Instructify

BY BILL FERRIS

One of the best moments of my day is reading a bedtime story to my boys. We get quality bonding time, they’re fostering what I hope is a life-long love of books, and I get to work on my list of character voices, which consists of “Gruff Adult Male,” “All-purpose Female,” “Little Kid,” and “Carnival Barker.” But little do they know that instead of putting up with Daddy’s lack of dramatic range, they could instead listen to James Earl Jones. The Screen Actors Guild Foundation has produced Storyline Online, a streaming video site where SAG members read a wide selection of children’s books.

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BY BILL FERRIS

ProProfs Brain Games lets you create simple online games for your class without expending much time or effort. The game varieties include crosswords, word finds, jigsaw puzzles, and so on. Not super-complex, but perfect for test reviews and elementary classrooms.

ProProfs does the hard work of configuring the puzzles themselves, meaning you just have to come up with questions and answers. So if you’ve got a bunch of vocabulary words you want your students to learn, consider putting them in a crossword format to make the exercise a little more entertaining. (more…)

BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

Understanding how to budget your resources and not spend more that you take in can help children create a foundation for success later in life. Unfortunately, the subject often seems boring and intangible for students — graphs of production curves, widgets, butter versus guns, the law of diminishing returns…I remember them all from my economics class, but at the time, they seemed to have no relevance to my personal situation.

But here we have The Centsables, an interactive training tool for explaining and teaching students about economic and monetary responsibility. The premise revolves around a group of financial superheroes, The Centsables, who explain healthy economic principles in a campy comic-book format that is engaging and fun for young students. (more…)

BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

In light of the recent earthquake in Haiti, it seems appropriate to offer up tools for teaching about the possibilities of natural disasters and preparations that can be done locally in our schools which may better prepare students for coping with the situation should it occur. To that end, the Red Cross has assembled their Masters of Disaster curriculum focused for students K-8.

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BY BILL FERRIS

One of the oldest classroom management tricks in the book is to use a timer to keep your students on schedule. Just finished a math lesson? Let them know they have two minutes to get ready for science. Big test today? They have 45 minutes to finish it. A timer sets clear expectations while keeping class running on time.

Online Stopwatch is the latest free online timer application I’ve found. Obviously it lets you set the timer, which then counts down to zero. However, it has several more features as well. (more…)

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

Your elementary students can follow Santa Claus’ flight path on Christmas Eve through the magic of Google Earth.

The jolly elves at the North American Aerospace Defense Command (that’s NORAD to you and me) have been tracking Santa using a combination of satellites, radar, Santa Cams, and fighter jets (!) for years. Now they’ve joined forces with Google to better update kids on Santa’s whereabouts as he flies around the world.

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BY BILL FERRIS

When I was a kid, I always wanted to go to Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Like actually go there, meet Speedy Delivery, check out the Trolley, all of it. If I’d only had the good sense to be born twenty years later, I could have paid a visit via the internet to the excellent Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood website.

Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood on the PBS Kids website lets you look at classic clips from the show. Elementary kids can watch video field trips in which Fred Rogers takes in a performance by Yo-Yo Ma, visits a museum, and guides kids on a trip to the doctor’s office for a checkup. Kids can read stories, play games, and build a neighborhood of their own.

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BY BILL FERRIS

Do you like birds? Perhaps more to the point, are you teaching a unit on birds? If so, make All About Birds the next site you visit. Created by the Cornell Lab or Ornithology, All About Birds strives to be “the Web’s best and most comprehensive resource for North American birds, bird watching, and bird conservation — accessible to everyone for free.” It’s a lofty goal, but if this site didn’t achieve it, I can’t imagine anyone else has.

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BY BILL FERRIS

“Birdies are friends!” That’s what my two-year-old son says. He even thinks an owl lives in the ceiling fan in his room. If that’s not a ringing endorsement for the avian kind, I don’t know what is. He especially loves the “birdie book,” a book from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology that plays the songs of 250 birds.

Given how much he likes the book, I’m a little nervous about showing him another great bird resource from Cornell. Round Robin: The Cornell Blog of Ornithology has a lot of fascinating bird content, including video, audio, and images that my little boy will probably want to look at all day long. (more…)

BY BILL FERRIS

Just because all your students aren’t artists, that doesn’t mean they can’t create their own comic strips. ToonDoo makes it easy to create a comic by using stock characters and scenes. If kids would rather provide their own protagonists, ToonDoo makes that a snap, too.

Students can choose from a variety of characters and locales. They can also create their own characters with the TraitR function (the name refers to character traits, as in “trait-er” rather than someone who will tattle on kids for cutting in the lunch line). For more options, kids can use the DoodleR tool to draw directly on the comic panels, or import and manipulate images with the ImagineR function.

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BY BILL FERRIS

Many years ago, Walt Disney drew a little cartoon mouse who in turn built a theme park with his own four-fingered hands. Or something. Today, your elementary students can create cartoons of their own, as well as stories, drawings, cards and more at Kerpoof, an online creativity site brought to you by Disney.

Kerpoof gets kids creating with a simple interface that has a surprising amount of options. The movie section is particularly impressive — you can have several characters onscreen at once, and direct their movement, actions and speech. Compared to online animation tool Xtranormal, Kerpoof gives you far more control over your characters — Xtranormal’s free version only allows two characters, and they can’t walk around. However, Kerpoof doesn’t allow you to switch camera angles, nor do the characters have voice simulation (which may be a positive, depending on your point of view). (more…)

BY BILL FERRIS

In Escape from the Mummy’s Tomb! your elementary students must recover Egyptian artifacts from inside a pyramid. As the title of the game has no doubt alerted you, you’ll have to wrest these artifacts from an undead mummy’s cold, dead, bandaged fingers.

After your students have finished their archaeological adventure, they’ll find themselves in a museum, where they must put the artifacts in their proper display cases. (more…)

BY BILL FERRIS

As school budgets dwindle and schools focus on high-stakes testing in core subjects, some schools see art programs as the go-to budgets to slash. Fortunately, there are a lot of tools and projects out there for art teachers that don’t cost a dime. The following are five of Instructify’s favorite free tools for art teachers.

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BY MELISSA THIBAULT

Picture this. You just finished teaching your third lesson on prime factors, photosynthesis or fractions, and there are some students who need more visuals and more practice. Wouldn’t it be great if you had free, quality-assured courseware in math, science, health, reading and keyboarding you could use to reinforce hard-to-grasp topics?

e-Learning for Kids, a global, nonprofit foundation, provides free courses for children ages 5 – 12, and is working to build a community for parents and educators to volunteer their expertise and share innovations and insights in childhood education. (more…)