Instructify

BY KEVIN HODGSON

You and your students may have heard all about the IBM computer, Watson, playing as a contestant on Jeopardy. You too can match wits with a computerized opponent in a game of Rock-Paper-Scissors. It’s not quite the same as Jeopardy, but this game from the New York Times pits humans against an artificial intelligence that learns from the style of play of its competitor (that would be you.)

The site notes:

A truly random game of rock-paper-scissors would result in a statistical tie with each player winning, tying and losing one-third of the time. However, people are not truly random and thus can be studied and analyzed. While this computer won’t win all rounds, over time it can exploit a person’s tendencies and patterns to gain an advantage over its opponent.

The game is simply played: choose whether the computer should be a novice or expert, and begin play by choosing if your hand is rock, paper, or scissors. What is interesting is that after a few rounds, the site begins to post messages about why the computer either won or did not win, making visible the computer’s decision-making strategies. For students, this might be a valuable tool for understanding some underlying logic of computerized players.

(For the record, I started out beating the computer, but it quickly bounced back, winning four in a row. After 21 games, it had the lead 8-6, with six tied games.)

Rock-Paper-Scissors: You Vs. The Computer

BY CHRISTOPHER PANNA

Have you worked with that administrator who’s obsessed with collecting data? He wants every decision informed by a test, survey, or committee report (and probably wants you on the committee). That guy certainly goes overboard, but teachers can keep him happy by using Poll Junkie to easily collect surveys.

The first thing you’ll notice is that Poll Junkie is designed to be fast and simple. No registration is required and all the tools you need are right there on the front page. The different types of questions allow you to get exactly the information you want; you can ask responders to rate items on a number scale, rank items in order, or use classic multiple choice. A completed poll generates two links: one with the questions for responders, and one with the results for you. There’s also HTML code for embedding questions on a website.

I’d only change two things about Poll Junkie: I’d give it a more school-appropriate name and I’d add an option for responders to enter their name (currently all responses are anonymous). Otherwise, it works great for surveying just about anyone. You can have students review a lesson, ask parents about their kids’ study habits, or gauge colleagues’ opinion on a school policy.

Poll Junkie

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

For years now, the talk in many technology circles has been the coming of the so-called semantic web, where information and data from many sources would be gathered and collated and, hopefully, interpreted across a wide range of topics. We may not be there yet but there are signs that more and more data is being transformed into useful information for learning. Gapminder World has the potential to be a very valuable research site for students learning about global trends through data visualization. The software that runs the site is a variation of Trendalyzer (developed by the Gapminder folks and sold to Google).

The aim of Trendalyzer and Gapminder World “….is to unveil the beauty of statistical time series by converting boring numbers into enjoyable, animated and interactive graphics.”

It succeeds, I think.

For example, given the focus on CO2 emissions and Global Warming, I checked out the data map on that topic at Gapminder World. Using information from as far back as 1820, I clicked the “play” button for the data grid, and watched as the world’s CO2 emissions began to unfold, region by region. I could then isolate the United States and China, or any other country, and do some direct comparisons. While that particular data set only goes back to the year 2000, a project that comes to mind is for students to gather data and continue the graph into 2010. Other topics include child mortality rates, impacts of earthquakes and volcanoes, and the age that people get married.

Gapminder also has a special section for teachers, where a long list of downloadable resources are available (including a beta version of a desktop Gapminder platform). The data, the graphs, and all of its resources can be used freely under a Creative Commons licence, so students can incorporate information into reports and projects.

Gapminder World

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BY AARON FOWLES

This year, I started a chess club at my school. It has been a great time seeing kids from north Memphis give up one afternoon per week to play chess at school. In order to make the club a little more competitive, I rated the players according to their wins and losses. I wanted to make this match the United States Chess Federation as closely as possible, so I used a rating program.

ELO Rater, now in version 2.0, was my program of choice. I tried several others, but this was the only one that combined ease of use with simple design. Most chess rating programs are tournament organizing programs, which are quite complex and not well suited to casual club play. This program allows users to enter in-game data in real time and receive ratings adjustments on the spot.

I can’t understate how much of a change this program has made in the club. It allows me to get a quick idea of how well each student is playing, and it allows me to make fair match-ups for casual play. There are still free tournament programs out there that are better for larger tournaments. The program, which runs on Windows and Linux using Wine, can keep track of different groups of people, so you can use one copy of the program to manage different groups of students.

ELO Rater

BY CHRISTOPHER PANNA

As much as I love maps, they occasionally frustrate me. By their very nature –- distorting a spherical earth to appear on a two-dimensional surface -– maps can represent the world inaccurately and lead to misunderstandings. Consider the Greenland problem in the Mercator projection. When something looks larger or smaller, we easily jump to conclusions about its importance.

But why not use distortion as a teaching tool? Distorting the world in the right ways can give us new insights, and that’s exactly what the Our Changing World map from FedEx does. Choose a topic and watch the size of each country morph to reflect the data. Certain parts of the world will expand or shrink depending on the value of their exports or their number of computer users, for example. Clicking below the map will bring up more detail about how the topic is changing the world. You can even compare two maps side-by-side (click “explore” in the upper right).

You may be skeptical about a resource produced by a corporation, but this map is truly more informational than commercial. There are no advertisements other than a small FedEx logo and occasional mention of the company’s name in the explanations.

This map is a fantastic way to show data visually, but it also makes a great jumping-off point to discuss maps’ power to represent information and influence our perceptions. Students could even research a topic and create their own distorted maps, though it’s probably best for them to focus on one region of the world.

Our Changing World

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BY AARON FOWLES

This article also appears on LEARN NC.

If you’re a teacher, you’re probably familiar with the life cycle of a computer in a typical classroom. The first two weeks are magnificent. The computer works wonderfully and performs all its tasks very quickly. Shortly after the honeymoon, though, things go sour. Internet Explorer won’t load a website. The computer begins crashing frequently. A student managed to get a virus on the computer. The icons on the desktop are all messed up. The computer then spends a few years in this semi-usable state: It won’t run the newest applications or even load a YouTube video. Eventually, it won’t turn on at all. The computer ends up either unplugged in the back of the room or sitting in a closet.

It doesn’t have to be that way. There is a way to invigorate those old computers and turn them back into machines that power teaching and learning. This method is totally free, relatively painless, community-supported, very stable, constantly updated, and secure. What could this magic solution be? The Linux operating system.

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BY BILL FERRIS

It’s that time of year again when lazy bloggers rehash old material under the guise of “Best of” lists rather than come up with new stuff. Instructify is no exception.

Below are the top 10 Instructify posts of 2009. The rankings were determined via a combination of Google Analytics, retweets, and the capricious and arbitrary whims of the editor.

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BY BILL FERRIS

If you use the polling program Poll Everywhere, they’ve just added a few more features. Audience members can now add Tweets directly to your PowerPoint slides (you can still moderate them before displaying, of course). You can also collect donations for your fundraiser via MobileCause. And just in case you’re thinking of making the jump from the free (poll up to 30 students) option to a premium plan, they’ve recorded several short videos that explain PE’s advanced features.

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BY REBECCAH HAINES

It being pretty early in the summer, I know you’re not really thinking about developing that perfect lesson plan.  However, in mid-September, when you’re frazzled from start of school madness, parents’ night, and you realize you don’t have a lesson for tomorrow, you’ll want to refer back to this website, Science with NOAA Research. 

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BY BILL FERRIS

This week’s MBTN features larger file attachments for Gmail users, following your favorite authors on Twitter, and how to shoot better video. Read more after the jump.

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Six Ways to Transform your Presentation
I’m still learning the whole presentation thing. I’ve probably made every classic presentation mistake, from mumbling to mistaking my PowerPoint slide show for an outline. Stepcase Lifehack has a great list of presentation tips for n00bs like me. Number one: ditch PowerPoint. I tried this for my last presentation and found it very liberating. This info will help you prepare a conference presentation, make your daily teaching more engaging, or come in handy for the forensics team.

26 Must-Have Free Fonts
Have you deleted Comic Sans from your computer yet? If not, I’ll wait here while you do that. Good. Now that that overused typeface is out of your life forever, what will you use for your bulletin boards and newsletters? Presidia Creative brings you 26 free fonts that will make your art projects and handouts look more slick. You’ll never need Comic Sans again.

Five Best Free Data Recovery Tools
Nothing places hard drives in more peril than finals week. At this time of year, the vengeful god Murphy inflicts horrible maladies upon the data of students and teachers worldwide for not heeding his law. Fortunately, atonement is within reach. Lifehacker has a rundown of five data-recovery tools that can bring Little Johnny’s term paper back to life just in time for him to print it out so his dog can eat it. -BILL FERRIS

Photo credit: Photocapy on Flickr.

Google does it again.  This time it’s a new layer for Google Earth that uses NASA-funded maps to show carbon dioxide emissions from various sources.  Of course, you can download Google Earth 5 and get the information so you can make your own maps, but you can view an example here.

In a classroom, maps like this can have many applications. The most obvious would be in a science class if you were studying climate change. You could compare and contrast the emissions from electricity production and the industrial sector.  Additionally, you could use the map to study your own area’s carbon footprint and compare it with other areas. Students could use the data within Google Earth to create a “tour” showing how various sectors and/or geographical areas contribute to carbon dioxide emissions.

I’m sure that once you play around with the maps and look at the data on your own, you’ll find many ways to integrate it into your own classroom. -REBECCAH HAINES

USA CO2 Emissions from fossil fuels 2002

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Whenever I see that I have a voicemail, I’m instantly demoralized. I’m not that busy, but man, am I impatient. Dial voicemail, dial in pass code, listen to robot tell me that there’s a new voicemail, dial number to listen to new voicemail, consider possible phone-related seppuku methods — you get the point.

Now, with K7 Unified Messaging, you can have your voicemails and faxes emailed directly to you. It takes a little bit of effort up front to arrange everything in a workable manner — after you set up your call-forwarding options to have your original number sent to the number K7 issues for you, you’ll pretty much be in business. The voicemails and faxes will arrive as attachments to the email that you receive. K7 will also have a private mailbox you can access directly by logging into the K7 website.

How might this be useful to you in the classroom? Its not. But whenever your central office sends a caller to your voicemail after you’ve left for the day, or if your students call to beg for an assignment extension, getting it before you go to work the next morning can be pretty handy. Also, if you end up with a bunch of messages, you might reclaim some more of your time in the morning. -NICK YINGLING

K7 Unified Messaging

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Have you ever had a colleague or student send you a file you have no idea how to open? If unfamiliar file extensions like “ODT,” “RGH” or “$S“ make you want to shout “!@#$%” you should visit OpenWith.org, a site that helps you find the program that will open whatever file you have — most of the time with free software. Spreadsheets, images, plugins, OpenWith can find all sorts of file types. Simply search for your mystery extension and OpenWith will find a program that can read it. You can also download a handy desktop tool to make looking up extensions even easier.  It’s an EXE file, in case you were wondering. That’s one file type you shouldn’t have to look up. -BILL FERRIS

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The National Center for Education Statistics is “the primary federal entity for collecting and analyzing data related to education.” Basically, if it involves a statistic about education, you can find it at NCES. Their Kids’ Zone is a branch of the site geared towards children, and provides activities for statistics and/or education.

Users can look up any school, college, or university, public or private, to get information like student-teacher ratios, class sizes, and tuition costs. In addition to demographic information, the NCES Kids’ Zone has tools to help kids create their own graphs using their own data, and games and quizzes in several subject areas. Some are great, and some are just silly (like matching universities to mascots, although I will admit to being pleased to see my own alma mater represented, even if there isn’t any true academic merit to the game — go Black Bears!) but poking around, you can find some gems. The Math Teasers would make a good weekly puzzle or challenge question for extra credit, and if you’re into things-of-the-day to get your students thinking, the home page has a daily word, quote, and historical fact.

NCES is also asking for kids to submit their own suggestions for activities for the site, which might be a great way to have kids think about technology, games, and learning. -GRETCHEN SCHAEFER

NCES Kids’ Zone

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