Instructify

BY KEVIN HODGSON

Google started it, but other sites are running with the idea of creating a search engine built around reading levels. Twurdy (a mash-up of “too wordy”) is one of the easiest and most user-friendly sites that I have come across for searching and finding information on the web based on the concept of “readiblity.” The site, which is built on the back of Google Search, conveniently color-codes the various reading levels, and a quick click of a button allows you to match up approximate age levels with reading levels.

There are three settings that you can choose: Just Twurdy, which searches using Twurdy’s basic algorithm with medium speed and medium results; Simple Twurdy, which searches using Twurdy’s simple algorithm for fast speed but less accurate results; and Twurdy with Pop, which searches using Twurdy’s most complex algorithm which includes looking up the popularity of words within the text. It has a slower speed, but a higher level of accuracy.

For students, this means that a quick search on a topic yields web resources that are at their reading levels — I did one on the Galapagos Islands and the site was very useful. For teachers, it means that gathering resources appropriate to students’ reading levels might get a bit easier. An interesting experiment, too, is to put in the URL of a website and see what reading level is assigned to it. I did this with my own blog and it was fascinating to see the blog posts broken down by reading levels.

One drawback is that I wanted to be able to better narrow my original search field to just specific age levels (such as, all of the websites about the Galapagos Islands for a 10-year-old reading level). But overall, Twurdy was a satisfying experience and one worth considering for the classroom.

Twurdy

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BY CHRISTOPHER PANNA

We’ve heard it so many times that it’s become cliché: The power of the internet, limitless information at our fingertips, etc. Now the danger is getting lost in a sea of too much information. A new service called Qwiki understands this and seeks not to provide more information, but to present it in a more compelling way.

Like any web reference, Qwiki begins with a search box on its main page. But instead of an article on a topic, Qwiki offers what it calls an “information experience.” The topic is explained by an automated voice while pictures, maps, and statistics appear to complement the spoken facts. It’s a revolutionary approach and I found myself more engaged in a topic by watching it on Qwiki than by researching it traditionally.

There are, however, a few things educators should know before diving in. First and foremost, Qwiki is only in its alpha release, which means it’s incomplete and possibly full of errors. You should also be aware that Qwiki’s main source is Wikipedia. The information read by the smooth voice comes directly from a topic’s Wikipedia article, as do most of the pictures.

In a school setting Qwiki would be appropriate for giving a brief introduction to a topic rather than for serious research. It could also serve as a great example of effective multimedia. Despite its current limitations, Qwiki is a promising project and could very well represent “the future of information” as its founders claim.

Qwiki

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BY CHRISTOPHER PANNA

Gone are the days when teachers have to rely on the limited selection of paper-bound “readers” for supplementary material like primary documents or scholarly articles. There’s a plethora of sources on the web, and Google’s specialized searches make it easier than ever to find what you want.

If you’re looking for past news articles, Google News Timeline provides a fun and intuitive way to search. Simply enter a year, month, and even day to see news articles published on that date. You can then refine your search by entering a subject and clicking “add more queries” to select a type of media like newspapers or magazines. The best thing about News Timeline, however, is the easy-to-use display that arranges the results chronologically. The example above is the result of searching Time Magazine exactly 30 years ago. Clicking an issue took me to Time’s page where the full articles were available. Using News Timeline I’ve found articles as far back as the early 1800s, and in some ways the older ones are the best because you get an image of the original print!

Another source for high-quality readings is Google Scholar. It searches publications like academic journals, public domain books, and court opinions. The options give you the same ability as News Timeline to refine your search by subject, author, and date. For some of the results, only an abstract is available, but for many you can read the full text. My Scholar search for works about Emily Dickinson published since 2000 yielded an entire book of academic reviews and several journal abstracts.

These search engines can open more options for you and your students as alternatives to textbook readings. Historical articles from News Timeline can give a perspective from a different time period, while Scholar can ensure that you keep up with recent developments.

Google News Timeline

Google Scholar

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BY BILL FERRIS

Google’s advanced search function lets you filter search results by reading level. Simply click the “Advanced Search” link next to the search bar on the Google home page (or directly underneath the search box on any search results page). In the “Need more tools?” section, you can tell Google to only return results within your reading level of choice (basic, intermediate, or advanced). Google will also give you a graph that breaks down the percentage of results that fall into each reading level.

This is a handy tool for elementary students. It’s also useful for folks who want to research a super-advanced topic they know nothing about, and want to find resources written in plain English.

How it works:

“The feature is based primarily on statistical models we built with the help of teachers. We paid teachers to classify pages for different reading levels, and then took their classifications to build a statistical model. With this model, we can compare the words on any webpage with the words in the model to classify reading levels. We also use data from Google Scholar, since most of the articles in Scholar are advanced.”

Since language isn’t always compatible with statistical models, you’ll want to use your own judgment when determining the reading levels of the results you get. Still, filtering by reading level may be a good way to make sure you and your students get the search results that are most helpful to you.

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

Tom Barrett has turned collaboration and sharing among teachers into an art form, and the results of these collaborations is a series of Google Presentations that can provide valuable insight into a wealth of possible technology tools for the classroom.

Tom (whose blog at EDTE.CH is worth a visit or two) has been exploring the possibility of iPods, Wallwisher, pocket video cameras, Twitter, Google Earth, Prezi and more as potential learning opportunities for students.

The real power comes when he asks teachers with ideas and experience to add to his presentations through the collaborative nature of Google Presentations. The result is a list of ever-growing resources that tap into a wide range of topics and levels of entry with a wide array of teaching voices.

Tom Barrett’s Interesting Ways to…

• Get to Know Your New Class
• Ideas for Class Blog Posts
• Use a Learning Platform in the Classroom
• Support Spelling in the Classroom
• Teach Reading Comprehension in the Classroom
• Use Web Conferencing in the Classroom
• Make Your Classroom a Sparkly Place to Learn
• Use Audio in Your Classroom
• Use Wallwisher in the Classroom
• Support Writing in the Classroom
• Use an iPod Touch in the Classroom
• Nintendo Wii in the Classroom
• Use a Wiki in the Classroom
• Use a Visualizer in the Classroom
• Use Twitter in the Classroom
• Use Wordle in the Classroom
• Use Your Pocket Video Camera in the Classroom
• Use Google Docs in the Classroom
• Use Google Earth in the Classroom
• Use a Nintendo DS in the Classroom
• Use Search Engines in the Classroom
• Use Your Interactive Whiteboard in the Classroom
• Prezi in the Classroom
• Use Voicethread in the Classroom
• Use the iPad in the Classroom
• Use Google Search in the Classroom
• Use Google Maps in the Classroom

BY BILL FERRIS

You probably have a few trusted websites you go to for information. Rather than hop from Google to Wikipedia to CNN to find what you’re looking for, though, Favitt lets you search up to six search engines simultaneously from one central location.

You can set your six favorite search engines inside handy tabs located at the top of the search bar, letting you switch easily from one to the other. (more…)

BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

Images — so useful in education, yet so convoluted in copyright explanations that many people fear using them. But if you wade into the waters of Creative Commons you can find millions of available images, ready to be used, modified, and shared. One of the more common image sites is Flickr, which we have highlighted a few times. Here at Instructify, we’ve talked about creative commons laws, and we’ve given you several ways to search Flickr using third party search engines like FlickrCC and Flickrstorm, but there is another way that deserves mention for their combination of the two.

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BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

What’s that in Google’s rear view mirror? The answer is Microsoft’s new search engine Bing. To be sure, the information highway is littered with examples of defeated search engines that have challenged Google’s relative monopoly on the search engine scene. Whether it was an engine that was too slow, returned irrelevant results, or just plain didn’t present information in a useful manner, Google has pretty much crushed the competition, achieving icon status on the internet as well being recognized as a verb in it’s own right.

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BY BILL FERRIS

It’s hard to believe that Google figured out how to search for my house from space before getting around to searching for photos licensed under Creative Commons¹. According to the Google Operating System blog (not affiliated with Google), Google Image Search now lets you narrow your results to pics that carry the Creative Commons license. Hey, better late than never.

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BY NICK YINGLING

Information aesthetics, or infosthetics for those in a hurry, is a term coined to describe the relationship between information visualization and creative design — the emphasis there being the word “creative.” Sure, any chump can make a pie chart to display some information, but how about a pie chart in 3D? That’s a very oversimplified example, but you get it, we get it, everybody gets it.

Spezify is a new search engine that draws upon various forms of multimedia and information sources to respond to your queries, and then presents you with the results in a cool visual display. Results are culled from various sources, such as Flickr, Wikipedia, Twitter, and Amazon (among plenty of others). The result is a very appealing mash of text and images.

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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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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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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.

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!

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Hello and greetings once again from my undisclosed, fortified location. As will happen from time to time, I started to feel the authorities closing in all around me. Men sporting both mustaches and sunglasses would stare at me for much longer than usual, ATMs would reject my cards, small electronic devices kept showing up in my apartment — I was getting the fear. Once again, I was in the grips of paranoia and panic because of copyright worries.

Phony intrigue aside, that weird déjà vu feeling is bound to creep up on you when you’re selecting an image for use. Have I seen this McDonalds Golden Arches®™© symbol somewhere before?  TinEye reverse image search engine is a great tool to help you trace images back to their original source (and, in some cases, a higher resolution version that’s better than the one you started out with).

TinEye has plugins available for both Firefox and IE, as well as bookmarklets for other browsers, so you won’t need to keep returning to the main page to copy in a URL. That should save you a lot of time when you stumble across an image on the web.

Because TinEye is the first search engine to let you see how an image is being used by different users, you can really show students how images can evolve. This can effectively demonstrate the ideas of image accountability and integrity. Have your students search a somewhat notorious company’s logo, such as Enron, and see how it has been modified. That opens the door for  you to field questions about trademarked logos being used for satire and parody. Aren’t you glad that I’m providing you with more work now? — NICK YINGLING

TinEye

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