Instructify

BY NICK YINGLING

Is English your first language? Did you know that if you constantly find yourself at a loss for words and keep making mistakes you might not exactly be considered fluent? Sure, I do hold an impossibly high standard and I am indeed applying a rather narrow definition for language fluency. My point is this: you probably need to give yourself a refresher. What better way to study than by helping someone else learn!

English Portal Community from Talk and Learn is an educational site for users around the world who want to improve their English. Users are able to study online, take quizzes, and after creating their own profile, chat with other members in English. (more…)

The early buzz about the world wide web was that it would throw open the floodgates of the world’s accumulated knowledge, creating a window into the cultures of the most far-flung places on earth. We instead got lolcats, pop-up ads, and meaningless quizzes about which superhero you are.

Fortunately, some wise folks had an eye on that original idyllic vision all along, and those folks now bring us the World Digital Library. A project of the Library of Congress and UNESCO, the site provides access to high-quality digital scans of primary source materials from all over the world.

These cultural treasures include maps, photographs, manuscripts, audio and video recordings and more, and there’s at least one item from every UNESCO member country. The WDL’s interface is phenomenal, offering beautiful, high-resolution scans with incredible zooming capability. Check out this 18th century Japanese woodblock print; you can zoom in close enough to see individual paper fibers.

The site is also exceptionally easy to navigate — perhaps dangerously so, if you like looking at pretty pictures and are prone to losing track of time. You can browse by place, time, topic, type of item, or contributing institution, and the site is navigable in seven different languages — Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

The possibilities for using the WDL in the classroom are nearly endless: Social studies teachers, obviously, will find a treasure trove of primary source materials, but they can also show works created contemporaneously from around the globe for any era, enabling students to develop a holistic sense of global history. Second-language teachers can have students view culturally significant items in their target language. English language arts teachers can identify exquisite images, audio, and video for use as writing prompts. And the ability to browse by topic provides opportunities for use by those often-neglected STEM teachers: Among the topics to choose from is “natural science and mathematics,” which can be further limited to astronomy, geometry, medicine, physics, etc.

An entry under the topic “mathematical geography” is a 15th-century Egyptian book called A Guide for the Perplexed on the Drawing of the Circle of Projection. Many thanks to the World Digital Library for raising our collective IQ. This is what I always knew the internet could be. -EMILY JACK

World Digital Library

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We here at Instructify love to hear from you. Would you like to leave some feedback on this posting or just send me a message? Simple: just go up on your roof and paint your remarks in big, block letters. If you’re in a rural area, you might arrange some rocks in a field. Then in the comments section under each posting simply send us the coordinates.

Yeah, I suppose maybe you could leave the actual comments in the comments section, Captain Buzzkill. I’m just trying to get you motivated about different ways that you might possibly use Google Earth.

Maybe you might be interested in using Google Earth to explore the Civil War, look at the global diamond trade, or engage students in math and geometry by looking at different mountains’ ski slopes. Take a look at these lesson plans for Google Earth, for example. You’ll find lessons spread out across five content areas: social studies, math, science, language arts, and cross curricular. The lessons start at basic how-tos for users (which aren’t just for stinking newbies — experienced users might even find new features to investigate), then branch out into both student-controlled and teacher-controlled lessons.

The best part is that these lesson plans are already prepared for you. The file formats will vary, but now you don’t have to stay up until 1 a.m. doing prep work and planning. Who knows? This new abundance of time might afford you the chance to start a new hobby…like arranging cryptic messages for satellites to read. I’m just saying. -NICK YINGLING

Lesson Plans for Google Earth

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20 Kids * 20 Kites * 20 Minutes
From the Big Wind Kite Factory in Hawaii, this link provides a complete rundown of instructions and supplies to get 20 of your students building kites and getting them in the air in 20 minutes. Sounds like a cool springtime project for an elementary art class.

Top 10 Tools for a Free Online Education
Want to learn programming? Maybe you’d like to learn to play an instrument or speak a language. Lifehacker has 10 great tools you or your students can use to learn cool new skills.

10 Must-Try Social Media Sites for College Students
While Instructify’s audience is predominantly K-12, a lot of your students will head off to college someday — possibly in a few short months. These 10 sites can help them thrive in their new learning environment by helping them find internships, stay organized, or maybe just find a ride to class.

20+ Must-Read Education Technology Blogs for Teachers, Students, and e-Learners
If Instructify whets your appetite for even more ways to bring nifty tools into your classroom, check out this list, which is pretty much what it sounds like. The fact that they’ve omitted Instructify is clearly just an oversight. -BILL FERRIS

Photo credit: .mands. on Flickr.

3 Challenges to Wiki Use in Instruction
Every teacher’s got a wiki these days. So what do you do with it in class? Integrating a piece of technology doesn’t lend itself to flying by the seat of one’s pants. THE Journal presents 3 Challenges to Wiki Use in Instruction, discussing what factors must be overcome to get the most out of wikis in education.

The World of 100
Imagine if the world were condensed into a village of 100 people. Now imagine if these villagers’ lifestyles were documented in the form of snazzy-looking charts. Toby Ng Design has created The World of 100, an illustration project in which demographic information such as population, literacy and air quality are depicted in striking graphic representations.

Learn 35+ Languages for Free in iTunes
LifeClever presents this list of free language courses available on iTunes. Good for your language students, or for anyone who’d like to converse in another language.

100 Free Online Lectures that Will Make You a Better Teacher
As a dedicated teacher, you’re always looking to improve professionally, right? A good tip at the right time can make a world of difference. This list of online videos will give you knowledge and ideas for getting even better at what you do. These videos deal with instructional suggestions, technology demos, and rules of the road for new teachers. -BILL FERRIS

Photo credit: One Good Bumblebee on Flickr.

50 Ways to Help the Planet – If you want to help the planet, and I’m talking about OUR planet, here (Earth), then you’ll find this list handy. By taking small steps and making seemingly insignificant lifestyle choices, you can make a significant difference when it comes to cutting down on your impact on the environment. Simple decisions like changing your light bulbs to  paying bills online can make a huge difference.

Top 20 Ways to Share a Great Blog Post - So you wrote an awesome blog post. Now, who is going to read it? Make sure you are getting the most exposure you can by using some of these methods from Mashable. Whether you want to bring people to your blog via Twitter or just telling a friend at the grocery store, you’ll need to get the word out there if you want anyone to know your brilliant musings.

10 Misconceptions About Common Sayings – If you’re fit as a fiddle, it doesn’t mean you’re in as good shape as a violin, but it does mean that you are as worthy as an expensive instrument. This and other phrases are commonly misused and butchered every day, so it might be important to know where these sayings come from. So don’t wait on tenterhooks anymore, and check out this list from ListVerse.

5 Traits of a Leader - As a teacher, it is important to know how to lead and stay in charge. Sometimes, though, it takes more than just THINKING you’re a leader to actually be one. Abide by these traits from YourLifeCoach and you’ll be fast on your way to strong leadership in no time. It takes a little confidence and vision to become someone others can really look up to. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Photo credit: Leonid Mamchenkov on Flickr

The evils of bad grammar must be vanquished. This is not an easy feat, especially for mild-mannered citizens such as ourselves. Luckily, the foes of proper English will soon meet their match now that Grammarman is on the scene. Grammarman is a superhero who fights for truth, justice, and properly formed sentence structure. You can enjoy reading the adventures of Grammarman as he beats baddies such as Sammy Colon, the Punctuation Villain. Watch these hilarious and fun (yet educational) episodes by Brian Boyd as Grammarman defends Verbo City from its ever-rising gramar and spelling problems.

Read along in the comics and you’ll notice something…odd about some of the sentences and dialogue. That’s right, the panels of the comic are riddled with…GRAMMAR ERRORS! It’s up to you to help Grammarman find the poorly constructed syntax and correct it. Think you’re up to the challenge? You’ve got six thrilling episodes to help defend Verbo City. Click over to the website before it are too late. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Grammarman

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7 Steps to Emotional Maturity – It’s easy to get wrapped up in your emotions sometimes, and that can lead to ineffective teaching. For students, getting wrapped up in their emotions can be a hindrance to progress. This list shows steps toward gaining emotional maturity, which doesn’t necessarily mean giving up your emotions. It just means taking the time to understand your feelings.

Top 10 Language Learning Blogs – Learning a new language doesn’t have to be difficult. Especially when you have the entire Internet at your fingertips. You might not even have to do too much research to find the right language to learn with these 10 language learning blogs from The Linguist. For all you foreign language teachers out there, this could be a great list for resources, too.

101 Interesting Human Body and Health Facts – Normally, I am wary of the word “interesting,” mainly because it is rather subjective, and also because it is one of those adjectives that doesn’t do much for its subject. However, this list from List Lovers encompasses a long list of uncommon medical facts, many of which are quite useful. For instance, did you know that one uses 200 muscles to take a single step?

Top 100 Novels of All Time – This list, compiled from other top 100 novels lists, including those on The Radcliffe List and Time, is a serious list for a serious reader. I don’t know how many of them I’ve actually read cover to cover, but many of them I read while I was in school. Hopefully, your students can do the same. I can’t say I totally agree with this list, as there’s no Fahrenheit 451 to be found. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Photo credit: solar ikon on Flickr.

Something for the “not as gross as it sounds” category, GameGoo is a series of educational games for your young learners. These Flash-based games are fun for anyone, but geared specifically for the kinder-crowd. With fun names like “Squanky the Tooth Taker Quiet Quest for Opposites” and “Wizards and Pigs Poetry Pickle,” your elementary students can have as much offbeat fun as they can stand while learning a variety of subjects.

One of the best aspects of these games is the spoken instructions that you receive. This makes the games have potential for auditory learners as well as visual learners. An initiative of Earobics, GameGoo is a good way for kids to get an early start on reading and listening comprehension skills. What’s more is that the games are actually fun and challenging enough that they will keep students’ attention without boring them. For example, one game challenges players to identify antonyms from a word bank, and if you choose correctly a little goblin-fairy thing collects a tooth from a sleeping camper, then offers it to a toothless beaver. Get the beaver all-new teeth, and you win. Strange as it sounds, this and the other games are loads of fun for learners of all ages. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

GameGoo

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A spoonful of podcasting helps the science go down. Yes, that’s a terrible lead sentence, but when a site has a name like Bytesize Science, how could I not think of utensil-sized portions? Or Mary Poppins? Bytesize Science delivers hot new scientific developments via their series of two- to three-minute podcasts. Your students can learn about paper-thin stereo speakers, underwater camouflage, or how chemists have improved artificial turf. You can download select episodes in Spanish as well, which would be helpful for some of your ESL students. To make things even easier, you can subscribe to Bytesize Science in iTunes or via RSS feed, so you can download each episode automatically. And since each episode is about the length of your average pop song, your students can learn intriguing scientific facts without expending a huge amount of time. Bite-sized indeed. -BILL FERRIS

Bytesize Science

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Your students have a great opportunity to see exotic places, and all they have to do is learn to speak Turkish.

The National Security Language Initiative for Youth offers 550 scholarships for high school students to travel overseas to learn less-commonly taught languages for a summer, a semester, or a full year. Through these immersion programs, students can learn Russian, Mandarin, Farsi, Arabic, Korean, Hindi, or Turkish. The scholarship covers all program costs, travel, food, accommodations, all that stuff.

In addition to picking up a language, this is a wonderful chance to absorb foreign cultures and see historic landmarks. To qualify, students must be U.S. citizens 15-18 years of age, earn at least a 2.5 GPA, and be enrolled in high school at the time of the application. Also, they’ll have to get a passport, and all the other things you do when leaving the country. The site has an FAQ that covers how to get a passport, plus other…well, frequently asked questions.

The application deadline is February 2, 2009, so there’s still time for your students to apply. Who wouldn’t want to see the world and learn a new language? -BILL FERRIS

National Security Language Initiative for Youth Scholarships to Study Abroad

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If you don’t learn Roman numerals, how will you know what Super Bowl you’re watching? Nova Roma has got you covered with their Handy Roman Numeral Converter. Type in any number, and it’ll be converted to a series of Ms, Xs and Is (for example, we’re now in the year MMIX). Just in case you’d like your students to actually learn how Roman numerals work, the page also explains what each letter means.

As long as you’re there, you may as well look around at the rest of the Nova Roma site. It has lots of information on ancient Roman culture, which would make it a great resource for a history or Latin class. But most importantly, your students will be able to decipher the numbers XLIII and XV — respectively the numbers for this year’s Super Bowl and Wrestlemania. -BILL FERRIS

Roman Numeral Converter

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I have a love-hate relationship with Wal-Mart. Shopping there can be unpleasant, as I always seem to get stuck in an aisle behind a family of six who can’t find what they’re looking for; however, I still shop there because I know I can find anything I want. Well, 4teachers.org is like the Wal-Mart of classroom technology resources, but better. You can find it all under one roof, AND you won’t spend hours stuck behind a slow-poke.

4teachers.org has a plethora of tools that teachers can use to make their lives easier. Some tools such as RubiStar and Assign-A-Day have already been discussed in this blog. Some other tools that are useful include CasaNotes, Project Based Learning (PBL) Checklists, and The Teacher Tacklebox. CasaNotes generates simple form letters that you can edit and print in English and Spanish. It offers some of the basics you might not want to recreate like progress reports, field trip permission slips, and parent-conference notices. The PBL Checklist section not only gives you information on the basics of PBL, but also provides customizable checklists for typical projects at various grade levels. Finally, the Teacher Tacklebox will allow you to search the best of the resources found on 4teachers.org. You can input a subject (such as Math), a theme (such as Basic Math), and a topic (such as Place Value), and it will come up with lesson ideas, TrackStar tracks (another 4teachers resource), and links to help you differentiate your instruction and integrate technology.

There are many more useful tools on 4teachers.org, so, please browse the “aisles” on your own. You’re guaranteed to find something you can use right away in your classroom, and you won’t have to dodge wayward carts. -REBECCAH HAINES

4teachers.org

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Mark your calendar and share it

When teaching English language learners, understanding their cultural backgrounds is crucial. You’ve probably already done a lot of research on the topic, but sometimes it helps to hear students’ stories in their own words.

At Education and Class, blogger Jane Van Galen has found several videos in which Spanish-speaking student immigrants give accounts of their upbringing and culture. These first-person narratives shed some light on these students’ lives, and the challenges they face learning a new language and adapting to a new culture.

Maybe hundreds of YouTube videos have lowered my standards, but the production quality looks really good — tasteful background music, clear subtitles, and nifty camera angles add to the storytelling. They’re produced by Learning and Teaching Scotland, who also feature language podcasts and other language learning tools on their site. Good production plus a one-on-one perspective makes these videos work as reminders that getting to know your students can help you teach them more effectively. -BILL FERRIS

In Their Own Voices

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Georgia Public Broadcasting’s SALSA program for young children combines live action, puppets, animation, and traditional children’s stories in a bilingual program that teaches Spanish language skills and builds cross-cultural understanding.

While Georgia Public Broadcasting offers information on purchasing the series, there are also a great many resources available at no cost on the SALSA website. You can watch full-length episodes online — 42 are listed and most are based on stories that children in grades K-2 will know well such as Little Red Riding Hood, the Three Billy Goats Gruff, and Goldilocks and the Three Bears. The site also includes numerous interactive games that allow children to practice using their Spanish vocabulary. Teachers interested in incorporating this program into their classroom will find transcripts, lists of key vocabulary words, and ideas for classroom activities as well. The Wyoming Department of Education also includes a web page with teacher resources, including pacing guides for grades K-2 and specific advice for using each episode, to help teachers incorporate SALSA into the elementary classroom.

Whether used in the classroom or at home, SALSA can be fun and effective way for young children to get off to a great start in Spanish. -KATHRYN WALBERT

SALSA

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