Instructify

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

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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

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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

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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

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Teaching students how to research often involves what not to do as much as what they should do. That is, don’t take credit for ideas that aren’t yours. Today we have unprecedented access to information, which can make it tempting to not credit a source, or to commit unintentional plagiarism. You can find lots of information to help you teach about this form of cheating at Guidelines and Resources for Avoiding Plagiarism, a website from the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction. The site has definitions of plagiarism, policy guidelines, plus information tailored specifically for teachers, students and parents. Naturally, like any good plagiarism resource, this site properly credits its sources in its works cited section. -BILL FERRIS

Guidelines and Resources for Avoiding Plagiarism

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Photo credit: cheesebikini on flickr

By now you’re surely familiar with Google Book Search, the project to digitize and display millions of books, which began in 2004. You’ve doubtless noticed that ordinary Google searches now turn up results from books, so that a student’s search for “Silas Marner” will point her not just to Wikipedia, but to the text and page images of the book itself on http://books.google.com. You may even have heard that Google recently settled a lawsuit brought by the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild over whether the search company had the right to scan in-copyright material and display parts of such material in search results.

It is our delightful task, however, to tell you about something we’re guessing you haven’t heard of: Google Book Search previews. You can now use Google Book Search’s “Preview Wizard” to generate a little virtual book that will fit in a small square of your web page or blog. All you need is the book’s ISBN number, access to your web site’s underlying code, and the courage to copy and paste snippets of JavaScript. (If you have a WordPress blog, use Design and Widgets to insert the code; if you have a Blogger.com blog, use Layout and Edit HTML.) By default, what appears is a picture of the book’s cover with clickable arrows that let you page back and forth in the book, though you might want to choose other display options. Some books will grant you access to the full text, while others will give you only a few pages or chapters, but in both cases this widget is a great way to encourage your screen-dazed students toward books.

It’s also worth noting that libraries, bookstores, and book-oriented sites are taking advantage of the same technology on a larger scale; Google Book Search previews are available from the websites of WorldCat, LibraryThing, GoodReads, Books-a-Million, and many more. Happy reading (online)! — AMANDA FRENCH

Google Book Search Preview Wizard

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Some people discourage you, telling you not to “reinvent the wheel.” Other people will give you too much encouragement, saying “build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.” Do not listen to either of these people. Both are trying to distract you with nonsensical feedback while they secretly steal your inventions and race to the patent office. While its clear that I have an obvious mistrust for others concerning my inventions (potato chip clip AND TV remote combined), don’t let my negativity infect your science classroom.

Originally published few years back, this article by the BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal) takes a rigorous look at one invention that is assumed to work just fine the way it exists: the parachute. Apparently, we’ve assumed parachutes to be a successful way of preventing death by “gravitational challenge” based purely on anecdotal evidence — there hasn’t been a single study that included controlled, randomized, double-blind parachute placebo groups. Without such a study, can we really know for sure that skydivers wouldn’t fare as well with a placebo instead of a parachute?

Their intent was to satirize criticisms about health interventions based off observational data by advocates who prefer evidence based findings. You, however, can use it with your students to spark an interest in challenging assumptions and looking at things from a different angle. While the article is tongue-in-cheek, it works on a fundamental level in that it is still an interesting, solid example for students trying to write a scientific research paper to see just how a scientific research paper gets written. Abstract, objective, data sources, citations—they are all in there. -NICK YINGLING

Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomised controlled trials via BMJ

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Photo credit: Library of Congress

Many teachers worry about their students’ reliance on Google as a way of finding information. If you can’t get them to become library junkies, you can at least prove to them that how they do research affects what information they find. A neat little visualization tool called Thumbshots.com Ranking can help.The Ranking tool allows you to compare searches on Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and other search engines by displaying a row of dots representing web pages, arranged in the same order that they appear in a particular set of search results. Hovering over a dot will show you a small preview, or “thumbshot,” of the page. One thing you’ll quickly see is that there’s not much overlap: pages that show up in Google results often don’t show up in Yahoo! results and vice versa.

Pages that do show up in both sets of results are highlighted in blue, and blue lines allow you to compare where the pages rank in each set of results. In the Yahoo! results for “water on Mars,” for instance, a 2001 article published on NASA’s website ranks 3rd; the same page ranks only 35th in Google’s results. The Ranking tool also allows you to highlight a particular site so that you can see, for instance, where Wikipedia is in each set of results. Moreover, you can teach your students about the importance of search words by showing them that searching Google for “water on Mars” returns significantly different results than searching Google for “Mars water.”

Once you’ve constructed and conducted a lesson whose moral is “Different searches produce different results,” you might want to explore any number of different search engines. Metasearch engines such as Dogpile and Clusty are search engines of search engines that compile results from several different sources. Search engines such as Grokker, Cuil, and Mahalo display information in dramatically different ways from the big three (Google, Yahoo!, and MSN Live Search). There’s a whole world to search out there, and a whole bunch of ways to search it. –AMANDA FRENCH

Thumbshots.com Ranking

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Whenever I hear of a new study connecting something terrible to something we used to think was safe, I think of the Wizard of Oz. Even after Dorothy reveals that old Oz is a fraud, he insists that she “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.” Though our imaginations may be eager to accept the latest hypothesis as scientific fact, we don’t always have the means to look behind the curtain for proof.

Evidence: How Do We Know What We Know? deals with the role evidence plays in establishing scientific truth. In the words of the site’s creators at the Exploratorium Museum, “this project uses case studies to examine how scientists construct a functional understanding of the world by gathering, assessing, and making use of scientific evidence.” The featured case study explores questions about human origins through a series of interviews with anthropologists and other scientists. The lesson begins with a comparison between humans and their primate relatives and ends with a discussion of what we can learn from mankind’s fossil record.

My favorite part of the site is called Can You Believe It? It’s a list of seven questions to ask about any scientific claim, which not only apply to the information found in the case study on human origins, but which can also be used to analyze and assess any science-based article. Best of all, you’re given the option to view the current day’s science headlines, allowing students and teachers alike to scan for evidence to decide for themselves if the latest discovery is science fact or science fiction. –JIMI RADABAUGH

Evidence: How Do We Know What We Know?

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With so much information available online, the printed newspaper might not have much time left. In the information age, opening the paper today to read about what happened yesterday seems incredibly slow. They’re not searchable, and their size is unwieldy for folks used to reading news on a laptop or iPhone. Plus they generate waste, and your fingers get all inky. That said, I’ve fond memories of reading through the funnies and the sports section on Sunday mornings as a kid. My wife wrote for a daily paper, too. The newspaper was our culture’s medium of record for generations, and it deserves better than to merely vanish into obsolescence.

Leave it to Google to make newspapers searchable. Google will partner with newspaper publishers to digitize archived issues and make more papers available online. You can still read them as they were originally printed — that includes headlines, articles, photos, ads, letters to the editor, maybe even an ink smudge or two. “Over time,” the Google blog says, “as we scan more articles and our index grows, we’ll also start blending these archives into our main search results so that when you search Google.com, you’ll be searching the full text of these newspapers as well.” Cool!

Google’s newspaper digitization project will allow your students to use primary source material to view history through the lens of people experiencing it. It also means they won’t have to head to the library to squint at microfiche editions of old newspapers for that research paper you assigned them.

Sure, the newspaper doesn’t have as many features as today’s online media, but it’s an important part of our heritage as an informed society. Now a lot of that heritage will be available digitally, and easier to access than ever before. I just hope they don’t forget to digitize the funny pages. -BILL FERRIS

Bringing history online, one newspaper at a time via the Official Google Blog

Google Launches Newspaper Digitization Project via Lifehacker

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Earlier we told you about Diigo (Digest of Internet Information, Groups, and Other stuff). Today, you’ll learn about the Groups part of the name. In addition to having awesome annotation tools, it also has a lot of great ways to share information with others, formal and informal. First you can send bookmarks not just to other Diigo members you’re “friends” with (sort of like the for:username feature in del.icio.us), but also to emails (I use it to send stuff to my spouse who refuses to join a social bookmarking site), and to your existing del.ico.us account. That’s the easy stuff. You can also form more formal groups within Diigo. You can share bookmarks (with your notes) to a group, and it will appear in the groups bookmarks.

It doesn’t stop there though. There’s a full discussion forum feature, so you can have a discussion where you invite other individual Diigo members to discuss a bookmark or just ideas for that matter, or you can have a discussion within a Group you belong to. Think of how you could use that with students to facilitate discussions around online reading. It takes the social part of social bookmarking to the next level. Some teachers have even used this feature to form study groups for students. -ALICE MERCER

Diigo

Jen Dorman has some great resources on using Diigo in education

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Instructify is finally letting me share information about one of my favorite online tools, Diigo. Diigo is a social bookmarking tool, but so much more. In addition to letting you bookmark pages, you can also annotate them. There are two tools you can use for this, highlighting and comments. Highlighting lets you highlight the actual text on a web page, and stores the highlighted words with your bookmark.Think of how useful this can be for online reading assignments in a class (no wonder it’s caught on with some high school AP teachers).

In addition to highlighting text, you can leave comments behind, and even position them using floating sticky notes. You can use these to direct students to specific part of a page, or leave vocabulary or other tips explaining parts of text that may be a little complex for students. Just go to Diigo, sign up and download the Diigo toolbar (or lighter Diigolet bookmarklet). -ALICE MERCER

FYI: it’s pronounced dee-go (Digest of Internet Information Groups and Other stuff).

Diigo

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Explanations Abound at Common Craft

Visual Web searching is apparently the hot new trend (see previous entries on Cuil and RedZee). If you’d rather get your search results in pictures instead of words, you should definitely have a look at Searchme, by far the most visually impressive visual search engine.

Searchme takes a page from iTunes’ Cover Flow interface. And by a page, I mean pretty much the whole darn book. Searchme brings up a screen shot of each search result, and you can flip through each like you would album covers in iTunes. Yeah, so it’s not totally original. But it looks really, really nice, and you can get an instant look at a site before you visit.

You can save your searches in “stacks,” in which you collect your visual search results for later use like a stack of baseball cards in a shoebox. Of course, it wouldn’t be a true Web 2.0 tool if you couldn’t share your stacks with your friends. You can also filter out adult content, and have video results play automatically.

Searchme is still in Beta, so you might find a bug or two. But it looks so good, you won’t care. -BILL FERRIS

Searchme

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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