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Pencils? Check.

Notebooks? Check.

Online word processor application? Check.

In addition to standbys like pens, pads, and the ever-popular Trapper Keeper, today’s learners need a new set of school supplies, too.  These tools enable students to take advantage of the new learning possibilities the Web has to offer, such as making research easier, or finding better, cheaper ways of doing what they’re already doing.

In that spirit, here’s my top 10 new-school school supplies (all of which, by the way, are completely free).

1. OpenOffice — Why pay a bunch of money to Microsoft when you can get top-quality, MS-compatible programs for free? The OpenOffice suite packs a word processor, spreadsheets, presentation software, graphics software, and a database program. The open-source OpenOffice can do pretty much anything Microsoft Office can do, except drain your bank account.
2. A Cell phone — Whether it’s for podcasting, conducting surveys, or staying organized, the cellular phone has a huge amount of educational potential for those who know how to use it.
3. Remember the Milk –Back in my day, I wrote inky scribbles on my palm to stay organized. Today’s kids have Remember the Milk, which can keep track of assignments, activities, chores, and all applicable due dates and priorities. It also has fewer smudges.
4. Diigo — Invaluable for research, Diigo lets students bookmark and annotate webpages so they won’t forget why they bookmarked a page in the first place. They can also read other folks’ notes or annotations for further insight. Like any good Web 2.0 tool, Diigo lets them share their bookmarks and annotations with friends, too.
5. BibMe — Once students have found some great sources on Diigo, how do they cite them? Nobody has the time or energy to leaf through their MLA style manual to find the proper citation format for a newspaper article or whatever. If your students can muster the effort to enter a title, author, or ISBN number, BibMe will do the hard part and churn out a citation pre-formatted for the bibliography. If only the entire research paper process was this simple.
6. Google Docs — Does many of the things OpenOffice does. Google Docs also adds a collaborative element, as multiple students will be able to edit a document, spreadsheet or presentation.
7. OpenDrive – No more excuses about hard drive crashes. OpenDrive offers 1GB of storage online. Students can sync it with files on their hard drive for backups, collaborate with friends on projects, or use it to store their ever-expanding music collection. And for the time being at least, it’s free.
8. VoiceThread — A slideshow with a soundtrack, VoiceThread lets students tell stories visually as well as textually. Easily upload video, audio, even record narration via their cell phone (I told you those things were handy), with any luck VoiceThread will replace PowerPoint.
9. Adobe Photoshop Express Beta — If you thought Microsoft Office was expensive, check out the price tag for Adobe Photoshop. Fortunately, Photoshop Express Beta performs most of the photo editing functions students will need without costing a cent. They don’t even have to download anything. Now that’s express!
10. PB Wiki — Wikis are great for class projects and to cross-reference other pieces of information. And PB Wiki makes setting up a wiki a breeze, even if you don’t know a wiki from a blog.

As with any top 10 list, I had to exclude other worthy applications. Now’s your chance to tout your favorites (or to tell me what a jerk I am) in the comments. -BILL FERRIS

UPDATE: Okay, so cell phones aren’t exactly free. However, your students probably own them already, and most of the educational uses for them won’t cost you anything to implement.

Photo credit: jgodsey on flickr

Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines — the new school year is upon us. The 180 school days ahead may hold nearly daily occurrences of less than enriching activities for you and your students… french fries for lunch? Gossip in the teachers lounge? As you think about the routines you will be setting in the days ahead, consider adding some poetry to the mix. You know, to balance out some of that other stuff.

Billy Collins, former Poet Laureate of the United States has even made it easy for you. Go to the website for Poetry 180: A Poem a Day for American High Schools, and you’ll find the poems pre-selected and accompanied by ideas for how to implement this program in your school. Collins imagines this as a school-wide endeavor, but there’s no reason you couldn’t put it into practice in your own classroom if you’re daunted by the idea of proposing it on a larger scale.

The idea here isn’t to study form or meaning or the life and times of the author. You needn’t even discuss the poems after they’ve been read if no one seems inclined to. Just get poetry out in the air! It’s good clean fun. -MARIELLE PRINCE

Poetry 180

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The English Fale Fail Blog might be just the thing if you love those silly LOLCats as much as I do, but get a kick out of that other undying meme known only as FAIL. The idea is simple, a photo or video that captures a moment of utter failure in an attempt to do something commonplace. For instance, a photo of a semi truck taking out a sign that says Clearance 16′ needs only the caption FAIL to let us know that some dummy thought he could do something that was clearly impossible, or at the very least, implausible. There’s also the caption EPIC FAIL, which denotes a failure on a much higher level.

There are examples all over the ‘Net, but one special blog has decided to concentrate on the moments in which the English language is marred, bastardized and downright butchered. The occurrences are more often than not found on handwritten signs and notes, but occasionally, the English language is damaged more thoroughly on a fixed structure such as a menu or a tattoo.

All of the pictures on EnglishFailBlog.com are user-submitted, so if you see an instance that you know is a travesty of English misuse, you could find your find on the site. Though some of the submissions are of gross translations, there are still plenty of examples of why being a good teacher now can prevent this kind of ridiculousness in the future. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

English Fail Blog

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Quick! You need to come up with some writing prompts for your students for a creative writing assignment, but the best thing you can come up with is “What I did on my summer vacation.” You’ve got a a writing emergency on your hands. You need 911 Writers Block to help you out.

911 Writers Block has lots of tools to get your students writing, whether they need a story setting to get them started, some more colorful verbs to punch up their prose, or get them unstuck in a story by having a new character make a dramatic entrance. You can even look up interesting ways to kill off characters.

You can use 911 Writers Block for everything from prompts for daily journal  entries to sending students there when they need fresh ideas. Please remember, though, that 911 Writers Block is a website, not a phone number. Your city’s 911 operators probably wouldn’t be very excited to help you with verbs, and don’t even think about telling them you want to kill off a character. -BILL FERRIS

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Looking for a fun tool to use in your elementary reading instruction? Your students will enjoy learning the fundamentals of reading with Starfall.

Starfall is a free interactive reading phonics based web site. It targets grades Pre-K through second grade. On the site you can start at the very beginning with the alphabet and move onto word families and non-fiction reading with biographies. Starfall has games to provide meaningful practice with fundamental reading strategies. The site features activities appropriate for everyone from beginning readers to fluent readers.

In the Alphabet Section students click on the different letters of he alphabet to hear the sound the letter makes and are shown pictures that begin with that sound. The site then provides sorting and matching games to provide practice with the letters. When your students are ready to move on they can visit the Learn to Read section where they can read stories that are broken up into the different word families. In this section the site offers little rhythms students can listen to in order to learn vowel rules such as long vowels and r-controlled vowels. Students can have the site actually sound and blend words of a story as they read along.

As your students develop as readers they can visit the It’s Fun to Read and I’m Reading section for different types of genres of stories such as poems, biographies, tongue twisters, plays, nonfiction, fiction, folk tales, comics, Greek Myths, and Chinese Fables. In addition, your students can participate in interactive activities that correlate with the different holidays we observe throughout the year. In addition to using this site in your classroom, this is a great resource for parents and students to use at home, especially for your students with limited English proficiency. -MONIQUE ST.LOUIS

Starfall

Top 100 Language Blogs: Whether you teach a foreign language or English as a second language, you’ll want to pay a visit to these language blogs. You’ll find useful info about food, travel and culture. And, you know, words too.

50 Tips and Tricks to Create a Learning Space in Second Life: Second Life, that online realm where you can interact with semi-realistic avatars of folks from around the world, can be a powerful educational tool if you know how to use it right. Read up on these strategies and turn Second Life into a virtual classroom.

40 Places for College Students to Find Free Unabridged Books Online and 20 Best Websites to Download Free EBooks: I like free books. You like free books. Now you don’t even have to go to the library to get books for free thanks lists that are pretty much what they sound like.

50 Useful Blogging Tools for Teachers: Still thinking about jumping into blogging? If you’re itching to get started, check out this list of useful blogging tools for teachers called…well, you get the idea.

Photo credit: zen on flickr.

Everyone’s got opinions. If you’ve ever visited an online message board, though, you know not everyone knows how to express or defend those opinions in a compelling, or sometimes, even logical manner. Learning debating skills will serve students well no matter what they choose to do with their lives. Show them how it’s done — send them to Debatepedia.

Endorsed by the National Forensic League, Debatepedia compiles several hot issues such as abortion, whether schools have the right to search student lockers, and climate change. Participants from both sides of the issue post their argument, leaving the reader to make up his or her own mind. Not only is this a good chance for students to get debate experience, but to also bone up on current events and important issues.

The best way to learn something is by jumping in and doing it.  Encourage your students to get involved in Debatepedia. Post an argument, or even volunteer for an editorial internship — putting “editor” on a resume will look pretty good in the college application process.

Argumentative skills will help students not only on the debate team, but also in writing position papers, as well as in becoming informed members of society. If reading Debatepedia can prevent at least one student from using the “you’re wrong because you’re stupid” argument, you’ve won. -BILL FERRIS

Debatepedia

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Five Rules for Better PowerPoint Presentations -Michael Hyatt’s blog, Working Smart, has these 5 great tips to spice up your next PowerPoint. The article is written from a business perspective, but that doesn’t mean these tips won’t help you when teaching the Civil War or Beowulf. One of the more important tidbits of advice is #4: Less is More. Amen, Mr. Hyatt.

40 Places for College Students to Find Free Unabridged Books Online -Your students, whether they are going to college or not, can surely benefit from more reading. In a digital age, why waste all the paper it takes to reprint a book when they are often archived online. These resources are, of course, free and include a list of places you can download audio versions of your favorite classics. Thanks to Education-Portal.com

Eleven Worst Foods Americans Eat Daily - It might be high time to get back on a health kick for your author, and what better place to start than identifying and limiting or eliminating certain foods from my diet. You can get on the train with me, and start the school year off right. HealthAssist.net presents this list of 11 kinds of food you should think twice before eating. Unfortunately for you, me and the good people at Krispy Kreme, doughnuts lead the list. Bummer, Bear Claw.

(25) Funny Metaphors Used in High School Essays -Because we aren’t without a sense of humor around here, (hopefully, you have one, too) so here are Help.com’s 25 examples of ridiculous metaphors used by high school students in various essays. Please note: some of these might be considered similes.  Among my favorite: From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30 and He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something. - JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

As the author of some of the shortest works on high school reading lists, Ernest Hemingway is probably a frequent feature of your students’ book reports.  Give those students who are trying to get away with a little less a little more to do by sending them over to the Hemingway Resource Center.

At first, I took issue with this site for what seems to me to be an insidious mixing of content and advertising (for example, throughout the pages there are offers for Hemingway memorabilia on ebay).   Upon closer inspection, however, I was impressed by the lengthy biography, the hard-hitting FAQ, and, most of all, the surprisingly active discussion forums.  The site’s contributors respond to visitors’ questions thoughtfully, and encourage them to look deeper into issues when it seems they might have been seeking easy answers.

Conclusion: the Hemingway Resource Center is the place to go, whether you’re looking for scholarship or for an Ernest Hemingway King Leather Sleigh Bed Headboard. -MARIELLE PRINCE

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We’ve reviewed a lot of bibliography makers here on Instructify, but BibMe may be the easiest to use. Like OttoBib, you can create a citation worthy of the MLA, APA, or Chicago style guides with nothing more than an ISBN number. BibMe takes it a few steps further, though, letting you search by the title or author of a work. Whereas OttoBib only worked for books, BibMe spits out citations for Web sites, journals, videos, newspapers, as well as “Other,” which I hope will allow me to use “Some guy I overheard at the mall” as a legitimate source.

When they’ve entered all their sources, BibMe will let your students save their bibliography online, or export it to Microsoft Word format, so they can just copy and paste right into their research papers. Best of all, the only thing BibMe costs is time, and not very much at that. When they’re faced with the prospect of spending hours writing a paper, anything you can do to save your students time will make you look like a hero. -BILL FERRIS

BibMe

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Back in my day we didn’t have that fancy schmancy “track changes” function. Rather, we did, but I hadn’t learned to use it yet. Personally, though, I’d rather edit a hard copy of an essay than an electronic version any day.

If you do your grading on paper rather than via email, may I suggest boning up on traditional editing marks, the kind old school newspaper editors used. Knowing how to mark up a paper lets you clearly suggest improvements to your students, while teaching them the language of the professional editor — useful to students interested in journalism or writing.

I’m a big fan of technology, but sometimes it’s good to look backwards, too. Grading writing assignments by hand is one area that has an advantage over the digital method. And if you’re going to edit hard copy, you may as well do it all the way by learning proper editing edit-iquette. -BILL FERRIS

Editing marks

Teachers and students from across North Carolina learned the Alice programming language this summer during a workshop and camp at Duke University with support from the National Science Foundation and IBM. Alice uses simple commands to animate student-created movies and video games. According to the workshop organizer, Dr. Susan Rodger from Duke University, “Middle school students don’t really know what computer science is about. Alice is changing that by attracting both boys and girls with its virtual worlds storytelling and interactive capabilities. Our workshop showed that Alice can be used for problem solving and presentations in different disciplines such as math, science, English, art, business, and history.”

Students and teachers alike were drawn to the visual format. Tom Robertson, a middle school mathematics and technology teacher from Asheville, said, “This summer I had the opportunity to observe middle school students using Alice to build creative 3-dimensional interactive worlds. They were completely engrossed in the task at hand: computer programming. Clearly, Alice was providing a technology experience that went beyond the typical PowerPoint presentation.” Janie Torain, a business teacher from Person High School in Person County, agreed. She noted that students in her class will use Alice Programming software to explore multimedia production while creating presentations in a ”FUN-damentally’ different and more enjoyable way than ever before.”

Teachers from many disciplines beyond technology and career education connected with Alice. Math teacher Bridgette Scott created a world for teaching the coordinate plane. Math teacher Cheri Grantlin from Durham plans to integrate Alice into creating engaging class starters. Nashville science teacher Alisa White noted Alice’s assessment possibilities. She said, “Worlds created by middle school students effectively promote interdisciplinary understanding, problem solving and learning fundamental concepts in life, earth, and physical science within a short period of time. It is a great assessment tool.”

Humanities teachers recognized Alice as a way to encourage student creativity and engage students with literature. According to Person County teacher Andrea Payne, “Alice slows the thinking down and helps a child think about ‘thinking about.’ Storyboarding takes thoughts from abstract to concrete. This is how screenwriters do it: they storyboard.”

For students, the most important aspect of Alice was the opportunity for self-expression. Jesse, a middle school student at the camp, said, “It’s interactive; that’s cool. It’s open - you know - there’s a lot you can do with it.” Brittany, another middle schooler, was looking forward to using Alice for projects. She said, “I like that you can actually create your own ideas and express yourself and have fun with it.”

Teachers who are interested in Alice can download free middle school lesson plans and materials from the Duke workshop. -DR. SUSAN RODGER

Note: This article was put together by Dr. Susan Rodger and several teachers attending the Adventures in Alice Programming Workshop held at Duke University in June and July 2008.

Alice (free download)

Free Alice lesson plans for middle school

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Have you ever needed the answer to some pressing question, but found yourself no where near a computer and yielded only a cell phone to get your answer? I know I’ve been there many times, especially when traveling, and while you can sometimes text message search engines (or call a web-savvy friend), you can’t always get the answer you need. After being in such a predicament, I’ve often resolved to finally getting a smart phone, but now I don’t have to!

ChaCha  is a service that allows anyone with a mobile phone to text 242 242 (CHACHA) or call 1-800-2CHACHA and ask any question in conversational English and receive an accurate answer as a text message within a few minutes. It basically makes any cell phone a “smart phone,” and the idea is genius really: they don’t use a search engine algorithm with automatically generated responses, but rather a network of knowledgeable human “guides.” And since ChaCha uses people to respond with answers, you can easily reply with follow-up questions as if you are exchanging messages with a friend.

So let’s say you can’t remember who Gabriel falls in love with in Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd (it’s Bathsheba Everdene, by the way), or you need a quick weather update, or you just need to find the closest vegetarian restaurant to your current location, you can just call or text ChaCha and get a great answer quickly.

The service is totally free, too (except for any text message or minute fees  that may apply based on your cell phone plan), so you don’t have to worry about encountering any hidden costs when you get your phone bill. So make your cell phone a bit smarter, and maybe make yourself a little smarter while you’re at it! -LAUREN FROHNE

ChaCha

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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

When I was not sure which path my career would go, I very seriously considered teaching English in Japan. The salary seemed fine, but I was more interested in getting some exposure to a completely new world. Because of extenuating circumstances that aren’t worth getting into here, I opted to remain a patriot for the time being. Nonetheless, I scoured the Web and found plenty of resources available to answer my questions about where to begin planning my travels abroad to share my English skills.

First, here is a great series of posts by blogger NomadicMatt. He’s broken his knowledge and expertise of teaching abroad into five parts, which covers everything from job types to specific places to teach and what to expect in various countries. There is also plenty of information on what is required of teachers planning to go overseas to teach:

All countries require that you be a native speaker. This means from the UK, US, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand. While some countries will hire Filipinos, they typically prefer Western employees.You will also need a bachelor’s degree from a 4 year accredited university. It doesn’t matter what your degree is in. Whether you have a degree in biochemistry to English to yoga doesn’t matter so long as you have a university degree. A four year degree is a MUST in the higher end countries like Korea and Japan.

These posts have lots of great information if you’ve already talked yourself into going, but it might be helpful to hear another side of the story, too. Read this post, about “The Ugly” side of teaching in Japan. It sheds a little bit of light on some of the aspects of over-the-pond tutelage that they won’t tell you about in the brochure. Also, Mottekaero jDonuts begs the question Is English Teaching Worth It? - JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Teaching English Abroad pt 1
Teaching English Abroad pt 2
Teaching English Abroad pt 3
Teaching English Abroad pt 4
Teaching English Abroad pt 5
Teaching English in Japan: The Ugly
Is English Teaching Worth It?

Photo credit: jmurawski on Flickr)