Let me just say it: I love PBS. From the documentaries, to the quality children’s programming, it’s one of my favorite channels to watch. But my love of Cookie Monster aside, did you know that PBS had developed a top-notch web resource for teachers? If the answer was no, then you owe it to yourself and your students to spend a planning period looking at the PBS Teachers website.
BY BILL FERRIS
Dividing your class into teams is an activity fraught with peril. Friends cluster together, shy kids awkwardly ask if they can join a group, and all that jostling can eat up several minutes. You could pick teams yourself, but doing so makes things too complicated — you have to put Little Johnny and Little Suzie in separate teams or they’ll goof off the entire class period. Type-A Bobby will want to do all the work himself, and Steve and Vanessa will let him, so you’ve got to split them up. See? Nothing but headaches. If only you could turn this process over to random chance.
See what I did there? I set a problem to make you wonder if there was a solution. And there is. Team Maker randomly generates teams for your class’ group projects. (more…)
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.
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.
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.
BY BILL FERRIS
Just because Google and Microsoft hate each other doesn’t mean their software can’t work together in harmony. OffiSync lets you create, access, edit and save Google Docs from Microsoft Office.
Calling someone a “dweeb” basically aims to call that person socially inept. Essentially, everyone is on a level playing field, so when I call other people names and put them down, I generally feel better about myself. What’s really sad is that I get the pop psychology for what I’m doing but I keep doing it. The best time to call someone a dweeb, I’ve found, is during gym class, right before you blast them in their thick glasses with a dodgeball.
So what can dweebs do? They can take that pejorative name and repossess it. By creating a social website for students to help get homework done, Dweeber connects youths and helps them work with their school friends online. See what just happened? Dweebs aren’t socially inept anymore—they’re socially connected!
BY BILL FERRIS
The web is full of free online word processors. EtherPad sets itself apart by letting multiple users collaborate in “really real” time. By that they mean you see someone else’s updates as they type them in. Google Docs, for example, has a considerable lag between updates, so contributors could unknowingly contradict or duplicate each other’s edits. With EtherPad, you can see your work partners wreaking havoc on your text as it happens.
Welcome to May’s random roundup. This month’s theme: Little Johnny, one-man stand-in for school-aged children the world over. After a year-and-a-half of hard work, we figured this overused cliche deserved a post of his own before he gets back to studying.
Time-savers for teachers
For other notes and resources the students need, consider giving this stuff to them as a whole, at the beginning of a session or semester. That way you only have to keep a master copy for Little Johnny who struggles to keep himself organized.
Learning exercise: Promote healthy living this school year
If you’re concerned about your students’ health, you can do something about it by extolling the virtues of healthy exercise. Ask Little Johnny how his little league team did over the summer. Do you have any joggers or climbers in your midst? Take an interest, and maybe they’ll get more active.
Search Visually, Safely with RedZee
RedZee filters out porn and other inappropriate content, so you don’t need to worry that Little Johnny will “accidentally” stumble across something he shouldn’t be looking at on a school computer.
Swap your Stuff at Zwaggle
But Zwaggle might be a good resource to pass along to parents. If you can make their lives easier by showing them where to find Christmas presents on the cheap, they might make your lives easier by encouraging Little Johnny to buckle down and try a little harder for his nice teacher.
Keep Your Grade Book Online with Engrade
If students (and their parents) can track their grades at any time, it may motivate them to stay on task throughout the class. Come parent-teacher conference time, you won’t have to deal with parents who are angry about Little Johnny’s surprise “D.”
Instructifeature: How to Stimulate Class Discussion Using Discussion Forums
In the classroom, you’re limited by clock. There’s only so much time you can devote to class discussion. Students feel the time crunch even more keenly—they’ve got to compose a thoughtful response in mere seconds. And while thinking on one’s feet is a valuable skill, how much better would Little Johnny’s answer be if he had more time to compose his ideas? Using discussion boards, students have the time they need to think of the best answer they can.
Photo credit: khalid almasoud on Flickr.
Wikipedia is just something we use and we know, so there’s no need to really know where it comes from. It is just internet magic. Okay, so you really must know more about Wikipedia? Are you ready for things to get really meta-abstract? Wikipedia has an entry on wikis, an About page for their site and a Wikipedia page for Wikipedia! Does your brain feel like Swiss cheese yet?
That’s probably too much info jamming you up right now. That was my point — I inflict some information overload, then while you’ve vulnerable to suggestion I hit you with the link I really want you to visit. Check out this tutorial from North Carolina State University Libraries. In under 6 minutes “Wikipedia: Beneath the Surface” offers up a great overview on this collaborative community.
What I found really engaging about this video was its focus on the discussion and history tabs. Many readers might just read the article on their subject, gather whatever info they want to know and they’re on their merry way. The discussion and history really help give the reader insight to the zeitgeist of an issue, such as how some people prefer modern pulsating nasal irrigation devices over traditional neti pots. Really. You might also explore issues like Wikiality, vandalism and misinformation.
Wikipedia has the dubious distinction of being the place students go when taking certain liberties for writing papers. The Wikipedia community can also be a place to help illustrate proper citation and research — irony completed. Your students might soon be on their way to reading between the lines in Wikipedia articles. -NICK YINGLING
Wikipedia: Beneath the Surface
Murder, Mystery, and Mayhem on Wikipedia: A Template For Collaborative Student Research
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
Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School in Berkley California has an initiative known as The Edible Schoolyard. It’s a non-profit organization developed in order to find ways of cooking and gardening for young people in their everyday lives. Chef and author Alice Waters conceived the program with Principal Neil Smith and has been underway since 1997. In the school, students in the Garden Program see for the care and preparation of organic foods from “seed to table.”
This is the type of initiative that teaches students at an early age where food comes from, and what exactly it takes for their favorite meals to make their way to the table. Students plant seeds, tend crops, and harvest various organic produce, and then go on to prepare their harvest in the kitchen. Students are also encouraged to break into small groups, where they learn the value of working together in order to see their work come to life, as well as keep track of their progress in garden journals. This is a great way for students to learn about ecological principles as well as how nature is an important element in their daily lives. There is plenty of information available at The Edible Schoolyard website, where you can also learn about ways to help support the initiative, as well as tips and suggestions of ways you can begin a similar initiative in your own school. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN
Force Feed Food Force to Your Students
I came across this post on TechRadar.com a couple of months back. After thoroughly pillaging this list for ideas to write about for Instructify, I decided to just share with you this list of 50 sites. Plagiarism police, calm yourselves — some of the things on this list had already been on Instructify first. This list is divided up into sites concerned with software and tools, storage and files, graphics, research and e-learning, and mobile workers. Check them out, I’m sure you’ll come across something good. Now instead of writing about each one, I can focus on writing my script for CSI: Portland.
PROTIP #1: The comments section on a blog post can sometimes generate even more useful content.
Occasionally the comments section can offer up some more user-generated links and tips. After going through, I found about 14-15 extra links in the comments section. Which is a good thing, because, as one reader points out, five of the items in the main article have gone missing.
On the other hand, some of them are from companies doing some quasi-trolling to gain their website some exposure. Really, TickleMePlant.com? Really? Maybe you’ll still be able to live without some of the comment section’s additional sites, but would you really describe such a poor quality of life as LIVING? If you aren’t tickling plants everyday you’re just as well off being dead.
PROTIP #2: Try not to preface sentences by announcing: PROTIP! I’ve chased away a lot of my own credibility and a great deal of respect from other people thanks to that.
Sometimes you might find a couple of potentially good prospects in the comments. I came up with two more valid leads that I’ll need to check out. Sadly, though, like all things on the internet, the conversation in the comments section pretty much devolves into free MP3 websites. It was good while it lasted, I guess.-NICK YINGLING
50 Websites You’ll Wonder How you Lived Without
Photo credit: Steffe on Flickr.
By now, we should all be well aware that Microsoft Office is not the end-all, be-all of word processing and spreadsheet programs. In fact, lots of other programs out there make up for Excel’s weaknesses and are much more powerful. EditGrid is one of those programs.
EditGrid is an online spreadsheet program that lets you create collaborative spreadsheets that you can work on with colleagues or friends in real time. Its main strength, however, is how you can format cells with images, JavaScript calls, and colorful charts and graphs. And, you can even exchange data between your own spreadsheets and spreadsheets hosted by other users.
EditGrid is a great tool for creating fancy spreadsheets that you can easily post to your blog or website as a “live” chart or table, so when you edit your spreadsheet, EditGrid will also update it wherever you have it posted. The site also offers various templates, like the ever-handy calendar template, and it has a neat iPhone version, too. Honestly, what more could you ask for from your spreadsheets? Take that, Excel! — LAUREN FROHNE
Manage documents and spreadsheets online with Microsoft Office Live Workspace
Sometimes I think about how the internet has become such a dominant presence in our lives and how it’s changed everything about how we communicate with each other around the world, and I get scared. I mean, I once used Skype in order to have a quick meeting with a professor who was in China, and it was like we weren’t even half the world away from each other. We were just looking at each other and talking about normal stuff like we would in person. With all of these new web-based technologies, sometimes I worry that we will never ever have to leave our houses again in order to do the things we do everyday. That’s the scary part. What if the internet turns us all into reclusive hermits who never have to leave the house because we can teach our classes, attend our meetings, and meet our friends for lunch over the internet?!?!
Contributing to my paranoia and hysteria is Dimdim, a web-based conferencing tool that makes it easy to not only have a web conversation, but also allows you to show pictures, PowerPoints, PDFs, live screens, and even video as part of your conversation. With Dimdim, you don’t even need a desktop client like Skype or Outlook, and it’s totally free. Basically, it is so advanced and so effective, you may never have to leave your house again.
Dimdim is a great site to use to set up a “virtual classroom” and share class materials on the web, or even to gather colleagues from around the world for a quick meeting. Just remember that even though the internet has made it so that we don’t have to go outside anymore, you should step out and see the sun every once in a while. -LAUREN FROHNE
Grab students’ attention before class with PowerPoint. Yeah, that’s right, with PowerPoint
Find cool tools for teachers: interactive professional development in Second Life
moxie design studios
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