Instructify

BY NICK YINGLING

Lately, during my lunch break, I usually sit at my desk and drop crumbs of food into my keyboard. That’s a terribly boring way to pass your lunch hour. So, naturally, I started watching my favorite show, The Golden Girls, on a streaming TV site. The main problem now is that most sites don’t have full episodes, just the excerpts. So I dug deeper. One site that streams shows is based somewhere in Asia. There are all sorts of foreign characters bannered across the top of the screen and the subtitles can sometimes take up one-third of the screen. How cool would it be if I managed to learn to read Chinese from passively exposing myself to the subtitles on my streaming episodes of The Golden Girls during my lunch break?!

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BY BILL FERRIS

This week’s MBTN features an express flight to Mars, Web 2.0 project ideas, alternatives to book reports, and online sites where you can learn a new language. Read about all of it after the jump.

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BY NICK YINGLING

In the comments for Bill’s posting about the Stuff You Missed in History Class Podcast, I mentioned that people who enjoyed that show might also enjoy Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History. It’s a little dry and demands some attentive listening, but can be pretty rewarding if you find that you enjoy it.

Dan Carlin brings a really unusual perspective to looking at history. In one of his more sensational episodes, “History Under the Influence,” he explores how drugs and alcohol might have played a role in history. For example, have you ever considered the possibility that certain historical figures were tweaking on amphetamines or strung out on painkillers? How about asking who was drunk and possibly bi-polar? It definitely sounds irreverent, but remember that history is often written by the winners.

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BY BILL FERRIS

Students have gotten used to doing things electronically. Your classroom doesn’t have to be an exception thanks to LectureTools, a learning management thingy from the University of Michigan.

Developers designed LectureTools with huge, impersonal college lecture courses in mind. However, there’s a lot here that K-12 teachers can use, too (though some of them would probably be best suited for 1:1 laptop environments). (more…)

It’s time again for our random roundup. This month’s theme: NASA, pioneers of space and subjects of an awful lot of posts.

Do-it-yourself is in, even with podcasting at NASA!
It seems that every time you turn around these days someone’s encouraging you to complete a DIY project.  Why pay for someone else to do it when you can do it yourself?  Apparently, NASA has the same attitude on its website on Do-It-Yourself Podcasts.

Set the controls for the closest planet to the sun: NASA Mission to Mercury
This site includes up-to-the-minute clocks that record the elapsed time of the mission as well as the Orbit Insertion time. Watch the actual August 3, 2004 launch of Messenger from mission control. You can take your class through a tour of images already taken by Messenger as it zooms toward Mercury.

Blast Off with the NASA Kids’ Club
NASA Kids’ Club is a great way to learn more about space exploration. It’s got great pictures, games and activities that will pique the interest of space-minded kids. As a no-cost way to learn about the space program, the NASA Kids’ Club is the Right Stuff.

Observe NASA’s Earth Observatory
What if we were able to turn our telescopes around and get a closer look at what is happening right below our feet? The folks at NASA have done just that with their Earth Observatory site. Teachers, head right for the Experiments tab and give your students interactive ways to study global warming and plant biomes around the world. If you love reading blogs (and I know you do!), check out the Expedition to Siberia blog that offers almost daily updates and pictures of this fascinating trip.

Cool satellite image from the inauguration
Check out this great picture from the presidential inauguration. As the GeoEye-1 satellite hurtled through the cosmos,  it took this snapshot to commemorate the historic occasion. That’s a lot of people! Not only that, I now know the roof of the Capitol is tarheel blue.

Observe Mars in 3D
Still have some of those promotional 3D glasses kicking around from after the Superbowl? Fire up one of NASA’s 3D image galleries to take your students on a tour of Mars.

It seems that every time you turn around these days someone’s encouraging you to complete a DIY project.  Why pay for someone else to do it when you can do it yourself?  Apparently, NASA has the same attitude on its website on Do-It-Yourself Podcasts.

Essentially, this website is a hub for high-quality, NASA-created video clips, audio files, and still images that you or your students can download to mash up with your own files to create a finished podcast (or vodcast).  The topics NASA offers for download are not all-inclusive;  currently you can download media about lab safety, Newton’s Laws, sport science, and spacesuits. Once downloaded, you can use various editing software programs (such as Animoto, which we blog about here, or the video editing software already on your computer such as Windows Movie Maker) to create your podcast.  Once the podcast is complete, NASA gives you permission to publish it in any way you want.  It could be a neat showcase of student work on a class or school website.

If you’re a teacher and you think this is a great idea but don’t really know where to start, the website also offers a DIY Podcasting Blog. The blog has some pre-posted ideas about how to use the website to make podcasts and videos in your classroom and it encourages teachers to share how they’ve used the site in their own classrooms via comments (also, here is a post we did on producing videos in the classroom). Overall, NASA seems to offer a great way to get started with podcasting using some very high-quality multimedia resources. So get your students out there DIY-ing some podcasts and vodcasts. -REBECCAH HAINES

Do-It-Yourself Podcasts

DIY Podcasting Blog

Related stuff:

Learn science facts in small chunks: Bytesize Science

Produce an Educational Video in Your Classroom

How to use your cell phone for education: Mobile podcasting

Reading is an essential skill that every kid should get excited about. Unfortunately, reading is often seen as a chore and busy work by students everywhere. If only we could find a way to harness tools on the web to get kids excited about reading. If only. BookWink is ahead of the curve, fortunately. BookWink is a site that uses podcasts and videos to present reading materials for students in 3rd to 8th grade. Search for books based on subject, grade level, title or author, where you can read reviews of hundreds of books.

You can subscribe to the video or audio podcasts, and for those of you who are new to podcasting, there is a handy and explanatory guide to setting up your iTunes so you can listen to and view all the info you can hope for. If you just want to check out some of the videos without subscribing, you can also look through the archives of previous subjects. The videos feel like a modern day Reading Rainbow, as books are reviewed and explained in groups of various themes such as popularity, Sea Adventures, and Museum Mysteries. Not only does BookWink harness the availability of internet video and audio applications, it’s a great way for students and teachers alike to discover new books that might not fall into the required summer reading lists. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

BookWink

Related stuff:

Book choices for early adolescents: the good, the bad, and the ugly

Story time: Storynory

In my own geeky world of talk radio programs, This American Life adds a little bit more of a storytelling element than most programming on National Public Radio. To me, anyway, the TAL team’s stories can arguably be considered more accessible than NPR. Now it time for me to sit back and let my inbox fill up with a whole bunch of hate. But I will concede this: NPR’s Planet Money podcast has been on fire lately.

So when Planet Money’s Alex Blumberg and Adam Davidson made this episode for This American Life, it was the best of both worlds. They do an excellent of job explaining the breakdown in banking that has occurred and the problems that banks currently face. The acting sounds a bit hammy sometimes, but I think its also hammy on purpose, as though they’re subtly being a bit derisive towards the bad borrowers and lenders.

The Bad Bank episode is a good starting point for students who have questions about what started this whole recession mess. The best part is that Blumberg and Davidson make it understandable for people like me, who — while incredibly smart — still have difficulty getting past the language barrier of business and finance. -NICK YINGLING

This American Life: Bad Bank

Related stuff:

Instructifeature: Four views of the recession…and none of them look that great

Marketplace explains the credit crisis as an Antarctic expedition

Want to know what strikes fear in the hearts of many a student? No, it isn’t the mystery meat in the cafeteria. In fact, it is the verbal section of any standardized test. I mean, how often do high schoolers use the word pertinacious in everyday conversation? Luckily for your students, VerbaLearn is here to make learning that vocabulary list much less tedious.

Once you create a free account, you can build a vocabulary list for the SAT, ACT, GRE, or General Vocabulary. Like any good teacher, VerbaLearn begins with a pre-assessment of your knowledge. It gives you an online quiz in which you either select the best definition, or the best synonym for a given word. It also allows you to specify whether your answer was “just a guess,” or if you’re “pretty sure.” If it was “just a guess,” it automatically goes on your study list. If you were “pretty sure,” you’ll see the word again in the quiz to give a synonym or definition, whichever you didn’t do the first time you saw the word. If you get it right the second time, you won’t see the word again. If you get it wrong, off it goes to your study list.

Once your study list is full, there are several options for study and review. You can continue to review online via fill-in-the-blank sentences, or you can review offline by subscribing to your personal vocabulary list podcast. You get an audio version downloaded to your favorite podcast aggregator that says the word, the definition, and a sentence using the word. All of the aforementioned features are free, though there are several other features such as video flashcards, crossword puzzles, and printed flashcards that you can get if you subscribe to the premium version.

Hopefully, this post has piqued your interest so that you will examine VerbaLearn punctiliously. Your students’ verbal fears will be assuaged as they become verbal gourmands using this website. -REBECCAH HAINES

VerbaLearn

Related stuff:

Expand your vocabulary with the Princeton Review Vocab Minute

Get your students ready for the SAT on the cheap

The Root of the Issue: Review word roots with this SAT word game

I wasn’t able to get back to the NCTIES conference today, but I’ve still got some material from Thursday. Tammy Worcester talked about a topic near and dear to my heart in her presentation “Cell Phones in the Classroom.”

Worcester began by asking us if we had our phones with us. In most social situations, this question is followed by “Please turn them off,” but she said we’d be using them during the presentation, so we should get them ready. I did, eager for an opportunity to show off my geektastic Android phone. (I kept hoping someone would notice it so I could bore them about how cool it is. Nobody noticed, which is probably for the best.)

Worcester first demonstrated GOOG-411, which Instructify has reviewed before but is worth bringing up again. It works like a free, automated 411 service. Ask for a business or business category, say your city and state, and Google will connect you for free. As a bonus, you can say “text” and Google will send you a text message with the business’ address and phone number. Slick, huh?

Speaking of Google, check out their SMS page for how to get lots of info by sending a text message. You can send a text message to 466453 (GOOGLE) to get weather updates, word definitions, movie showtimes, all kinds of stuff. For a full list of Google phone fun, no matter what sort of smart phone you use, head to  www.google.com/mobile.

If you have email on your phone, try making blog posts via email on your Blogger account (other blog services may also have this feature, but I’m unaware — let us know if they do!). On the Dashboard, if you click on Settings and Email you can set up an email address that, if you send an email to it, will post your emails directly to the blog. You’ll probably want to keep that address a secret, but Worcester set up a demo blog and gave us the address so we could try it out. If you’ve got a camera phone, it’ll also post pictures. This would be handy for a photo assignment for students — ask them to take a picture about, say, an indigenous animal and post it to the blog with comments, for example.

Worcester also pointed out the mobile podcasting service Gabcast, which lets you make a podcast directly from your cell phone. It costs around $10 for 100 minutes of recording time, which isn’t bad but you can probably find a free service somewhere online.

Finally, Worcester covered Poll Everywhere, a service that lets you set up live polls in which students (or whoever) can vote via text message. You can embed the poll results in your blog, website or PowerPoint presentation. Poll Everywhere is free so long as you have 30 or fewer poll respondents. However, those 30 people can take as many polls as you’d like to set up. Alice Mercer covered this one back in July, but once again, a friendly reminder never hurts.

All in all, it was a very informative presentation that explored what cell phones can do for education. So even if I didn’t get to show off my geek phone, I now know a few new tricks it can do. -BILL FERRIS

For more info, check out Tammy Worcester’s website

Online handouts from her NCTIES session (which technically aren’t handouts, but are technically useful)

Related stuff:

Ask the readers: phones in class

Top 6: Using cell phones in school

Use cell phones to poll your students

Google Local Voice Search: Dialing 411 Just Got a Little Longer

Photo credit: Milica Sekulic on Flickr.

Walden, and 99 other Free Online Books Every Student of Humanity Should Read
The Universities and Colleges blog presents this list of 100 classic works of literature in the public domain (that is to say, free). The books are available at Project Gutenberg, which has even more books, once you and your students get through these 100. Piece of cake, right?

100 Ways to Use Your iPod to Learn and Study Better
A lot of your students have iPods. You may have even confiscated a few. Use those gadgets for education with this list from the Online Education Database. You’ll find study guides, tutorials, podcasting tools and more.

The 15 Clearest Benefits of Gaming
We all knew gaming developed hand-eye coordination. It can also help students develop empathy, assist in dealing with post-traumatic stress, and spark their imaginations. Kris Graft of Edge Online provides a thorough listing of the upside of video games, but the author unfortunately neglects obvious benefits such as saving Princess Toadstool or PWNING your friends.

10 Best Practices for using wikis in education
You’ve spent hours putting together a wiki that you know will allow students to learn and produce lots of valuable content. You send them the link and…nothing happens. Don’t let your wiki go to waste. Technology Teacher has 10 tips on how to use wikis to engage your students.

This site, and others, feature lots of great places for your students to create content, and to locate materials like audio, photos, and videos to mashup, or include in their own creations. We have reviewed sites that have photos that have a creative commons license, but what if the picture or audio clip you want to use is copyrighted (not in the public domain, or licensed in Creative Commons)? Now we’re going to talk about legal concepts, but since we aren’t lawyers (we just may pretend we are in our classrooms), this is not legal advice, yahda, yahda…

First the good news: there is a legal concept called “Fair Use” that allows educators to use snippets of copyrighted material. Fair Use applies to educators, journalist, and satirists (us and Jon Stewart, yipee!). It says you can use copyrighted materials, BUT the use is governed by these four principles:

1. Purpose and character of the use - Why are you using this material?
2. Nature of the material - In what form are you using the material?
3. Amount of the portion used - How much of the original work are you using?
4. Effect on the potential market - Does your use hurt the original owner financially(1)

Now the not-so-good news. Naturally enough, the law on this is purposefully vague to leave it up to the courts to decide on a case-by-case basis. I know it’s never been my dream to be a Supreme Court test case (maybe a nightmare). Because of this, there have been two responses by educators, we play it safe and avoid the use of copyright protected materials, and/or we have come up with some “rules of thumb” to guide our use of copyrighted materials (e.g. you can use 10 seconds but not more than 10% of copyrighted audio, you can excerpt a paragraph from a chapter, etc.).

I’m going to finish up this article with a list of some guides that give some rules of thumb, but I will be following up with another piece about different approaches to this copyright conundrum. -ALICE MERCER

(1) Tony Jongejan’s Presentation on Copyright at NECC 2008 - Where I got the principles listed above

TechLearning Copyright Guideline for Administrators - A guide with a handy-dandy chart from Hall Davidson

Related Stuff:

Download Free Copyrighted Books with WOWIO. Yes, it’s Legal.

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

I know, we’ve all seen ugly examples of cell phones being used to message in class, start fights, and film teachers behaving badly, BUT you can use cell phones for the forces of good in education. I’ve recently upgraded my cell phone to a “smarter” model, so I’m discovering lots of cool things, many of which are not limited to smart models.

Instructify has compiled a list of educational uses for your cell phone. Today we’ll look at how to turn your phone into a mobile podcasting studio.

Mobile podcasting (recording audio from your cell phone) is great on field trips, or any time you’re away from your computer. To get started, you’ll first need to find a podcasting service.

Services to use:

1. Record by phone with Gabcast.com -Use your cell to call Gabcast’s toll-free number and start talking. It’ll save your call as a podcast, which you can upload to your blog or website. Gabcast lets you record conference calls, too, so you can do remote interviews, or get your whole class involved.

2. Gcast - Another service we’ve previously reviewed that lets you call their toll-free number to record your podcast

How and why:

Still not sure about this podcasting stuff? Check out these links to see how other teachers are using mobile podcasts in their classrooms.

1. Intelligenic » Post Topic » Kidcast 53 - Podcasting and Fieldtrips
2. Wendy Goodwin of R.A. Mitchell Elementary School in Gadsden, Alabama students’ GCAST podcasts about their field trip to Space Camp in Huntsville Alabama
3. Wes Fryer shows how to do it

Hopefully now you have an idea of how to use your phone for podcasting. Next time we’ll talk about how to use your cell to take photos and record videos for class. -ALICE MERCER

Related Stuff:

Sound Field Trip Advice from Kidcast

¿Como se dice Podcast? ESL Pod

Gcast: We Don’t Need No Stinking Microphones!

Tune In: Education Podcasting Network

Photo credit: Steve Roe on flickr

The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill is in the process of launching Carolina on iTunes U, which uses iTunes software to provide a common platform for the entire University to share digital media.  When the project launches, the entire campus community can share lecture podcasts, video tutorials, and other media-based course material for free.

The initiative blurs the boundaries between the classroom and the campus at large, and allows students to get their neuroscience lectures from the same place they get the latest top ten hits.  It’s an extension of iTunes U – a part of the Apple iTunes store filled with free educational audio and video content.  The material is available to anyone with iTunes software, allowing Joe Schmoe and Joe College alike to access fascinating material from museums, PBS stations, and universities.

The Apple website proposes iTunes U as a way for students to “go right on learning while they grab a meal, walk to class, or work out at the gym.”  When I’m on the treadmill, I need something with a more forceful beat than a dactylic hexameter – but if Longfellow’s Evangeline really gets your heart pumping, knock yourself out. Workout preferences notwithstanding, the possibilities offered by iTunes U are nearly limitless, for colleges and K-12 communities.

Bonus: Warner Music won’t sue you for sharing that French and Indian War lecture with your friends. -EMILY JACK

Carolina on iTunes U