Instructify

The holidays are nearly upon us, and so is all the stress that accompanies them. I don’t just mean the stress from exploding turkey fryers or engaging in hand-to-hand combat with other holiday shoppers. I’m talking about midterms, research papers, and presentations—and you get to grade them!

SlideRocket isn’t really going to help you with the midterms or papers, but it will go great lengths towards making your students’ presentations look awesome. Delivering professional quality design through a web-based application, SlideRocket makes PowerPoint look like a joke. Since it’s a web app you won’t have to use up space on your hard drive and you won’t have to mess around with all that payment and registration business. Boasting an impressive library of image effects and stylish options for representing data, SlideRocket also lets you import media from Flickr, YouTube and other sites with ease. That’s World Wide Internet interconnectivity.

How many times have you thought to yourself, “If I watch one more PowerPoint, I’m going to claw my eyes out”? How many times have you taught from a clunky, outdated PowerPoint slide show? I’m certain you felt a sneaking suspicion that people were about to claw their eyes out.  Its not always what you’re saying so much as how you’re saying it. Add a little style with SlideRocket. -NICK YINGLING

Related Stuff:

Animate your lessons with Animoto

Grab students’ attention before class with PowerPoint. Yeah, that’s right, with PowerPoint.

Avoid Killing Students’ Interest and Attention with Power Point

Share and SlideShare Alike

5 Sources for Free and Legal Images -If you blog or use any sort of photography in your presentations, you might want to start thinking about making sure those photos and images are legal for you to use. If you want to skip that step, try using one of these five sources from The Blog Herald. The best part is that they are free, so you won’t have to dole out any hard-earned cash, and you’ll still feel fine about using the images copyright free. Of course, there is always Creative Commons Flickr if all else fails.

Classroom Survival Kit: 25 Items You Need to Have on Hand In Your Classroom - From TeachingChildren.ca, this list includes all of the essentials for teachers, not  necessarily students. Though some of the items sound more like things you might need if you were going to commit a crime (tool box, dice, metal nail file, duct tape), most of the items here are crucially handy to have around. I personally would have never thought of keeping “thank you” cards around until the last minute, but I guess preparation helps.

11 Things You Shouldn’t Leave for School Without- This article from Dumb Little Man is meant for the college-bound, and it is never too early for seniors to start thinking about preparing themselves for success. These are all online resources, so if nothing else, sites like Ottobib.com — an online bibliography — provide resources students of all ages can use.

10 Quick Lesson Ideas for Substitute Teachers - Substitutes have it tough. My own mother substitute taught many classes in my school system, and though she had it pretty easy because many people loved her, most other subs didn’t top the list of people students respected.  These tips from Work Sheet Library should come in handy for any subs out there who might otherwise spend their whole day asking students to “settle down.” My favorite on the list: magic tricks. Nobody can make fun of a substitute teacher who does magic tricks…right?  -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Photo credit: curly_exp(l)osure on Flickr

Ah, the science fair: a chance for your brainy students to match their mettle against other students around the county. For me, my only project involved agar, bacteria, and a weak hypothesis. I did find out that my dog’s mouth was just as clean as mine was, much to my chagrin. As stunning as this project seemed, it was shoddy and thrown together at best. I guess that is the price I paid for waiting for the last minute to start. Had I had web access like today’s youth, I could have used the site Easy Science Fair Projects.net to find something more fun and simple.

Easy Science Fair Projects has projects “anyone can do,” so if there are students in your class hanging on to the excuse of “I can’t think of anything good,” then point them here. The projects are divided into sections for kindergarten, primary, and elementary projects, with a handful of projects for each. There’s even a project blog so you can subscribe to the RSS feed for updates on newly added projects.  As promised, all of the projects are simple to accomplish, with few materials needed. You can also get all the information you might need to complete these projects, including the length of time needed to complete and what “stuff” you might need. Check out this balloon experiment for a good example of what you can expect.

Instructify would love to hear any other tips you might like to share about what you’re doing to influence your students to enter (and hopefully win) this year’s science fair. Let us know in the comments. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Easy Science Fair Projects

Related Stuff:

Grants for energy education projects

Do Some Teeny Tiny Experiments with Microbes in Action

Hunkin’s Experiments - Cool Cartoon Experiments for Your Classroom

Make Fun Science Projects by Reading Comics: Howtoons

If you were jonesing for a list of lists to better your edification skills yesterday, I apologize. Nonetheless, Instructify is happy to present Tuesday by the Numbers, the day-late version of its sister column, Monday by the Numbers.

100 Free Online Ivy League Courses You Should Take Just for Fun - I know it says “for fun,” but come on, the real reason to take any class is to get some sort of betterment or education, right? Whatever your motive, Eduk8 delivers this great list of online course offerings from places like Johns Hopkins and MIT. The courses themselves range in subject from Child Development and Psychology to Foreign Culture, and the list is chock full of such unique offerings as The Anthropology of Computing and Hip Hop.

100 Awesome, Free Web Tools for Elementary Teachers - It can be tough sometimes to filter out the things on the web that are truly valuable, especially when it comes to things that are useful in teaching children. Here’s a list from SmartTeaching.org that will help you be a better researcher and educator to the youngins. With 100 here, you’ll find something you didn’t know for sure.

101 Ideas for a Great Start - Though the school year has technically already begun, it isn’t too late to start things out right by setting yourself and your students up for success. Iowa State offers these tips in establishing some great methods for students and teachers to start things off on the right foot. The list is set up in categories such as ‘creating a welcoming atmosphere’ and ‘encourage active learning.’

7 tips to top sleep, 3 tips for staying awake - Though it should just be as easy as ‘get to bed earlier, wake up later,’ sleeping is not always as easy a task as it seems to accomplish. The University Blog gives us these tips to help you zonk out at night, and pep up during the day. Stop yawning and read these now. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Photo credit:  zen on flickr

Pencils? Check.

Notebooks? Check.

Online word processor application? Check.

In addition to standbys like pens, pads, and the ever-popular Trapper Keeper, today’s learners need a new set of school supplies, too.  These tools enable students to take advantage of the new learning possibilities the Web has to offer, such as making research easier, or finding better, cheaper ways of doing what they’re already doing.

In that spirit, here’s my top 10 new-school school supplies (all of which, by the way, are completely free).

1. OpenOffice — Why pay a bunch of money to Microsoft when you can get top-quality, MS-compatible programs for free? The OpenOffice suite packs a word processor, spreadsheets, presentation software, graphics software, and a database program. The open-source OpenOffice can do pretty much anything Microsoft Office can do, except drain your bank account.
2. A Cell phone — Whether it’s for podcasting, conducting surveys, or staying organized, the cellular phone has a huge amount of educational potential for those who know how to use it.
3. Remember the Milk –Back in my day, I wrote inky scribbles on my palm to stay organized. Today’s kids have Remember the Milk, which can keep track of assignments, activities, chores, and all applicable due dates and priorities. It also has fewer smudges.
4. Diigo — Invaluable for research, Diigo lets students bookmark and annotate webpages so they won’t forget why they bookmarked a page in the first place. They can also read other folks’ notes or annotations for further insight. Like any good Web 2.0 tool, Diigo lets them share their bookmarks and annotations with friends, too.
5. BibMe — Once students have found some great sources on Diigo, how do they cite them? Nobody has the time or energy to leaf through their MLA style manual to find the proper citation format for a newspaper article or whatever. If your students can muster the effort to enter a title, author, or ISBN number, BibMe will do the hard part and churn out a citation pre-formatted for the bibliography. If only the entire research paper process was this simple.
6. Google Docs — Does many of the things OpenOffice does. Google Docs also adds a collaborative element, as multiple students will be able to edit a document, spreadsheet or presentation.
7. OpenDrive – No more excuses about hard drive crashes. OpenDrive offers 1GB of storage online. Students can sync it with files on their hard drive for backups, collaborate with friends on projects, or use it to store their ever-expanding music collection. And for the time being at least, it’s free.
8. VoiceThread — A slideshow with a soundtrack, VoiceThread lets students tell stories visually as well as textually. Easily upload video, audio, even record narration via their cell phone (I told you those things were handy), with any luck VoiceThread will replace PowerPoint.
9. Adobe Photoshop Express Beta — If you thought Microsoft Office was expensive, check out the price tag for Adobe Photoshop. Fortunately, Photoshop Express Beta performs most of the photo editing functions students will need without costing a cent. They don’t even have to download anything. Now that’s express!
10. PB Wiki — Wikis are great for class projects and to cross-reference other pieces of information. And PB Wiki makes setting up a wiki a breeze, even if you don’t know a wiki from a blog.

As with any top 10 list, I had to exclude other worthy applications. Now’s your chance to tout your favorites (or to tell me what a jerk I am) in the comments. -BILL FERRIS

UPDATE: Okay, so cell phones aren’t exactly free. However, your students probably own them already, and most of the educational uses for them won’t cost you anything to implement.

Photo credit: jgodsey on flickr

Tired of teaching from the text book? Having a hard time fitting environmental science instruction into the school day? Well EcoKids can change all of that!

EcoKids is a Canadian interactive website created to engage students in environmental activities. This site is full of resources for teachers such as lesson plans, printable resources, and helpful links. It even has specifically designed lessons for ESL (English as a Second Language) students using the different environmental themes. Teachers can access information on Wildlife, Climate Change, Energy, The North, Waste, Land Use, and Earth Day to initiate any environmental or science lesson, or provided a great follow up to an end-of-unit study. This site even has a Fact of the Day that teachers can use to initiate classroom discussions or writing activities about the environment. Looking for an environmental project for your classroom or school? You can visit different links on the site that show different types of environmental projects students and schools are involved in for ideas.

Students can access the site and engage in games to practice what they have learned in the different areas of Wildlife, Climate Change, Energy, the North Pole, and Land Use. The games integrate the environmental themes with reading, math, science, problem solving, and social studies. Students can work on their writing skills by responding to questions posted periodically on the site, or commenting on the blog. -MONIQUE ST.LOUIS

EcoKids

Related Stuff:

EEK! – Environmental Education for Kids is Nothing to be Afraid of

Join the Environmental Kids Club

Environmental Arithmetic: Rainforest Maths

Crack The BioDaVersity Code

FEMA for Kids

Does Anybody Know Exactly Who Can Prevent Forest Fires?

Lights, camera, video…in the classroom? You betcha! If you think kids like watching videos, wait until they start making them. Creating stuff is at a higher level of Bloom’s Taxonomy than bubbling in a test sheet. But where to begin?

This handy and easy-to-understand guide from Education.com on producing an educational video is a great place to start. It breaks the process down into pre-production, production, and post production, step-by-step. You don’t need a lot of fancy equipment, as most digital cameras today have a video mode on them (my experience with Flip has been fantastic). I would add only one point to this otherwise superb article - for editing there is a free resource for Windows users in Movie Maker. It is not the most stable program (in the interest of disclosure, I have had Adobe Premiere Elements lock on me too, just not as often), but I’ll share a resource that should help you with these problems, PapaJohn - Movie Maker 2 - Issues-1.

A few other resources to help you out are Mathew Needleman’s excellent Video in the Classroom.com site. If you think your kids are too young, wait till you see what he’s done with 2nd graders. If there is an NYU Film school for videos in education it’s the AFI (American Film Institute) which does a lot of workshops teaching educators how to effectively help students make interesting, high-quality videos. -ALICE MERCER

Producting an Educational Video via Education.com
PapaJohn - Movie Maker 2 - Issues-1
AFI ScreenNation
Video in the Classroom.com — Integrating Video Production in the Elementary Classroom and Beyond

Related Stuff:
All Educational, All the Time–TeacherTube

Photo Credit: Stacy Lynn Baum on flickr

If you’ve ever wanted to write a book, but you never thought about how it could possibly come to fruition, then you should know it’s easier than you think. With Blurb, you can create a book of just about any size or shape, with any number of pages, and a fully customized look and feel. The content is all up to you, though, so you’ll be responsible for the hard part.

Once you finish your masterpiece, you can download the easy-to-use editor software to arrange and layout the book the way you want it. After that, pricing per individual book starts at $12.95. You can order as few or many as you like, and your work can be featured on the site for purchase by others if you wish. You’ll retain the copyrights, and you can even set your price to determine your own profit level.

Blurb’s self-publishing platform could make for an awesome class project. Your students could be responsible for creating a collaborative project full of their own musings, pictures, stories and drawings. If you’ve got a web-savvy class, you can also take advantage of the blog-to-book feature and have them blog throughout the year, and then collect their works into a group project or individual books. The service and software are so easy to use, who knows, maybe you’ll see an Instructify book sometime soon. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Blurb

Johnny Lee, a YouTube personality and “human-computer interaction researcher” is changing the way we use existing technology through simple modifications, and he’s sharing it with everyone. This amazing demo proves that using something as inexpensive and highly obtainable as the Wii Remote, he can create an interactive whiteboard. Lee explains that while the whiteboard isn’t exactly the quality of it’s $3000 likeness, you’ll still get “80% there for about 1% of the cost.” He notes that teachers are able to access this technology for use in their classrooms, and many already are.

Lee makes no qualms about making this sort of technology available for anyone who wants it. He’s put the software on his website, and at the time of this demo, it had been downloaded half a million times. View the demo for the full extent of what other uses Lee is finding for the technology, and visit his website if you want to learn more. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Johnny Lee’s $40 Interactive Whiteboard

Johnny Lee Computer-Human Interaction Researcher

Back in February, Jeremy blogged about Doodle 4 Google, a contest where students redesigned the Google logo based around the question, “What if…?”. The entries are in, and you can now vote for your favorites. The winning drawing will replace the usual Google logo on May 22.

If you missed the contest deadline, you can still take advantage of the lesson plans Google has made available for the project. The contest’s central question, “What if…?” can be a springboard for lots of creative ideas beyond just the Google logo. For example, I think the Instructify banner at the top of this page would be a great choice. -BILL FERRIS

Doodle 4 Google - Vote

Related Stuff:
Get Your Schoodle to Doodle for Google

I always thought that college was the time for experimentation, but as it turns out, there’s a lot of experimenting you can do in elementary school, too. Hunkin’s Experiments are a collection of simple cartoons that explain how to do simple experiments. Their drawings are rudimentary and playful, but luckily, so are the experiments themselves.

Hunkin has divided them into several categories like Food Experiments, Math, Sound, and even Clothes. Here’s an example from the “Food Experiments” category:

How To Write Your Name on an Apple - Cut the shapes of the letters out of strips of plastic insulating tape. Stick these on a growing apple and wait a week. Areas of the apple covered by the tape will have become bleached and the name will be clearly visible when you remove the tape.

None of the experiments get much more difficult than that, and the science behind each is never really explained. If you just want some easy and fun experiments and tricks to have fun in the classroom, then Hunkin has something for you. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Hunkin’s Experiments

Related Stuff:
Extract DNA from Bananas

The last movie I watched about British schoolchildren was over 2 hours long and didn’t make a lot of sense to me. My main trouble was trying to figure out why an organization such as the Department of Mysteries would store rather valuable information in crystal ball format, which were then stacked precariously on high shelves where they could easily fall and shatter. If you ask me that’s just inviting disaster.

Plot holes aside, terrific strides are being made by other British schoolchildren when it comes to film-making. Check out the Me and My Movie feature on Children’s BBC. This interactive site offers the amateur filmmaker in your classroom all kinds of videos and written instructions—plotting advice, camera techniques, lighting, etc. Trying all these short tutorials together is the Movie-Making Guide, which helps the student to plan out the entire process. -NICK YINGLING

Me and My Movie

Related Stuff:
Get Ready for your Closeup: Kids’ Vid

Tangentially Related Stuff:
http://www.myspace.com/harryandthepotters
http://www.myspace.com/dracoandthemalfoysusa

I recently had to create a time line for a project. Not knowing what else to do, I cobbled one together in Excel like a caveman. Literally three days later, I heard about Mnemograph, which would have made my time line look a lot better, and would have required a lot less effort.

Mnemograph makes creating a time line easy. Your time line can cover any duration, from a couple of hours to several hundred years (great for history projects). To add an entry, just add the date or time and the event description, and you’re all set. You can also import images to give your time line a more historic flair.

Mnemograph is kind of a one-trick pony, but that single trick is pretty valuable if you need to plan a project or illustrate some historical milestones. One milestone I’ve hit is that, thanks to Mnemograph, I won’t have to hack these things together in Excel anymore. -BILL FERRIS

Mnemograph

Do you struggle to explain Web 2.0 to interested but clueless administrators? Social networking, blogging and podcasting can be tough to describe to the uninitiated. If you need succinct explanations of social media to convince your principal to open the school’s firewall for you, show him or her a video by Common Craft.

Common Craft videos are free mini-tutorials on everything from wikis to RSS, and even what to do in case of a Zombie attack (that was a Halloween video, but zombies probably don’t know what day it is, so it’s good advice to heed year-round). Each video discusses a topic in plain English using a white board and simple paper drawings for visual aids. The simplicity of the production is Common Craft’s greatest asset - nebulous concepts like social bookmarking don’t look so daunting in a paper doll context.

Watching Common Craft videos may give you a few ideas for some class projects. Your class can make this type of video without much more than a white board and a Web cam. Making your videos as engaging and pithy as Common Craft, however, may take some practice. -BILL FERRIS

Common Craft

Related Stuff:
Learn How at VideoJug
Access Free E-Learning Content with Tutorom Beta

I can’t say that I have seen the show Surfing Scientist, but he has some pretty fun and educational experiments you can use to entertain and keep your students interested in science. Most of the experiments here are almost more about logic than science, but I’m sure you can find a way to spin them both ways. There are 20 “conundrums” to choose from and download, so you can then print copies to hand out to your students. Surfing Scientist also has some other content at the site that could prove to be educational and maybe even “cool” at this site, so feel free to scavenge for some ideas. This could be the perfect way to stave off the approaching summer and keep kids in their seats and thinking. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

The Surfing Scientist’s Conundrums