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Even if you love what you do, work can be a serious drag. Every once in a while, everyone finds themselves in a place where work feels too much like… well, work. Especially when it comes to teaching, it can be all-too-easy to over-think, get distracted or get bogged down with things that don’t actually matter.

How to Make Work Feel Effortless may sound a little bit like one of those commercials that tell you that you’ll lose 20 pounds in two weeks if you pay them $500 (unbelievable but tempting); however, these tips from Zen Habits don’t cost a small fortune and they could actually make your work seem a little less like a chore. These eight tips offer some basic guidelines to keep your mind and body in line, so that you can be a more efficient and happier teacher.

Tip #8 is my personal favorite: “Refuse to do what you don’t want to do.” But maybe I should apply that one in moderation… -LAUREN FROHNE

How to Make Work Feel Effortless

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Photo credit: Patrick Q on flickr

The folks at the Internet Public Library know what every good public librarian knows: Teens need their own space. Teens are loud and opinionated, and they need to be convinced that hanging out in the library is worth their time. While the volume element isn’t such an issue in the virtual world, the second part (seeming hip and relevant) certainly is. The Internet Public Library (IPL) provides a virtual space for teens — IPL Teenspace that mirrors the atmosphere of the best teen rooms in brick-and-mortar libraries.

IPL Teenspace collects the best resources for teens and makes them easily accessible. Like in a real library, those resources consist a healthy mix of the things teens need in order to succeed academically and things that speak to who they are on a more personal level.

In the first category: Sites offering homework help, support for students writing research papers, and advice for college preparation.

In the second category: A guide to graphic novels and a poetry wiki where teens can contribute their own work. Best of all is a page called “Procrastinator,” which offers links to all sorts of enticing, time-sucking websites that are really and truly hip and fun.

Somewhere in between the two categories — what teens need and what teens want — is a list of websites providing answers to “frequently asked embarrassing questions,” most of them about health, sexuality, relationships, and substance abuse.

And be sure to check out the “Thing of the Week,” where the IPL librarians pose a question and teens post their responses anonymously. You’ll be amazed at how teens open their hearts when someone bothers to ask what they think. And you’ll be even more amazed at how terrible their “best pick-up lines” are. -EMILY JACK

IPL Teenspace

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How many of you are still keeping up with your New Year’s resolutions? How many of you even remember what they were? It’s easy to give up on a goal after a few days of slacking, whether that goal is to exercise every day, or to grade student essays faster. The problem with long-term goals is a lack of any short-term reward (which I guess is why they’re long term goals). I’m not saying you should expect to lose ten pounds in a day, but you should have just a little incentive to remind you why you’re grunting and sweating instead of watching TV.

Teachers give incentives every day when they hand students back their homework. Scrawling an A+ or, for young’uns, affixing those little gold stars to a well-done math assignment can give them the short-term confidence boost they need while they strive to meet the long-term goal of learning mathematics.

As an adult, I’m not ashamed to admit I need a little gold star once in a while to keep me motivated and productive. Here are a few tips on how tiny rewards can make a big difference in meeting your goals.

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Schools get hit hard by rising gas prices — not only do teachers and staff have to pay more in gas, but so do parents dropping off their kids. A lot of kids take the bus to school, but it’s not an option for many families.

GoLoco is doing its part to encourage car pooling by making it easier to find folks to share rides with. You can sign up for a free account to find other commuters going your way. Fewer cars on the road will save you pennies, reduce traffic congestion, and do a good turn for the environment.

Your fellow teachers will love the idea of saving a few bucks, but don’t forget to let parents know about GoLoco, too. The more people sign up, the more likely it is to find rides. And the more people in your car pool, the more money you save. -BILL FERRIS

GoLoco

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The classroom is changing pretty quickly, but most accounts of why the classroom is changing tend to start with an alarmist perspective.  “U.S. students aren’t globally competitive!”  “Gaps are widening!”  Have you heard statements like these at the beginning of a professional development session?  Have you attended professional development sessions that offer you a series of harrowing facts, but no real solutions?  Yuck!

It’s nice sometimes to step back and look at how society is changing and consider what that means for the classroom without the klaxons ringing.  Matt Mason and Nicholas Felton have put together Hard Times, a very short presentation with some interesting statistics and insights about modern life, but few “the sky is falling” statements.  This handsomely-designed pamphlet, also available in PDF format, steps you through some of the basics of digital life in chapters like “Part IX-A. Our Parents Killed Bad Ideas With Music.  Part IX-B.  We Kill Bad Ideas With New Business Models.”

Hard Times is part of Penguin UK’s We Tell Stories, an innovative, six-week series of digital fiction inspired by classic novels, which also serves as a fine model for digital storytelling and re-interpretation of literature.  Hard Times refers back to the Charles Dickens novel of the same name, but perhaps Mason and Felton’s work is mis-titled.  I’d call this “Exciting Times.”  Still, who knew that re-interpreting Dickens would yield something so… concise? -ROSS WHITE

Hard Times

We Tell Stories

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In recent years, a lot of schools have told their physical education programs to hit the showers. Greater emphasis on testing, budget cuts, and so on. But as school wallets get lighter, the children are getting heavier due to lack of exercise.

If you’re concerned about your students’ health, you can do something about it by extolling the virtues of healthy exercise. Ask Little Johnny how his little league team did over the summer. Do you have any joggers or climbers in your midst? Take an interest, and maybe they’ll get more active.

Of course, the best way to generate excitement about exercise is to let students see you do it yourself. If you’re a runner, show up early and run at the track before class starts. Maybe volunteer as a coach.

Personally, I’m a walker. I’m not going to pretend it’s a huge workout, but almost any activity is better exercise than sitting. If you live close enough, consider walking to school. If you live in a small community, or you have errands within walking distance, try taking a walk down your town’s main street. You’ll be visibly modeling good behavior, and parents will like the fact you’re out and about within the community. You can check out Walk Score to help gauge how walkable your area is, as well as to look for ideas for neat business or attractions you can find within walking distance.

Teaching kids healthy habits should be a goal of every school. Even if yours doesn’t have a dedicated health or P.E program, you can still teach them a lot about healthful living. -BILL FERRIS

Walk Score

Obesity Up, Phys Ed Down

Photo credit: Thomas Hawk on flickr

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

With the new school year upon us, are you rushing around trying to get a million things done? If you find that some tasks are slipping through the cracks, or you’re tired of scrawling your to-do lists onto crumpled scraps of paper, consider a digital solution like Remember the Milk.

Remember the Milk adds some serious power to your productivity by letting you organize your tasks based on due dates and priorities. You can also keep tasks for different projects separate, so if you’re checking your list of what you need for your bulletin board, you won’t need to hunt through all your tasks to find the few that you’re looking for.

If you’re a disciple of David Allen’s Getting Things Done system, check out the Remember the Milk blog for a great way to keep all your projects and next actions organized.

One of my favorite things about Remember the Milk is that it works with Jott, which lets you record a voice message, converts it to text, and sends it to your RTM inbox. We all get great ideas at times when we don’t have access to pen and paper, or when writing could prove dangerous, such as while driving. Using my cell phone, I can send a Jott to my Remember the Milk account so I don’t run the risk of forgetting the idea (or driving off the road).

Staying organized is essential to teaching. If a plain old pen and paper work best for you, then by all means keep using them. However, if you need to inject a little digital horsepower into your organization methods, Remember the Milk is a great way to keep your tasks straight, and to prevent those crumpled-up to-do lists from accumulating all over the place. -BILL FERRIS

UPDATE: Broken links are now fixed.

Remember the Milk

Getting Started with “Getting Things Done” via 43 Folders

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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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“I hope our profiles all go dead, entombed in distant servers
A monument of your youth, although lacking its observers
Your page will be an empty shell, when no one is behind it
I hope your MySpace stays forever - and I hope that your kids find it“

The Internet is kind of like a modern day time capsule. The things that kids (and adults!) put out there get indexed and stored away forever, and will be Google-able well after they all grow up and abandon their MySpace and Facebook pages.

This isn’t something previous generations have had to deal with, though. I know that the most awkward things I ever found of my parents were some semi-incriminating, and semi-faded, photos from a camping trip back in 1975, but nothing to be embarrassed about really. But what about when the “MySpace generation” grows up and has kids of their own — kids who will be able to just simply Google their parents and find archaic (and yet still sparkly) MySpace pages filled with animated gifs, possibly obscene comments and photos of their melancholic reflection in the bathroom mirror?

And, while it’s hilarious to think about now, maybe those are all things that they might not want popping back into their lives at a later point, like, say, when they are running for the US Senate or have curious kids of their own. And maybe that’s something they should go ahead and consider now.

So someone decided to write a hilarious song (featuring the above quote) that considers what it’ll be like when abandoned MySpace pages are found by the next generation — what I will now designate as the “time capsule effect” of social networking sites — and here it is for your enjoyment.

Don’t worry, it’s safe to share with your kids or students, and I’m sure they’ll find it hilarious, too. Seriously, I was totally rotfl-ing!

Wait a minute, now that I think about it, did I ever delete my old Friendster page from 2002? Uh oh… — LAUREN FROHNE

My Hope

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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 Ben Franklin said, “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” That’s one old saying I wish wasn’t true. If you’re a teacher on summer vacation, I’m guessing you’ve gotten used to sleeping in until decadent times like (gasp!) 8:30 in the morning. It’s great while it lasts, but those first few days back in the classroom can be, literally and figuratively, a rude awakening.

Jessica Cheng at Popular Science says sleeping in is the top cause of grogginess when we return to work, whether the late slumber occurred over the course of a whole summer, or even just a weekend. That extra sleep causes a condition called phase delay — basically, your body gets used to waking up later. When you go to bed Sunday night, your body is counting on extra hours of sleep that, come Monday morning, are no longer an option.

To ease yourself back into your school-year schedule, the article states you can gradually set your alarm fifteen minutes earlier every day until you hit your target. Of course, that means you actually have to get up at that time — no snooze button allowed. But if you want more energy on your first day of class (or the Mondays thereafter), you’ll have to wake up at the same time every day, even on weekends.

Deciding whether to abandon sleeping late on weekends is a tough call, but it’s at least worth considering whether those glorious hours of rest on Saturday and Sunday are worth sloughing through the day on Monday. -BILL FERRIS

Why is it So Hard to Wake Up in the Morning?

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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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I hope you’re all enjoying your summer vacation. Maybe you’ve got some plans for the Independence Day weekend. Then again, with gas prices shooting into the stratosphere, maybe you don’t.

In these days of pricey petrol, you’ve got to get a little creative to save money on gas. That’s why you should head over to SmartPlanet and read their post, Top 10 eco driving tips to beat fuel rises. These tips include common sense (car pooling), hypermiling (get into second and fourth gear quickly), and some tips that are actually more convenient than conventional wisdom (at high speeds, crank the A/C and keep those windows rolled up to reduce drag).

The list is packed with useful advice and charming Britishisms like motorway, lift, and complaints about how “unleaded’s now 112.6 pence per litre,” whatever that means. So don’t let high fuel prices keep you cooped up this holiday. Read this advice and hit the road! -BILL FERRIS

Top 10 eco driving tips to beat fuel rises via SmartPlanet

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50 Things Everyone Should Know How To Do - Do you know how to build a fire? How about CPR, do you know it? Or give directions? All of these things are essential life skills that you should know if you don’t already. This list from Marc and Angel covers everything from swimming to changing a tire in order for you to be more self-reliant.

6 Things Money Cannot Help You Achieve - Even Bill Gates and Steve Jobs still have to deal with the same time that you and I do, even if they could buy and sell you and me in a heartbeat. Surely there are other things than the ones presented on this list by Dumb Little Man, but these 6 make good sense. Money can’t buy you self-esteem, unfortunately, nor will it buy happiness.

52 Character Building Thoughts for Children - These might not be great tips for your older students, but the elementary crowd could really benefit from them. Leah Davies, M. Ed. brings us these great quotes on KellyBear.com. There are some real gems here, like this: When I am sad, I help myself feel better by thinking of things that are good in my life.

9 Ways to Save At The Movies - I know this isn’t completely related to teaching, but since school is out for most of us, we might have some more free time on our hands. Unfortunately, free time allows you to spend more money. If you plan to see any of the awesome, or not awesome movies this summer, here are some ways you can save from The Consumerist. My favorite on the list: Be careful with the concessions. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

(photo by Jo Jakeman on Flickr)