BY BILL FERRIS
I love mind maps for organizing ideas. You can find a lot of slick online mind-mapping applications. My only complaint with most of them, though, is that you have to spend a little time messing around with establishing a structure and selecting the word balloons and arrows and such. Fortunately, Text 2 Mind Map lets you skip all that rigmarole and get right to the idea stage.
BY BILL FERRIS
This week’s by the numbers segment shows you easy ways to be more productive, as well as the tools to help you do it. Read all about it after the jump.
Stripped GTD: 3 Habits That Make You More Productive
If you’ve heard of David Allen’s Getting Things Done system but are a bit intimidated by the implementation process (he recommends setting aside two full days to reorganize your personal organization system), Stepcase Lifehack has a streamlined version, boiling GTD down to its barest essentials. Check out these habits and dial up your productivity.
BY BILL FERRIS
mySchoollog is an organization and productivity tool created specifically for students. Kids can keep track of their assignments, quizzes, grades, course schedule, and even upload their notes and files. Students can enter tasks into their to-do list, sorted according to subject (labeled as “lesson” in this app). Students can also download their to-do list and notes in Word or PDF formats. It also has a handy extras section, which features the periodic table, converters for length, temperature, and energy units, and tables of trigonometric ratios.
Welcome to May’s random roundup. This month’s theme: Little Johnny, one-man stand-in for school-aged children the world over. After a year-and-a-half of hard work, we figured this overused cliche deserved a post of his own before he gets back to studying.
Time-savers for teachers
For other notes and resources the students need, consider giving this stuff to them as a whole, at the beginning of a session or semester. That way you only have to keep a master copy for Little Johnny who struggles to keep himself organized.
Learning exercise: Promote healthy living this school year
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.
Search Visually, Safely with RedZee
RedZee filters out porn and other inappropriate content, so you don’t need to worry that Little Johnny will “accidentally” stumble across something he shouldn’t be looking at on a school computer.
Swap your Stuff at Zwaggle
But Zwaggle might be a good resource to pass along to parents. If you can make their lives easier by showing them where to find Christmas presents on the cheap, they might make your lives easier by encouraging Little Johnny to buckle down and try a little harder for his nice teacher.
Keep Your Grade Book Online with Engrade
If students (and their parents) can track their grades at any time, it may motivate them to stay on task throughout the class. Come parent-teacher conference time, you won’t have to deal with parents who are angry about Little Johnny’s surprise “D.”
Instructifeature: How to Stimulate Class Discussion Using Discussion Forums
In the classroom, you’re limited by clock. There’s only so much time you can devote to class discussion. Students feel the time crunch even more keenly—they’ve got to compose a thoughtful response in mere seconds. And while thinking on one’s feet is a valuable skill, how much better would Little Johnny’s answer be if he had more time to compose his ideas? Using discussion boards, students have the time they need to think of the best answer they can.
Photo credit: khalid almasoud on Flickr.
Planning lessons that will keep a class engaged and motivated takes enough time on its own without adding all the other things teachers have to contend with like parent meetings and conferences. Here are some time-saving tips that teachers can use to make the most of their precious free time. Their simplicity may surprise you.
Perhaps the best way to start organizing your life to maximize your time is to have some sort of daily planner or scheduler that outlines your responsibilities. This may sound like remedial stuff here, but when it comes to balancing your free time and making sure you use it efficiently, a planner is an indispensable tool.
Nowadays we don’t have to carry around those bulky leather folders with the huge notebook-sized pages our parents lugged around. This is the digital age, and teachers have myriad choices to help keep themselves organized. Most PDAs have a calendar function, as do many cell phones. Many have the ability to set alarms and notices that will remind you of important upcoming events. Take advantage of all the technology you have at your fingertips.
Whatever the avenue you choose, the most important thing is that you put in the effort and sit down regularly to make a schedule. Over time you’ll find that this planning will become second nature. There is no bigger time thief than moving forward without a plan.
Schedule time in for yourself as well, since decompressing from the rigors of school is just as important as anything else, so that you can bring your best teaching ability to your students.
The temptation to keep every single scrap of paper and materials can at times be overwhelming. Avoid it at all costs. Make your community happy by recycling as much of that wasted paper as you can. As for other class materials that have to be kept, establish a workable file system so your classroom materials are easy to find at a moment’s notice.
Keeping your desk neat and tidy isn’t the only way to make the most of your time. What about all those papers and handouts for the class? Encourage your students to polish their organization skills as well by requiring them to keep tabs on their own assignments.
For other notes and resources the students need, consider giving this stuff to them as a whole, at the beginning of a session or semester. That way you only have to keep a master copy for little Johnny who struggles to keep himself organized. You’ll be doing both of you a favor by encouraging better organizational skills.
Making the most of your time as a teacher can be difficult, but when it comes to organization, five seconds of pre-planning can save you hours of searching in the long run. -KATIE WILSON
This post was contributed by Katie Wilson, who writes about the universities online. She welcomes your feedback at KatieWilson06 at gmail.com
NCTIES update — Thursday morning
Merlin Mann on Time and Attention
What are you waiting for? Manage Your Time!
Photo credit: gothick_matt on Flickr.
As a graduate student and educator I found it more and more difficult to balance my day-to-day without some organizational assistance. I was constantly checking my calendars, and putting bookmarks on every website I found so I could read it later. I then discovered iGoogle.
iGoogle is a web page designed by Google to allow users to create their own personalized home page. Users can choose to put their calendars, e-mail inbox, bookmark list, RSS readers, and other neat gadgets right in one place. Google supplies thousands of these free gadgets designed to help reduce your need to visit a dozen different pages in one day. Not only does this give your mouse a rest, but it keeps all your important web sites up front and current all the time.
Once I started using this tool on a daily (okay, hourly) basis I realized how useful this could be for all educators, or what’s more, for their students. As many schools are making formidable budget cuts, teachers are finding ways to reduce their paper and copier use by turning to digital software to store and share assignments. Now we have classrooms of students that are using the internet on a daily basis for research and homework assignment. And just like they would need that old pile of paper, students need a virtual locker to store all this virtual information. This is where iGoogle comes to the rescue.
I have slowly been weaning some of my more tech-savvy students onto iGoogle. I find that they are just as excited about it as they are for their social networking web sites. They can personalize their pages with the gadgets and tools that they need to be successful in school, AND they can make it look pretty too. I have shared my Google assignments calendar with them so they can see what is due every day. They get updates each time a teacher updates his or her web page or blog. Students can check on the status of their virtual online projects and find current events all on one web page.
For more suggestion on ways to use iGoogle in your classroom you can visit iGoogle for educators. -MEGAN CURLEY
NCTIES update — Thursday morning
Instructifeature: Create teaching portfolios easily with Google Sites
I’m at the NCTIES conference in Raleigh. The intro session featured Vicki Davis of the Cool Cat Teacher Blog. Renowned for using nifty tools in her teaching, she shared a great philosophy for integrating technology into your classroom: focus on what you want to DO, and THEN pick your tools. Deciding you want a blog because that’s what everybody else is doing isn’t going to lead to a good learning experience for students.
In my first morning session, Wilson Diaz from Chapel Hill High School talked about how using the Google suite of apps (Docs, Groups, Calendar, etc.) helped him with both parents and students. He hit all the high points, such as using Google Docs for collaboration and such. However, he also noted that by using Google as a class information tool, it stopped parents from calling him with the same old questions. You know the ones — “If I only knew Little Johnny was having problems, I could have done something sooner!” or “Little Suzy told me she didn’t have any homework.” And so on.
In addition, Diaz said he uses Google to post assignments and due dates. That means, for example, if a kid loses a worksheet, he or she can download it immediately, rather than wait until after school to stop by the teacher’s room. It was a nice presentation on how to use a series of tools to eliminate headaches from the teaching process.
Overall, I enjoy NCTIES because it’s more hopeful than other conferences. It focuses on possibilities rather than problems. Don’t get me wrong, people discuss problems here all the time, but the solutions — usually creative and incorporating technology in ways that will engage students — sound like opportunities rather than obstacles. -BILL FERRIS
Inspiration is the gold standard for mind-mapping and graphic organization, and until recently, has been a licensed program tied to a machine. The company has followed the crowd to the cloud, and recently released MyWebspiration, a web-based version of the software you either have and love, or have seen and heard about and want to have a chance to love. If you are in the latter group, here’s your opportunity to get in on some Inspiration action.
Like just about any cloud-based program, you do need to create an account. Once you’ve done that, MyWebspiration is almost identical to Inspiration, although there are a few added features. Collaborating is made easier (collaborators will also need an account) and you can publish your finished product to the web, too. All of the great features of the original Inspiration are still there: toggling between mind map and outline view (a great way to teach outlining skills, by the way), templates, Rapid Fire mode, and lots of clip art to keep the kids happy. The layout and functions work virtually the same as the licensed version.
MyWebspiration is in free, public beta right now, and will eventually be a subscription service, so give it a whirl for free while you can. Make a graphic argument for why you (or your district) should pony up for the subscription while you’re there. -GRETCHEN SCHAEFER
Those are some Lovely Charts you’ve got there
When making diagrams the old fashioned way, if you’re not careful you can ugly up what should be a simple process. White boards and paper easels fill up quickly, and the combination of bad handwriting and thick markers can obfuscate the simplest ideas. And heaven help you if you try to create a diagram in Excel. If you use Lovely Charts, however, you can create clean, clear charts and diagrams that can easily communicate a process or idea.
You or your students can use Lovely charts to show the family tree of characters in a novel, divvy up responsibilities for a class project, or even just put together a seating chart. The drag-and-drop functionality makes it easy to create, arrange and edit symbols and labels on your chart, which makes it more likely that if you look at your chart tomorrow, it’ll still make sense to you.
On their website, Lovely Charts claims,”Lovely Charts is easy…And sexy!” I wouldn’t go so far as to call a diagramming program sexy. It is free, however, which is pretty attractive to a cheapskate like me. Lovely charts gives you a nice-looking way to share your ideas. -BILL FERRIS
Share diagrams and mind maps online with Gliffy
Mind Mapping Made Simple with Mindomo
Grading can be the bane of any teacher’s existence, especially when it’s not just a matter of comparing a bubble sheet to an answer key. A teacher can spend more mental energy grading a paper or a proof or a problem or a project than the student spent doing it.
David Allen’s popular productivity system “Getting Things Done” (GTD) has at least some concepts that can help with this task, a task unique to the profession of teaching. Much of what GTD recommends would help any disorganized person: get a physical inbox, buy some great filing cabinets and plenty of file folders, make sure that you write down every single task or idea in a place where you will be sure to see it, take full advantage of software and shiny gadgets. If you feel generally disorganized, then any organizational system, including this one, might help. But GTD is specifically intended for people whose work, like that of a teacher’s, is potentially infinite:
“Most people I know have at least half a dozen things they’re trying to achieve right now, and even if they had the rest of their lives to try, they wouldn’t be able to finish these to perfection. You’re probably faced with the same dilemma. How good could that conference be? How effective could the training program be, or the structure of your executives’ compensation package? How inspiring is the essay you’re writing? How motivating the staff meeting? How functional the reorganization? And a last question: How much available data could be relevant to doing those projects “better”? The answer is, an infinite amount, easily accessible, or at least potentially so, through the Web” (p. 5).
The fact that Allen has been working mainly with managers and executives is clear, but it should be equally clear that teachers have the same problem of potentially infinite excellence. Say that I want to do something as simple as “Teach Bobby to use commas.” I could spend days on that single task: reading up on all the latest comma-teaching research, trying first one method and then another to find the one best suited for Bobby’s individual learning style, testing and retesting to make sure Bobby is retaining the lesson and honing the skill. Bobby surely needs to learn other things as well, and of course there are probably a dozen or ten dozen other Bobbys for whom I am partly responsible at any given moment.
This “infinity issue” becomes particularly acute for me, I find, during two activities: writing (don’t ask me how long this article took me) and grading. Say that Bobby turns in a paper on World War Two for my History class, and I see at once that his knowledge of World War One is decidedly deficient. Moreover, he doesn’t know how to use commas (see above!), and I can see a lot of grammar errors, and he doesn’t know the difference between primary and secondary sources, and he cited Wikipedia inappropriately, and I strongly suspect he thinks Winston Churchill was the king of England. What can I do? He was supposed to learn those things elsewhere, but clearly he didn’t. I could give him individual tutoring, but I don’t have the time, and in any case most of those topics are outside the purview of the course. In GTD terms, what has happened is that a whole slew of “open loops” have been created in my mind. According to David Allen, “open loops” are “anything pulling at your attention that doesn’t belong where it is, the way it is,” and these nagging problems are constantly “being tracked by a less-than-conscious part of you” (p. 12). Thus: stress.
The GTD remedy for the stress caused by open loops in the subconscious is basically to get them out of the subconscious onto a piece of paper or digital equivalent, then to collect them into a place where you will be sure to see them (developing such a system is a major part of the book), and then to make conscious decisions that close the loops. Some tasks and ideas will turn into actions to be done, others will be thrown away, saved for later, or delegated, but nothing will slip through the cracks, hanging around radiating a menacing aura of incompleteness. The subconscious mind is then relieved of its stress. (A famous application of this process to e-mail is called “Inbox Zero.”)
I once had the interesting experience of reading through a huge stack of student applications for a program I wasn’t affiliated with; what I noticed was that the experience (unlike that of grading) was utterly stressless, even though the pile was easily twice as large as an average pile of papers to be graded. It was relatively easy to decide whether a particular application should go in the “yes,” “maybe,” or “no” pile, and then to keep processing the piles until I had only two: “yes” and “no.” Seeing applicants’ errors was stress-free, because I wasn’t responsible for teaching the applicants not to make them. The loops were easy to close.
But it’s harder to close those open loops while grading: with limited time and energy, what can I do about Bobby’s commas? Sure, I can write “Commas!!!” in the margin, but a part of me knows that that’s no help at all. The loop stays open. It’s easy to get distracted and frustrated while grading; it can be like trying get to a particular destination by driving down a highway lined with smoking wrecks and bleeding people.
Well, if you can’t stop every half a mile to give CPR and wrap tourniquets, you can at least write down the milepost numbers and call 911 when you get where you’re going. In other words, here are three ideas based on the GTD system about how to close the unconscious open loops that grading student work can create in a teacher’s mind:
I’ve heard of cases where, for instance, the history teacher has openly castigated the English teacher for not teaching Bobby what he should have learned by now. (Certainly there’s a lot of private complaining that goes on.) That might help to close an open loop in your mind, to be sure, but it probably won’t affect that other teacher’s practice: he’s probably doing the best he can in any case. A better way to close the loops caused by grading is simply to make and maintain a list for every student of “Things to Learn,” and then decide what concrete action to take about the items on that list. You might refuse to grade the assignment until the student has learned those things, or you might require the student to learn them before the next assignment, or you might give the list to the student’s parents, or you might give the list to the student before she leaves your class, or you might publish it in the local paper, or put it on the web, or send it to the school board — whatever will ease your mind and give you a sense of completion. Or, of course, you can choose some or all of those unlearned lessons and commit to teaching them to that student.
Plenty of teachers do this kind of thing already, of course, going in to class the next day and saying, “It’s apparent from your homework that many of you didn’t understand the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact: let’s review.” But David Allen suggests that there’s a significant organizational and psychological benefit to developing the habit of “externalizing” such insights into lists. Again, what you do with the lists you make is entirely up to you: you could use them in your current class or use them for version 2.0 of your lesson plan or make a conscious decision not to teach any of it. The important thing is to collect, review, and take some action on the information.
Recommending a $45.00 dictionary to a student who writes “to a certain extinct” probably wouldn’t be any more effective than commenting “Wrong word!” in the margin of a paper, but directing her to Merriam-Webster.com, or teaching him to type “define:” into Google, or giving her this list of student bloomers might actually have an effect. Heck, even making your own list of hilarious and frustrating student errors might help to clear your mind. And there are are always some students who would genuinely like to know where to go to get some help, whether that’s to Strunk and White or to a writing tutor that you recommend.
At this point you might be saying, “Enough with all the lists!” But one of the main things that technology can do for us is make it easy to manage documents. Technology may not save time, but it certainly saves space. Even if you have eighty students, it’s not difficult to start a simple text file for each one and keep it in a folder. But plain paper or index cards would be fine, too, as would sophisticated-but-simple note-taking applications such as Evernote, which allows for powerful searching and cross-indexing. For beginning teachers, especially, starting the habit of keeping such rich files can be a real help: over the years it will develop into an enviable archive. And sooner than that, it might develop into an even more enviable “mind like water” that ripples with peace. -AMANDA FRENCH
David Allen. Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. New York: Viking, 2001.
Robert Talbert, associate professor of mathematics and computer science, writes about teaching and GTD on his blog “Casting Out Nines.”
Last week, I really felt like I was truly connected, just surfing along on the web’s many superhighway tubes. I cruised over to TED and watched a video of Anand Agarawala presenting the BumpTop desktop. Just as my web surfing was getting so pitted and rad, I noticed that this presentation was from way back in 2007. It was kind of a bummer, dude. Not gnarly. Other surfer slang.
But who cares? Even if it was from 2007, the idea is still very new and completely unique. This clever desktop interface, which Agarawala co-created, is still in private beta testing, so it hasn’t even hit the streets yet. That’s newer than new.
If your desktop is like mine, your icons are pretty much all over the screen — program icons, Word docs, and other junk. Different projects and priorities are grouped together. In boring old 2D, this is just an eye sore. If you show it to a baby, that baby’s natural instinct will be to start crying. BumpTop puts that mess into 3D and throws in some physics for your desktop objects. The end result is a very manageable mess.
Granted, Instructify strives to provide you with an actual tool you can start using now and I don’t like that we’ll need to wait. At least BumpTop is on your radar now. You can try signing up for a private beta invite by shooting them an email at info[at]bumptop.com and let them know that you’re an educator who could give some unique feedback. That might grease the wheels in your favor. I wanna hear some success stories you have about getting into that super cool kids club beta group! — NICK YINGLING
Many people are happily using Google Docs as a free alternative to costlier productivity suites, but did you know that there are templates for Google Docs, too? While not huge, the Google Docs Templates directory has some valuable tools to help you get the most out of Docs with very little effort.
Students can grab templates for writing reports and research papers, as well as for creating bibliographies or study schedules. For teachers, you can keep your grade book and attendance using a spreadsheet template, or use the lesson plan or one of many calendar formats to organize your time and teaching. There are budget tools, calculators, letterheads, and even a nifty math quiz generator found in the templates directory.
In what might be a sign of the times, the most popular templates being used right now are for creating resumes. To view them all, check out the directory by going to the link below, or, when creating a new document in Google Docs, choosing “From template…” will get you there too. -GRETCHEN SCHAEFER
With so much information available to them on the world wide web, students sometimes need a little guidance when doing research. The million dollar question for educators is how to guide students’ research easily and effectively. A teacher could create a wiki containing links, images, and videos, but this requires a bit of time, which most teachers would argue, is limited. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to easily gather all of these resources and “box” them up to effectively guide student research? With SimplyBox, you can do just that.
SimplyBox touts itself as “a free service to capture, share, and organize anything you find on the web.” Registration for the service is a breeze. The required toolbar works on IE7 or higher and Firefox 2.0 or higher (sorry Chrome and Safari users). The toolbar is only required on the machine of the person creating the boxes, so if students will not be creating their own SimplyBox accounts, they won’t need to install the toolbar on their computers.
After you’ve created your account and logged in, you’ll be able to create your boxes and your containers to hold those boxes (don’t worry, that’ll make more sense once you start playing with it). Here’s an example — I want my US History class to begin research on the Revolutionary War but I want to guide their research at the beginning so they know which direction I’d like them to go. With SimplyBox, I can easily “box and save” images, text and videos for some of the resources I’d like them to use. Once I’ve saved all of the items into my box, I can easily share this box to receive a URL that I would then give to my students to access the resources I’ve saved for them. You can view the Revolutionary War example I’ve created by going here (hint: play with the different Views in the upper right hand corner.)
Research is a great way for students to learn more about the subjects they’re learning. As educators, we can help them out a bit by thinking “outside the box” by going “inside the box” with SimplyBox.-JERRY SWIATEK
There are lots of desktop calendar programs out there, and they all boast similar, if not the same, features. You know, your basic shared calendar, maybe an e-mail client built in, a place for notes or a to-do list, a saved contact list. But there’s more to your day than just your appointments and to-do lists, right?
ReminderCube is a desktop calendar that’s much more than a calendar. With an RSS reader, an application launcher, a client for your GMail, a password manager and much more, ReminderCube is like your own personal assistant. And like a personal assistant, you can set it up to remind you of certain appointments or tasks. Unlike a personal assistant, though, you can change the look and feel of the application to with different colors and skins.
ReminderCube is a pretty slick little program that is easy and intuitive to use and can help you get organized quickly. Plus, unlike some other calendar programs, it’s totally free! Beware, however — it seems to only run on Windows-based operating systems. Sorry Mac users! -LAUREN FROHNE
Students can manage their homework with Soshiku
What’s your classroom layout? Do you have the desks in classic row setup? U-shaped? Circle? Whichever setup you’re currently rocking, maybe you should think of switching things up a little. A change of scenery is a great way to recharge your brain and your students’ brains. Maybe even add some plants for atmosphere.
What you shouldn’t do, however, is start changing up things without planning ahead. You don’t want to end up moving all those desks and chairs only to find out that you made a poor estimate. Make a floor plan using Gliffy.
Gliffy is more than just a floor planning app; Gliffy offers up many more charts and plans to help you organize and share your thoughts. Everything I’ve written above was just to bait and hook you. It also made it relevant to the classroom and allowed me to incorporate that funny link.
While its similar to a lot of mind mapping apps out there, Gliffy outshines them by lending more attention to providing better design details to the shapes and images used in diagrams, plans and charts. Don’t believe me? Check out this example of a network diagram. It is much more engaging for the viewer, and it makes you look even more professional. -NICK YINGLING
Mind Mapping Made Simple with Mindomo
moxie design studios
