Instructify

BY KEVIN HODGSON

My StoryMaker is the perfect tool for younger students just learning about plot design and character development for short stories. Hosted by the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, My StoryMaker walks students through the process of story creation using a variety of online tools.

My StoryMaker requires no login other than a first name. Kids choose a main character from a limited menu of possibilities, pick what they want that character to be doing (on a rescue mission? Finding love?) and then designate which secondary character is also involved in the story. These steps are laid out in a very basic, easy-to-use method. The story editor then launches and, in a nice touch, there is an audio tutorial matching up with the text tutorial on the next steps.

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BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

Everyone has a website these days — even people’s pets have a web presence. The the fact remains, however, that creating a site takes a bit of HTML know-how. Kompozer is trying to change all that. It’s a free, intuitive web-development application that, for the novice, works a lot like any old word processor, and for the savvy web designer, looks and acts much like Adobe Dreamweaver.

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

AnswerGarden is sort of like a virtual garden, in which you plant a question or query and wait patiently for folks to provide the answers or responses. The “garden” of responses then grows right before your eyes. Free to use, easy to set up, and even easier to respond to, AnswerGarden is an interesting brainstorming or response tool that uses the concept of “word clouds” to display what visitors have written.

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BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

Do your students need to study for that upcoming geography test? Perhaps the SATs are coming up? Well, flashcards are so 1994. It’s time to head over to Smart.fm. Smart.fm is a free learning and review system that is like your own personal study partner — a study partner that happens to have a super-slick multimedia review system in her backpack.

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BY JACKIE REGALES

If your students are anything like mine, then they will always salivate (figuratively, I hope) at the chance to make something, whether on poster board or a program like Photostory. In today’s classrooms, though, whipping out scissors and glue sticks can seem a little old-fashioned. Enter Smilebox, which offers slide-show and scrapbook-creation options, as well as the ability to make invitations, collages and greeting cards. Fair warning: on some of these pages, music will begin playing automatically, and it’s exactly the kind of digitized music you think it is.

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BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

When you decide to make a web page, the first question (assuming you have already settled on the subject matter) is what is the site going to look like? I’m not talking about tweaking the CSS, but rather the overall big picture, the starting point where you paint with broad strokes. Often times you use a whiteboard, or a piece of paper, or a tablet if you’re on the high-tech end of things. But what if you have the drawing or artistic talents equal to a rock? How can you lay out your ideas in a manner that can be understood?

If the previous sentence describes you, then you should consider using Balsamiq’s mockup tools to lay things out visually before you get into the nuts and bolts of coding. (more…)

BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

For a while, Xtranormal was my favorite animation application, but GoAnimate might just give it a run for its money. The interface is intuitive and slapping together a movie really doesn’t take much time at all.

It’s free to sign up for GoAnimate, and you can make a basic characters and animations for free. The site does finance its operations via micro-transactions like buying clothes for a character — want the cartoon fireman’s helmet? It’s going to cost you a few actual pennies. But you can use the basic functionality of the application for free.

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

If we really believe in the axiom of “learning by doing,” then teaching the concept of stopmotion moviemaking should begin with a program like Pivot Stickfigure Animator. Pivot is a freeware program for PCs (an alternative freeware program available for all platforms is called Stykz) that is deceptively simple to use. Users are given a stickfigure to start. By moving the figure and adjusting its various body parts, users create a stopmotion movie, frame by frame.

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BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

Let me start off by saying InterroBang is both ambitious and potentially time-consuming, but it’s also a really cool idea. In a nutshell, InterroBang is a game that sends you on real-life missions of discovery and learning. Now I use the term mission because that’s what they refer to it as, but these really cover a wide range of activities, from basic — go somewhere you’ve never been before and observe who goes there and try and deduce why — to complex — go to both a supermarket and a farmers’ market and compare produce varieties and countries of origin. The more complex the mission, the more points you receive. You prove your team completed the mission by uploading pictures, video, and other documentation of your activities.

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BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

Looking for something to spice up your physics class and let your students have a bit of fun at the same time? If so, check out the very cool OE-CAKE physics simulator, a sandbox-style physics program that allows you to see how different physics elements will interact with each other.

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

Free association writing is one way to spark reluctant students who get bogged down in the process of needing to write exactly what the teacher expects them to write. This trepidation often stops young writers from even starting a piece. One Word is a website that might offer  interesting ways to get kids writing without worrying about being graded or even being read by anyone, if that is their wish. One Word gives you a single word — potato, for example — and provides you with a visual timer to write whatever comes to your mind in 60 seconds.

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BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

If you’re like me, you remember with fondness long nights with your friends, your trusty plastic icosahedron, pencils and paper, and junk food. I’m talking about Dungeons and Dragons of course, the game many of us geeks played when we were younger and had a lot more time on our hands. At one point blamed by pundits and media outlets as a bad influence on children, D&D is now making inroads in libraries and touting its value toward teaching children problem solving, teamwork, and mathematics and reading skills.

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

If you watched the Super Bowl on television this year, you no doubt caught the Google commercial that told of a love story entirely through search queries. The ad, known as Parisian Love, was effective and I know I wondered — from a writing and teaching perspective — how it could be replicated. A complicated method of screencasting seemed to be the only thing I could think of, and that would be too cumbersome for most of us, including me. But Google has now made it simple to duplicate its efforts. The company launched a site called Google Search Story, which is an online digital story tool that allows users to create a shortened version of what we saw on the Parisian Love commercial.

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

I’m convinced there’s a songwriter in everyone, if only we could lower the hurdles for creating the music to go with our songs. Not everyone has the dedication to put in years of practice to learn an instrument well enough to write a song on it. But what if we could lower that hurdle a bit? JamStudio is one such site that makes the song composition easier by allowing users to choose an instrument loop, plug in basic chord changes, and listen to what they have created — all within seconds.

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BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

I grew up on LEGOs, probably a top-three toy during my childhood. It’s one of the things I purchased for my kids as soon as they were old enough. So when LEGO announced its 2010 LEGO Smart contest it was a sure fire Instructify post.

The contest is only for educators — in a contest involving toys, students aren’t eligible for some reason — and the contest kit is free of charge. The contest revolves around creative ways to use LEGOs in an educational capacity. Past winners have found interesting ways to integrate the aspects of LEGO toys into lesson plans and use them as teaching tools.

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