Instructify

BY DAN FROELICH

Have you ever found yourself telling a fellow educator, “I don’t have that file with me, but I’d be glad to email it to you when I get home tonight”? With the aid of Dropbox, you’ll never have to say that again.

Dropbox is a web service that allows you to store up to two gigabytes of data online for free. Simply get an account with Dropbox, download and install the application, and place the files you want to store on the web into Dropbox, and you’re done. Now any time you save files in your Dropbox, they are automatically synced online and on your computer. Better yet, once you install the Dropbox application on any computer or mobile device you own, you‘ll have instant access to all your files with a simple login.

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BY AARON FOWLES

Have you ever gone deep into a cave and experienced absolute silence? It’s a zen moment, certainly: no light, no noise, just perfect absence.

Now, think about your classroom. Have you ever experienced anything like the vacuous silence and dark within the four walls of a school building? Since you haven’t, and nobody has, the folks over at Simply Noise have given us free access to auditory bliss.

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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.

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BY BILL FERRIS

I’ve been a dedicated Firefox user for years because of its wondrous catalog of extensions. I like Google Chrome, too — from its load time to how it accesses pages, everything about it is fast, fast, fast. But I never made the full-time switch because it didn’t have all my geeky extensions.

In their ongoing bid for world domination Google has rectified this deficiency, opening up its sprawling new extensions gallery. To use them you’ll have to install the new beta version of the browser (don’t be afraid of using a beta version in this case, however — “beta” is Googlespeak for “software”).

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BY BILL FERRIS

I’ve been using Thunderbird for my email since 2006. It’s a highly functional, lightweight email option. This week, however, I made the switch to Postbox. Postbox is to Thunderbird as Super Mario is to Mario — bigger, stronger, and occasionally able to shoot fireballs. Well, two of those things, anyway.

Postbox takes the best features of Thunderbird (in fact, Postbox is built on Thunderbird’s open-source code by some ex-Mozilla personnel) and creates a much more robust email program. Frankly, Postbox bears as much resemblance to Gmail as Thunderbird — the conversation view and the big, fat “Archive” button are straight out of the Googleplex.

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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.

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BY BILL FERRIS

For many teachers, summer vacation is the Super Bowl of job perks. You’ve worked hard at a demanding job, and now get some well-earned time to relax.

This year, though, the economy has become the fingernail in teachers’ bowls of soup. A lot of educators have lost their jobs, and many worry that more cuts are on the way. While you can’t control who gets laid off, you can use your summer months to make yourself as valuable an employee as possible.

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This week’s MBTN features alternative teaching methods, how to use colons & semicolons, a web backpack for students and the best search engines for student research. Details after the jump.

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Venerable note-taking app Evernote has rolled out a few new features that ought to help you and your students. You can now send Twitter messages directly into your Evernote account, use Evernote on your iPhone, or find tips on how you can use Evernote on their tips blog. You can also read the general Evernote blog for updates as they happen. All that is in addition to existing features like saving snippets websites you visit and recognizing text in pictures. -BILL FERRIS

Ron’s Evernote Tips Blog

Evernote Blog

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What can I say about getting students to study that doesn’t sound ultra-mega cheesy? Or hasn’t already been said a thousand times before? Its two classic struggles: on one side, the teacher who tries to motivate the student into hitting the books; on the other, the Instructify poster trying to put a new spin on it.

My heart really goes out to that second guy — he’s in a tough spot. If he ends up writing something cliché, he might have to take a hard look in the mirror and realize what a middling talent he has become. We don’t need to worry so much for the teacher trying to motivate the student, though. At least they can fall back on these study tips from UnderGradZone.com.

Although these study tips are designed for new college students, what’s to stop you from using these tips in your classroom? You’ll just need to make a couple quick switches in some of the terminology they use. We’re aware that giving students 80+ pages worth of study tips to read is kinda like putting out a fire with rocket fuel, so the best practice might be to divide this up and pass it out over time.

Saturday Night Live had a pretty good sketch recently. In it, the guy from the High School Musical movies returns to his alma mater to impart some of his new-found wisdom. His advice is timeless: school isn’t all singing and dancing and jazz hands. Eventually we all have to grow up and start studying seriously. But don’t ever let them take away your jazz hands. Not. Ever. -NICK YINGLING

ACT: Study Tips

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Photo credit: Treehugger 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

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PDF to Word, recently out of closed beta and now in open beta, touts itself as “The Most Accurate PDF-to-Word Converter.” There are many PDF to Word conversion utilities, both for pay and for free, available on the web these days, but none of the free tools handled pdf files like PDF to Word does. This service handled everything I threw at it.  Many of the other conversion utilities are unable to convert any special formatting or images contained in the PDF files, but it seems PDF to Word had no trouble in handling these items.

Back in January of 2008, Instructify reviewed a free application called Free PDF to Word Converter.  One clear advantage that PDF to Word has over this app, and the many others that are available, is that PDF to Word is online. There is nothing to download or install. This is especially important in many education settings where the installation of software is prohibited. In the one test I tried with Free PDF to Word Converter, I attempted to convert a PDF report from Google Analytics. PDF to Word Converter failed and told me that the file is either corrupt or encrypted (neither is true.) PDF to Word handled the conversion perfectly.

PDF to Word is a far superior product to any others that I tested. The ease of use and the fact that it’s online and free, make it, by far, the best utility available for PDF to word conversion. -JERRY SWIATEK

PDF to Word

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Have you ever received or found a PDF file that you needed to make a few changes to, but either you didn’t have Adobe Acrobat or had no clue how to use that application? Yeah, me too. There are tons of services that allow you to convert those pdf files to Word documents, but the formatting always seems to get screwed up. That’s why it was so exciting to hear of a brand-new online service from the folks at Docudesk called PDFVue.

With PDFVue you can upload any document from any computer without having to have expensive software. Once you’ve made your changes you can simply download the updated PDF or share its secure PDFVue link.

Using this great tool could not be any easier. Upload your PDF file, mark it up with additional text, links, change colors or add sticky notes. You can also add additional images or forms options such as radio buttons, drop down boxes or text boxes. Then, click the share button to share your document with anyone you choose or click the download button to download your new document to your computer. It’s really that simple.

The service is still in beta, so there may be the occasional bug here or there, but in all of the testing I’ve done, it has worked flawlessly. The end result is a clean, very professional-looking new PDF file.

Still unsure? Check out their Quick Start Guide here. -JERRY SWIATEK

PDFVue.com

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For every positive and supportive person out there on the internet, there are about 500 people being negative and acting like they’re super-cool know-it-alls. I mean, how was I supposed to know that it wasn’t cool anymore to use Netscape to surf the ‘net? Now I’m being told that no one says “surfing the ‘net” anymore, either. That’s enough from my new character, Guy Who’s Bewildered by Computers in 1998. You get the point.

First, please open up your Firefox web browsing program. Now, click here. Elliott Kosmicki, a web developer, marketing specialist and creator of the productivity website Good Plum, offers up a bunch of useful tips for getting some productivity out of Firefox. From keyboard shortcuts to some very handy extension plugins, Kosmicki offers up eight simple tricks you can use to impress other Firefox users.

Maybe you’re at a coffee shop and you want to look cool? These tips can make you look totally rad for someone who is watching you use a computer. Now I’m being told that people stopped saying “totally rad” a long time ago, then the hipsters brought it back for ironic usage, but now its been abandoned for good. I can’t win! -NICK YINGLING

HOW TO: Make Firefox Your Productivity Machine

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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

MyWebspiration

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