Instructify

BY DAVID BARGER

Classroom Earth is a dynamic website that synthesizes materials from numerous sources into a virtual cornucopia of useful environmental information. Are you an environmental news junkie and not getting what you need from the mainstream news media? The In the News section should be your first stop to see real-life stories of how the environment is affecting us all. Recent stories include how students in LA can attend environmentally themed classes and a look at America’s 10 most-endangered species.

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BY BILL FERRIS

As further proof that my pop-culture awareness stopped sometime in the mid-90s, this month’s random roundup features Indiana Jones, apparently Instructify’s go-to reference to convey that a history or archaeology tool is exciting or adventurous in some capacity.

Of course, now that they’re making a fifth Indiana Jones movie, I don’t feel quite so dated.

National Geographic’s Explore a Pyramid: Archaeology with No Risk of Snakes or Nazis!
When I was a kid, I wanted to be an archaeologist like Indiana Jones and I dreamed about being on Nickelodeon’s Legends of the Hidden Temple. Sadly, I’m not currently exploring foreign lands for ancient artifacts and getting chased by Nazis, nor did I ever get the chance to be a Blue Barracuda. But with National Geographic’s Explore a Pyramid, your students can have the opportunities that I never did, and learn while doing it!

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BY NICK YINGLING

MBTN last week was a straight up embarrassment. Bill called in to Instructify headquarters and handed down two options: I should commit seppuku immediately OR I should make certain that MTBN for 8/24/09 is a slam dunk. Did I choose the razor-sharp samurai sword or rapier-like witticisms? Find out after the jump.

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BY THOMAS RHEINECKER

Searching the internet for information is a tricky business. There are countless resources out there but there is not a lot to govern the quality or accuracy of the information that you find. A web site may look genuine but may still contain inaccurate information.

This is even more important when you are using the web to conduct scientific research or to look up information to support any stage of a research project. Inaccurate information could invalidate your research and leave you with useless results. You will have wasted time, energy, and not have furthered the quest for knowledge as you had originally anticipated. So how do you find authoritative web resources for scientific research?

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BY BILL FERRIS

Back in my day we had to figure out arcane citation formats by poring through dusty old style manuals. This was during that awkward window after people started putting good information on the internet, but before the style manuals told you how to cite web documents.

Your students don’t know how lucky they are to have handy pieces of software to do this arduous work for them. Below is Instructify’s list of the five best bibliography and citation applications out there. Pass these on to your students and spare them the agony of building bibliographies the hard way.

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Perform searches of computational knowledge

BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

WolframAlpha is an ambitious knowledge repository that functions similar to a web browser. It’s important to note the difference between a knowledge repository and a search engine — this isn’t a competitor to Google. In fact, it functions as a much different application. The concept is to show useful, relevant information based on your query, not give you a list of links to click on and find the information yourself. For example, if you enter a famous person it gives you a basic breakdown biography, more of a when, where, what response that would put important dates at your fingertips.

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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.

10 High Fliers on Twitter
Still struggling to figure out how to use microblogging app/distraction engine Twitter for educational purposes? The Chronicle of Higher Education lists 10 exemplary Twitterers from the edusphere. Follow these folks for insight and ideas on how you can use Twitter to interact with your students, stay up-to-date with education news, network with fellow teachers, or come up with ideas for your classroom. Number four on the list: former Instructify writer Amanda French.

18 cool sites and apps that teach you about space
Learn more about the final frontier with this list of sites. You’ll find stuff from NASA, simulations of solar systems, space weather, solar flares and lots more. You’ll probably recognize a few of these sites from previous Instructify articles, but try to act surprised anyway. Don’t worry, there are plenty of new ones, too.

Ten Commandments of eLearning
Integrating technology into teaching isn’t easy, especially if you’re used to doing things the old-fashioned way. If you’re trying to figure out where to begin, or you’ve unsuccessfully tried classroom blogging or discussion forums, read this article from Cath Ellis, an English English teacher (she lives in the UK) who blogs about technology in education. She takes an approach other successful ed-tech users have extolled — focus on what you want to do, then pick the technology that will help you do it.

8 Unconventional Student Research Projects
Are your students bored by the same old research projects and science fair ideas? Tell them to have a look at this list of unique projects compiled by the fine folks at StudentHacks. While these particular projects were for college courses, it wouldn’t kill your kids to be ambitious with their projects. Also, after reading about projects like crickets playing Pac-Man or using Star Wars to teach recursion in computer science classes, they might get inspired to do something really creative. -BILL FERRIS

Photo credit: delgrosso on Flickr.

Remember back when dial-up modems were the coolest and Jimmy Ray was burning up the charts? Back when a search of the internet would dump a bunch of ugly search results back at you? Then after about 30 minutes of searching, you’d be lucky to find the exact phrase you were looking for. Then you’d be luckier still if that was even in context.

ChunkIt! is a plugin for Firefox and Internet Explorer that is designed to make search results more relevant, displaying them in context and with more information than the small excerpt we’re used to seeing. By refining results, ChunkIt! is able to provide users with a preview of sites, thus eliminating the need to click through a search result, back out, then try the next search result, and so on. One example when this comes in handy would be apartment hunting on Craigslist. Anyone who has ever slogged through that stark search result format can easily imagine the amount of time ChunkIt! could save you. Now, imagine how this might help a student save time during academic research, like on an eyeball-terrifying Lexis-Nexis search result page. Maybe if I had such a time-saver when I was in school I would have had higher than a 1.25 GPA.

ChunkIt! isn’t without some drawbacks. I was a bit annoyed to have to give up a little bit of browser real estate for another toolbar. Another unpredictable thing was how unconsciously familiar I was with Google results, so I had a little bit of mental resistance to a new style at first. There were also a handful of reviews and comments floating around out there of people who were a bit unimpressed, or suggested another tool for the same task.

Really, the user should be the judge. This is a plugin, so if ChunkIt! isn’t for you, it’s easy to uninstall and it didn’t cost you anything. Maybe when your Boolean logic tricks aren’t quite cutting it, you would want to crank up ChunkIt! for a short time. Like an annoying and ghastly song from 1997, it’s just good to know it’s available whenever you want to refer to it. -NICK YINGLING

ChunkIt!

Related stuff:

Search intelligently with SweetSearch

Search the web using only your mouse: KallOut

Search the Web visually with Searchme

Cuil adds power, pictures to Web searches

I love Google, but it does get irritating to have to wade through a bunch of junk and irrelevant search results to find what I’m looking for. SweetSearch aims to remedy that by pairing the power of the search engine with the common sense of the human brain.

SweetSearch is an offshoot of findingDulcinea, which bills itself as librarian of the internet. Like any good librarian, they’ve dedicated themselves to finding useful info quickly and efficiently. According to the horse’s mouth, “The sites included in the SweetSearch engine were hand selected by the team of Internet researchers at findingDulcinea.com. Every site included in SweetSearch has been reviewed for content, quality and reliability.”

You’d think that poring over websites by hand would mean a dearth of useful resources. Not so. A search on “North Carolina history” turns up information on items like the Lost Colony of Roanoke, population and geographical info, and a lot more. While SweetSearch won’t make me completely forsake the almighty Google for web research, I do like knowing I can easily find information that appeals to someone other than SEO gurus and search bots. -BILL FERRIS

SweetSearch

Related stuff:

Searching for a better way to search? Try these Firefox add-ons

Search the web using only your mouse: KallOut

Search the Web visually with Searchme

Cuil adds power, pictures to Web searches

I came across this post on TechRadar.com a couple of months back. After thoroughly pillaging this list for ideas to write about for Instructify, I decided to just share with you this list of 50 sites. Plagiarism police, calm yourselves — some of the things on this list had already been on Instructify first. This list is divided up into sites concerned with software and tools, storage and files, graphics, research and e-learning, and mobile workers. Check them out, I’m sure you’ll come across something good. Now instead of writing about each one, I can focus on writing my script for CSI: Portland.

PROTIP #1: The comments section on a blog post can sometimes generate even more useful content.

Occasionally the comments section can offer up some more user-generated links and tips. After going through, I found about 14-15 extra links in the comments section. Which is a good thing, because, as one reader points out, five of the items in the main article have gone missing.

On the other hand, some of them are from companies doing some quasi-trolling to gain their website some exposure. Really, TickleMePlant.com? Really? Maybe you’ll still be able to live without some of the comment section’s additional sites, but would you really describe such a poor quality of life as LIVING? If you aren’t tickling plants everyday you’re just as well off being dead.

PROTIP #2: Try not to preface sentences by announcing:  PROTIP!  I’ve chased away a lot of my own credibility and a great deal of respect from other people thanks to that.

Sometimes you might find a couple of potentially good prospects in the comments. I came up with two more valid leads that I’ll need to check out. Sadly, though, like all things on the internet, the conversation in the comments section pretty much devolves into free MP3 websites. It was good while it lasted, I guess.-NICK YINGLING

50 Websites You’ll Wonder How you Lived Without

Photo credit: Steffe on Flickr.

There’s a lively discussion in the comments over at the Reference Extract planning site: some visitors are skeptical (to say the least) about the need for a search engine that gives results “weighted towards sites most often referred to by librarians at institutions such as the Library of Congress.”

But both teachers and librarians know that students encounter a great deal of non-credible and un-credible as well as incredible content on the web, content that students are all too prone to take at face value. And there are similar projects out there: KidZui, which we covered last month, is not just a search engine but an entire browser built to lead kids toward websites approved by teachers. New search engines such as Cuil, which we covered back in August, do emerge. So a project like this — and Reference Extract is an ambitious project–isn’t out in left field, whether or not it’s a Google-killer.

If you read through the proposal, there’s lots of interesting data to support the project, and there’s some good geek food for those who’d like to know how the search engine will work (they’re going to pull out and index the URLs from QuestionPoint and use the Find retrieval engine from OCLC, or possibly Nutch . . . oh, never mind). The folks who are going to build this search engine prove with studies and pretty graphs that librarians are perceived as credible and that different librarians do tend to send researchers to the same websites.

So what do you think? Would you be likely to use and encourage your students to use a search engine “built for maximum credibility”? -AMANDA FRENCH

Reference Extract planning site

Related stuff:

Ensure kid-safe browsing with KidZui

Cuil adds power, pictures to web searches

Visit the Library of Congress online

Search the world’s libraries with WorldCat

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

SimplyBox

Related stuff:

Zotero, the Web-Wrangler

College ruled 2.0: Google Notebook

Q: What’s the difference between questions and Frequently Asked Questions?

A: FAQs assume that many people are asking the same questions. By posting the answers to these common queries in one accessible place, duplicate answers are avoided, saving time for both the person asking and the person answering.

If you took that concept and multiplied it by the number of websites on the world wide web, you’d have SnappyFingers.com. The site claims to be “the smartest and most comprehensive Question/Answer explorer on the web.” It’s a great idea. Ask a question, and SnappyFingers.com will provide a bunch of answers, as well as links to those websites that answered. However, at this stage, SnappyFingers illustrates the weaknesses of the internet as much as its strengths. To say that the answers you get are biased would be a dramatic understatement. For example, the question ‘what is socialism?’ is answered by WorldSocialism.org, SunflowerSocialists.org, WorkerSolidarity.org, and so on. In addition, satirical answers often appear, which can be good for a laugh, but bad for a research paper.

In its defense, SnappyFingers.com is still in the beginning stages of finding and ranking content. Perhaps in time the featured FAQs will become more objective and reliable. For now, savvy teachers could incorporate the site into a lesson focusing on critical analysis of source material. After all, the internet is every bit as varied and unpredictable as the world it represents. –JIMI RADABAUGH

SnappyFingers.com

Related Stuff:

Compare Google searches with Thumbshots.com Ranking

Photo credit: Laughing Squid on flickr

Don’t be deterred by the terms-of-use warning on the front page, which cautions you to “surf at your own risk.”    The Florida Virtual Library is an excellent resource for student exploration, research, and reference, compiling an abundance of links to support education. If you find “objectionable content” here, you’ll find it at Disneyworld.

The Florida Virtual Library mimics the experience of walking into a library building, but without all those fussy right angles.  The quirky, colorful interface is engaging enough to appeal to students without screaming, “Hey kids, I’m rad!  This site is da bomb!  See?  I talk like you!  I’m down!  Hey kids!  Come back!”

The FVL is the library of the Florida Virtual School, an award-winning institution that’s been excelling in online education for more than ten years.  Lucky for us, they’ve made the library accessible to the general public.

The site’s well-labeled collections of links cover every major curriculum area, and include things like collections of primary resources, entry points for learning about current events, a writing center, information about college and careers, and portals for teachers and parents.

A word about site navigation: using your browser’s “back” button doesn’t always seem to work, so it’s best to rely on the FVL’s internal navigation tabs.

Add this one to your bag of tricks when you’re looking for a one-stop place to send students for conducting online research. -EMILY JACK

The Florida Virtual Library

Related Stuff:

Check out the Internet Public Library Teenspace

Visit the Library of Congress online