Instructify

BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

Here at Instructify, there are a few terms that make us sit up and pay attention. One of them is formative assessment. Just saying those two words can send Dr. Hobgood into an hour-long session on the importance and practical applications of formative assessment with an ear-to-ear smile the whole time. Recently, the advent of wireless clickers has provided a new tool for teachers to plan formative assessment strategies in the classroom. But like all new technologies, this equipment is somewhat expensive, and not practical to put in every classroom (especially with students’ propensity to walk out of classrooms with items).

Enter Microsoft’s rather oddly named application Mouse Mischief. Mouse Mischief is a program that takes an ordinary wired or wireless mouse and a PowerPoint presentation and turns it into an interactive teaching environment where teachers can engage in…wait for it…formative assessment of their students’ understanding and comprehension of the lesson plan or subject they are studying, allowing for the all important on-the-fly reevaluation of learning goals. (more…)

BY BILL FERRIS

If you use any of the free applications we talk about on Instrucify, you’ve probably registered for a lot of web sites. You have a different username and password for each of them, right? Right? I’m guessing you and several of your students use one password for several websites. If it’s a weak one, you leave yourselves vulnerable to hackers who are betting that if they can find your less-secure password to some random web app, that password just might work on your bank account, too.

You can stay much safer online by creating strong passwords (aside: if your password is “password,” you deserved to get hacked). Microsoft has developed Password Checker, a handy app that tells you how strong your passwords are. (more…)

BY BILL FERRIS

Just because Google and Microsoft hate each other doesn’t mean their software can’t work together in harmony. OffiSync lets you create, access, edit and save Google Docs from Microsoft Office.

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BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

What’s that in Google’s rear view mirror? The answer is Microsoft’s new search engine Bing. To be sure, the information highway is littered with examples of defeated search engines that have challenged Google’s relative monopoly on the search engine scene. Whether it was an engine that was too slow, returned irrelevant results, or just plain didn’t present information in a useful manner, Google has pretty much crushed the competition, achieving icon status on the internet as well being recognized as a verb in it’s own right.

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