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15 Awesome Tutorial Websites You Probably Don’t Know About
A couple weeks ago I decided to take up juggling. Right away I was amazed at the high quality tutorials I found online. If you have a random hobby you’d like to try, or you’re looking for a project during these summer months, check out this list of sites.

100 Unbelievably Useful Reference Sites You’ve Never Heard Of
Here’s a great big list of sites you can use to find everything from literature to library references to health care. You can also find fun stuff like the Dialectizer, which can translate your text to sound like Elmer Fudd. Who doesn’t need that?

10 Brain Training Tips To Teach and Learn
Keep your brain fit for optimum learning potential. The folks at SharpBrains have these ten tips to turn you and your students into efficient thinking and learning machines.

Video Toolbox: 150+ Online Video Tools and Resources
Need to edit a class video project? Want some advice on how to create a video podcast? Or do you need to convert video to a different file format? Mashable has all that and more in this great post. -BILL FERRIS

Photo credit:  zen on flickr

Whether you’re creating a podcast or adding a voice over for a slide show, the list of free audio recorders begins and ends with Audacity. Audacity is an open source program that lets you record and edit audio quickly and easily. Just hook up a microphone to your computer, hit the record button, and start talking. When you’re done, you can edit out all the “uhs,” long pauses and bad jokes. Audacity displays a visual of the sound waves themselves, enabling you to make edits so precise you can shave the letter off a word. Save as a .WAV or .MP3 file and send your message to the masses (or, at least, your students).

In addition to podcasting, you could record classroom lectures for sick students. Your class might write and record a radio drama. The dance team could edit together a mix of songs for their next performance. If you teach an online class, your students might appreciate hearing their instructor’s voice in a setting that’s not a parent-teacher conference. The possible uses are endless, and like any good gadget, Audacity is fun enough that you’ll probably try to think of some.

We review a lot of software on Instructify, so believe me when I say you’ll have a hard time finding a free program as useful, versatile, and simple as Audacity. It’s been around forever, yet we haven’t officially reviewed it until now - I guess we must’ve taken it for granted. If your only exposure to audio recording and editing is Windows Sound Recorder, give Audacity a try. The upgrade might inspire you to start a podcast of your own. -BILL FERRIS

Audacity

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I took three years of Spanish in high school plus two semesters in college, and I don’t remember much more than “jugar boliche.” But having a small vocabulary doesn’t mean you can’t communicate big ideas. Some guy named Mike from Runawaybox.com expresses his feelings for his sexy señorita with nothing but a guitar and rudimentary verb conjugations in his hit song, One Semester of Spanish Love Song. (Tip: if your school blocks YouTube, you can still watch the video with KeepVid.)

This song illustrates both the difficulties inherent in learning a new language, as well as what you can accomplish with a little creativity. If you teach an intro foreign language course, let your students watch this to get their minds working for the next time they have to do a skit or class presentation. Maybe it’ll inspire them to retain more than how to say “bowling” in español. -BILL FERRIS

One Semester of Spanish Love Song via Education Week

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Welcome to your romantic and eerily educentric Valentine’s Day date. But will it end in love, tears, or possibly food poisoning from an undercooked Valentine’s dinner? These kind educators were gracious enough to share their Valentine’s Day experiences:

Dinner and a Movie: Benjamin Baxter at On the Tenure Track invites you to a live recreation of Saving Private Ryan in his own classroom.

Dining by Candlelight: Larry Ferlazzo at In Practice and Eric at Teachers Call say teachers should include more modern means of illuminating young minds.

Set the Mood with Music: Alvaro at SharpBrains says musical training stimulates the brain. Meanwhile, Creating Lifelong Learners tells you how to make the most of your iPod in class.

Send a Valentine’s Card: Ms. Cornelius says principals who care, trust and lead by example are sooo her type.

Like Romeo and Juliet, Minus the Suicide: The Bard Blog knows there’s no better way to woo someone than with poetry. Learn how to read Shakespearean verse like a true Romeo.

Even More Poetry: Eduwonkette has the same idea. Send your Valentine a funny poem.

On a Budget: American Consumer News has tips on how to get great books for cheap. Speaking of books, Money Blue Book talks about a few things you didn’t know your library could do.

On a Budget, Part II: Uncle Joe’s Leadership Blog tells parents and students how to get a free college education. And Thursday Bram at Wise Bread tells students where to shop when they have to start buying their own textbooks.

Propagating the Species: GrrlScientist at Living the Scientific Life has the skinny on a guide to teaching evolutionary theory.

Lovers’ Quarrel: Mr. Walker, The English Teacher, prompts a heated discussion on tracking.

Kiss and Make Up: Resolve conflicts with colleagues by employing these strategies, courtesy of Pat at Successful Teaching.

Share a Few Laughs: Scenes from The Battleground pokes fun at the idea of blaming the victim in education.

Spend Some Time with Your Kids: TutorFi’s Colleen Palat asks, “Does My Child Need a Tutor?“If so, not to worry. The kid can still excel in school.

Find a Special Someone where you Least Expect It: Joanne Jacobs dishes on Principal Shimon Waronker, a Hasidic Jew, ignoring potential culture shock to turn around a prominently black and Hispanic school.

Watch the Sunrise: Circle Time “Lead From The Start” discusses teaching with both sides of the brain to usher in a new tomorrow in student learning.

Remembering the Way We Were: The Tempered Radical’s Bill Ferriter asked beginning teachers to remind older colleagues they’re still learning how to do this job.

Stand by Your Man (or Woman): Nancy Flanagan, a Teacher in a Strange Land, sticks up for teachers in the face of claims that the professions isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Get Some Alone Time: Dana at Principled Discovery doesn’t like the idea of the federal government butting in and bossing around local schools.

Remembering it’s the Thought that Counts: Like many parents reared on New Math, NYC Educator struggles to help his daughter at math. But he’s a dear for trying.

Fending off Suitors: Ms_Teacher isn’t interested in ETS’ insultingly low wages.

Dumped: To MasterPapers.com and CustomEssays.co.uk - We both knew this was coming. Selling essays to students is just wrong, wrong, wrong. And your advice on essay writing is pure fluff. I don’t think we should see each other anymore.

Photo Credit: Candy hearts at cryptogram.com.

Sorry to not have your precious MBTN done yesterday, voracious reader. Here it is today to make up for it. (February is a beast!)

10 Tips to Retain More of What You Read Online - You took the time to click on it, so you might as well actually digest what you’ve just read. Vandelay Website Design presents 10 ways to help, including these: Read at times you can focus, trim the fat, be aware of visual cues.

10 Books for Inquiring Minds - I’m sure that ALL books slake some sort of inquiry, but these books are for those of us who really want to delve. I am most interested in Seven Deadly Colours - about how nature creates color and how we perceive it. Neat.

Dale Carnegie’s Top 10 Tips for Improving Your Social Life - I don’t know who Dale Carnegie is, but if I had a social life, maybe my friends could tell me. Seriously, though, what is everyone doing tonight? Wanna hang out?

10 Simple Ways to Do Only Three Things Today- I don’t know if these tips are as beneficial as some of these others, but hey, we all can use some time to just be lazy, right? Even still, if you only do 3 things today, make them count.

40 Inspirational & Motivational Songs That’ll Keep You Refreshed! - Please note, these songs also happen to all be terrible, in my opinion - but I hope they help you stay motivated and inspired. Des’Ree, I hope you are happy with yourself. - JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

(photo credit: Eddie~S)

While trying to score for “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” as a duet for flutophone and ocarina I found an open source application called LilyPond that handles the messy job of transcribing music notation. Lilypond handles anything from a simple one-line melody to a symphony or oratorio. That includes not only basic things like lyrics, accidentals, and multiple staves, but polyphony, divisi lyrics, expressive marks, grace notes, instrument-specific notation, scoring for bagpipe, and ancient notation. (If you’ve always wanted to arrange Gregorian chants for bagpipe, this baby’s for you!)

To use LilyPond, you type special notation into a simple text editor, then save and compile the file. LilyPond then outputs beautifully scored, professional-looking sheet music in PDF format. You have to code the music as if you were a programmer, though, using special notation. That can be daunting at first, but the manual is clearly written and thorough (a surprise for open-source software) and the system is fairly easy to pick up. “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” would look something like this:

\relative {
\time 4/4
c4 c4 c8. d16 e4
e8. d16 e8. f16 g2
\times 2/3 { c8 c c } \times 2/3 { g8 g g }
\times 2/3 { e8 e e } \times 2/3 { c8 c c }
g’8. f16 e8. d16 c2
}

If you read music, you can probably read this notation without too much trouble. You can see the output file here.

Unlike some very expensive applications on the market, LilyPond doesn’t let you play in your music on a keyboard, and you can’t play it back to hear how it sounds - all LilyPond does is write it down for you. But it can handle anything an amateur musician or composer would reasonably need, and the price is certainly right for a teacher’s budget. -DAVID WALBERT

LilyPond

Photo credit: selva on flickr.com

It’ll be a while before your school’s marching band takes the field again. And you’ll need every second if you want to design a show that can top this one: this past season, the University of California Marching Band staged a video game-themed extravaganza. I don’t want to sound like a geek or anything, but it’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.

Relive those hours spent saving princesses and amassing points as you thrill to the sounds of classic video games. See if you can recognize all of them (and if you’re a nerd like me, you probably can).

It’s funny - the reason I joined my high school band in the first place was because my parents wanted me to stop playing so many video games. Seeing Cal’s video game show brings musicianship eerily full-circle. -BILL FERRIS

University of California Marching Band Video Game Show via YouTube

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Here’s a novel idea: teach kids about music they like to listen to.

In an age when music and art programs are being slashed from school budgets, music producer Quncy Jones and Steven Van Zandt of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band are leading the charge to revitalize school music programs with rock-and-roll.

Van Zandt is starting Little Steven’s Rock-and-Roll High School (editor’s note: that’s a very un-rock-and-roll name), a curriculum where students will learn about rock’s history and cultural impact.

“Rock-and-roll is a uniquely American art form,” Van Zandt told The Washington Post. “We receive emotional information as well as intellectual information from it.” The Post quotes Quincy Jones as saying, “Our schools have an obligation. The culture is the soul of a country, and they aren’t teaching the music which has helped mold the culture.”

Of course, this could all be a sinister plan from parents to get kids to stop listening to that infernal racket. If rebellious music like rock and hip-hop is taught in school, maybe it’ll lose it’s appeal. Personally, I think giving students more options than just band and choir would be a great way to increase kids’ appreciation for music. And that’s coming from a career trombonist in my high school band. -BILL FERRIS

Top Musicians Are Composing Own Curricula via The Washington Post

Every science teacher’s favorite musical jaunt through the periodic table, Tom Lehrer’s “The Elements,” now has an animated video. This fun flash animation gives students a fighting chance at singing along by displaying each element as it’s sung.

At the risk of giving away the ending, animator Mike Stanfill kindly fills in the elements that have been discovered since the song was recorded in 1955, so it covers the complete list of elements. And far be it from us to tell you how to do your job, but any student who can sing this whole song from memory deserves some serious extra credit.

“The Elements” is an oldie but goodie that just got a little goodie-r. These kids nowadays with their rock and roll music could do with a song stuck in their heads that actually teaches them something. –BILL FERRIS

The Element Song

MusicTheory.net teaches students how music works. They can do drills on notes on the musical staff, the piano keyboard, the guitar fret board, or valves for brass instruments. If a kid won’t shut up about having perfect pitch, set him to work on the ear training for scales, chords and intervals. The site will also generate blank sheet music for any aspiring composers or arrangers out there. If you want, you can grab a downloadable version of the site for offline learning, or if you want to load it onto several classroom computers without Web access.

As a self-admitted guitar hack, I only know about half of what those words mean. Though if I’m inclined to learn, MusicTheory.net seems like the place to do it, rather than shell out money for lessons. –BILL FERRIS

MusicTheory.net

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We Got the Beat: Metronome Online

Do your instrumental music students keep time horribly? Do they rush the beat like they’re in a race against the drummer? A metronome can help kids learn to maintain a steady tempo, and the annoying clicks give added incentive to try and master this skill faster. But who wants to buy a little box whose only function is to make an obnoxious noise 120 times per minute?

Nobody, that’s who. Especially since you can find a free one online. Metronome Online is exactly what it sounds like, and you can adjust it from 40 bpm to 208. To go with the aforementioned annoying clicks, it’s also got a grating “A” tone for students to tune their instruments. Let parents know about it, and Metronome Online could theoretically aggravate the entire marching band into virtuosity. -BILL FERRIS

Metronome Online

With all due respect to Guitar Hero aficionados, it’s not like you need any musical talent to play it. This should be simple–kids like music and video games. Why can’t there be a game that actually teaches kids to play?

After reading that kind of intro paragraph, you’ve probably figured out that there is such a game - Synthesia, available for free, even. Notes fall from the sky over a keyboard at the bottom of the screen. Press the correct keys at the correct time to boost your score. Pretty simple. Tetris was simple, too, and that game was pretty successful.

Speaking of Tetris, one of Synthesia’s most fun features is that it comes bundled with MIDI files for classic video games like Super Mario Bros., Bubble Bobble, and the aforementioned Russian puzzle game. But you can play along with any MIDI file you can find. The game itself is pretty difficult if you’re not a pianist, but playing the left-hand part for the Tetris theme at low speed is a good choice for beginners. If you’ve got some piano training, you may want to tackle Dragon Warrior.

For best results, you’ll need a USB or MIDI musical keyboard. You can play Synthesia with a standard computer keyboard, but it’s pretty useless if your goal is to actually learn something. I know I learned something–piano is hard. But Synthesia makes it just a little bit easier, and more fun. -BILL FERRIS

Synthesia

Music soothes the savage beast. Except for alligators. Apparently music riles them up.

NPR’s Robert Krulwich reports that the note B flat has a lot of crazy properties, including provoking alligators to roar. Play a B flat one octave below middle C in front of a Gator and it’ll think you’re a rival reptile. Which is great if you’re into picking fights with alligators.

Krulwich also says a certain black hole in the Perseus cluster emits the note B flat 57 octaves below middle C. That’s more bass than Barry White, people.

The NPR article has the audio piece linked to it, which also features a catchy song. Krulwich points out how B flat keeps popping up in unexpected places. Perhaps your music or physics students can ponder this one for awhile, or research some other musical phenomena. But if you see them walking into the wilderness with a tuba, you might want to call an ambulance just in case. –BILL FERRIS

Have You Heard About B Flat?