of resources available to K - 12 Educators here. There are games, tools, and plans aplenty, so you might kill some time just exploring the site. There’s the usual suspects as far as content is concerned — math, science, English, and some areas where you can request the things you’d like to see covered. The site is designed nicely, with intuitive controls, yet lots of pages to click through. However, the resources themselves are incredibly detailed, and have a lot of great visual accompaniment to help you see what they mean.

The Worsely School might not be much different than your own (though it might already have the funding you need to get something like this going– who knows?), so what can you do to make your school as full of resources and materials to share with other teachers worldwide? Public education is truly the “village” that raises our children in today’s times, so its up to us to share and inspire others who share our craft. Let us know in the comments what ideas you’ve had to broaden the educational spectrum. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Worsely School’s Teacher Resources  

What’s your classroom management style? Do you lay down the law? Do you try to relate to your students on a personal level?

Classroom management is tricky in that every teacher is expected to know it even though no one really teaches it. Blogger Dan Meyer at dy/dan asks teachers, So How Do You Teach Classroom Management? In the article Meyer discusses a few of the tactics he uses. He also asks, since what works for him might not work for you, can you teach it effectively? Be sure to peruse the comments, as several educators weigh in with their opinions. - BILL FERRIS

So How Do You Teach Classroom Management?

Photo credit: WorldIslandInfo.com on flickr

They say time is money. In a school, time is knowledge. For example, the time you spend getting your students to calm down after recess is time you no longer have to teach them their vocabulary words this week. To keep your class on track, whip out this handy dandy Class Timer.

Class Timer can do exactly two things: it can track how long an activity takes, or count down from a predetermined time. But its uses are practically limitless. If you’re giving a test, Class Timer can let them know exactly how long they have left to finish. Once the science lesson is done, tell your kids they’ve got exactly two minutes to get their social studies homework out. Or see who has the fastest time in a math race.

With Class Timer, time won’t slip away from you, and your students will have more time to expand their knowledge. -BILL FERRIS

Class Timer

Are you out of ideas for your classroom displays? Do you feel like you’ve accomplished all you can in the unforgiving medium of construction paper? If so, get inspired again by visiting the Classroom Displays Blog.

Londoner Linda Hartley posts some of the most creative displays from across the pond. They’re tagged by subject, holiday, and all sorts of criteria. So if you’re looking for ideas to steal a little inspiration for your upcoming winter bulletin boards, this is a good place to turn. Now dig your scissors and construction paper out of the trash and get creative again. -BILL FERRIS

Classroom Displays Blog

Missing class terrifies many teachers. Not to knock brave substitute teachers - they’re in an unwinnable situation where they have to walk into unfamiliar territory and try to teach a subject they may or may not know. Still, when you get back, you know you’ll have to play catch-up to get your class back on schedule.

Dan Meyer at dy/dan has a solution. In his post, How I Work: Sub Plans, Meyer outlines how he burns an electronic sub plan onto a DVD. Like the picture says, his substitute merely has to press “play” and the learning begins.

Though Meyer uses pricey programs like Final Cut Pro, you could accomplish the same thing with free tools like Audacity, OpenOffice’s Impress presentation tool, or create a screencast with Screencast-o-Matic.

What his idea will cost you is time. Meyer said it took about 90 minutes. Before that scares you away, he says, “forty of those could be chalked under the Bumblin’ Around column.” The more you do it, the less time it’ll take you. But the real figure to consider is the amount of in-class time this approach could save. Spending 45 minutes to an hour doesn’t sound like so much when it means you won’t have to squeeze two 50 minute lessons into a single class period. -BILL FERRIS

How I Work: Sub Plans

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Some teachers are naturals in the classroom. Something about them gives the impression that they know what they’re talking about. Students, and other teachers, are simply compelled to listen to them. But what about the rest of us? Is classroom leadership something you either have or you don’t?

Not according to a post at the Even Happier blog entitled How to Command Respect. Body language is the key to projecting a confident air, and this post is full of advice that will make your students sit up straight and take notice. Tips include keeping good posture, balancing your weight so as not to lean on one foot, keeping eye contact, and don’t fidget.

Like any good self-help blog, it pointed out dozens of bad habits I’d accumulated. But fixing several small things can yield big results. So next time you catch yourself shifting from foot to foot at the front of the class, remember Even Happier’s advice and take charge of your class. –BILL FERRIS

How to Command Respect

Photo credit: megadem on flickr.com.