Instructifeature: Make graphing fun with an interactive white board

Google SketchUp: free & easy 3D modeling

Field trip to Jordan: No tickets required with Project Explorer

Certification Map - Where do you want to teach?

Speed up your reading with Spreeder

Old words make a comeback at Save the Words

Convert PDF files to editable documents easily with PDF to Word

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YouTube EDU features educational videos online

My daughter, who is three, sent me a picture message from school yesterday (with the help of her teacher), and it just reinforced the reality that children are accessing the internet and mobile devices much younger these days. While the internet is such a valuable resource to bring concepts to life and research new topics, it also has large areas we would our kids not see. Figuring out a feasible plan to not only protect your kids from the seedy side of the internet but also explain to them why you’re doing it can be a delicate balancing act.

The people at NetSmartz are trying to make internet safety and education a little easier. NetSmartz is divided into sections tailored for specific groups — parents, teachers, children, teens, and law enforcement. Within each subset you will find information and activities to help you create a workable solution to internet protection. As we zoom forward in the miniaturization of technology age, the issue of internet exposure to younger and younger demographics is only going to grow, it’s a good idea to be proactive on self-educating yourselves on this.

NetSmartz

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Growing up during the tail end of the Cold War, I heard the phrase “Be happy you don’t live in the U.S.S.R because…” many times in relation to things I felt were unfair. As a child you don’t really have an appreciation for the ways legal systems and governments work outside of the United States. Until I got to middle school I didn’t know what a parliament was outside of a brand of cigarettes.

To get a better sense of how the rest of the world works, the website JuriGlobe is an excellent resource you can point students to or reference yourself when they ask those gotcha questions in class like “Is Turkmenistan’s legal system based on a Common Law or Civilist model?”

Provided by the good folks at the University of Ottawa in Canada, the website has a great deal of information about the governmental and legal structures of every country in the world. You can get this information in a table or on a map. In addition to legal and governmental structures, JuriGlobe has a wealth of information on linguistics and international trade as well. There is certainly enough information here to have students complete a research project on a foreign country, and like I said before, it’s a great resource to keep in your digital back pocket in case of an international stumper. Oh, and just because I know your dying to know, Turkmenistan is based on a Civilist model.

JuriGlobe

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Argue landmark Supreme Court cases in Argument Wars

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Homonym and homophone confusion has plagued many a student essay. Words that have identical pronunciation but drastically different meanings make English one of the hardest languages to learn, even for native speakers. Alan Cooper has kindly put together a big list of such words at Alan Cooper’s Homonyms, a site which all English teachers should introduce to their students as soon as possible.

This list groups all the homophones together, then provides a concise, clarifying definition next to it. This list also builds students’ vocabulary — when looking at the homonyms for “adds,” I found the little-used word “adze,” which is like a sideways axe tool used to smooth out rough-cut wood. See? You learn something new every day.

If your students struggle telling the difference between there, their and they’re, Alan Cooper’s Homophones is just what they knead. Er, that is, need.

Alan Cooper’s Homonyms

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BY REBECCAH HAINES

Apropos to the recent Random Roundup: PBS published here on Instructify, here’s another gem from PBS - PBS Design Squad. This extensive website offers many options for a teacher aspiring to integrate more STEM into his or her classroom.

The website is based on a PBS program called Design Squad. On the show, two teams of college-aged students compete in various design and engineering challenges. You can watch episodes online. I think these videos would be a great way to engage your students. Each team includes racially diverse young men and women, which will help your students see that engineers aren’t just a bunch of pasty nerds with pocket protectors.

After you’ve engaged your kids with an episode, there is an extensive section for parents and educators with tons of ideas on how to use the episodes to extend learning. There are downloadable activities complete with instructions on how to build various things such as rubber-band cars and circuits. As expected from a place like PBS, there is also a detailed Educator’s Guide (we teachers love us a good educator’s guide!). The Educator’s Guide actually puts the activities into little units aligned with content standards.

Another great feature of this website is the DS Exchange. This portion of the website encourages student creativity and experimentation. You can “Make a Wish” about an invention you’d like to see in the real world. Other users of the site can see those wishes and in turn can make “Sketches” in which they draw and submit their design to meet the wish. Then, users are encouraged to make their sketches a reality and submit their results to the website. For students lacking inspiration, there is a weekly challenge posted by Design Squad to get those creative juices flowing.

All in all, this website seems to offer a lot of what teachers look for — engaging scenarios in the videos, activities, educator’s guides, and a place for students to express creativity and engage in inquiry. I always thought engineers were a little on the nerdy side, but after looking at this website, I’m thinking maybe I missed out. Hopefully, after you share it with your students, they will be inspired as well!

PBS Design Squad

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The world may be getting smaller, but the universe is still a pretty big place. If you’ve the urge to feel like an insignificant speck of dust, play with this flash app that shows you the scale of the universe.

The controls are simple. Actually, make that control, as in singular — move the slider back and forth to zoom through the universe’s spectrum of size, from the boundaries of the known universe itself all the way down to quantum foam, whatever that is. You don’t know what big is until you check out WOH G64, a star so big it would take an airplane 1200 years to fly around it once (and it’s not even the biggest star).

This is a fun diversion for a science class, and a good way for anybody to get a sense of how big (and small) the universe is.

Scale of the Universe

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You’ve seen them in the movies — those gigantic radio telescopes that NASA uses to listen for signals from their satellites as well as perhaps little green aliens from another planet. But did you know that you can build a radio telescope at your school and actually take part in radio-telescope-based astronomy?

That is the idea behind NASA’s Radio JOVE project, to bring the experience of using a radio telescope into the hands of schools and astronomy buffs across the country. For a small fee, NASA will send you all the components needed to build your own radio telescope and start listening to the sounds emitted by celestial objects. They also have given detailed ways and reasons to fit the JOVE project into your science class curriculum.

Can’t afford the fee or can’t find funding to help cover the cost? Not a problem. You and your class can still participate in the JOVE project via one of NASA’s radio telescopes that provide a free online streaming observatory.

Besides being a really cool hands-on project, this is an excellent way to get young students interested in a field of study that doesn’t receive much attention in the middle school and high school grade levels.

Radio JOVE

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Photo credit: ~Prescott on Flickr.

Here’s what’s going on at the NASA Earth Observatory, brought to you by Fred Beyer at EarthSciTeach.

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Audio-visual rental company Meeting Tomorrow wants to give LCD projectors to 10 schools. To win, just vote for your school on the Meeting Tomorrow website.

Meeting Tomorrow counts only one vote from each computer, so you’ll have to get your friends, colleagues and students involved. As of this writing, the 10th-place school has 369 votes, which is hardly insurmountable by the contest deadline, which, by the way, is March 31. Spread the word, and go out and vote. If you win, be sure to post a comment about it right here.

Meeting Tomorrow’s Audio Visual Giveaway

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1. Doodle 4 Google competition lets kids design Google logo
2. PBS Teachers is a smorgasbord of teacher resources
3. Have students use The Big6 to solve problems
4. Use Team Maker for your next group assignment
5. Actors read books to kids at Storyline Online
6. Build your own educational games at ProProfs BrainGames
7. Read milestone documents from American history at Our Documents
8. Argue landmark Supreme Court cases in Argument Wars
9. Find free images at Flickr: Creative Commons
10. Inquiry in Action has loads of inquiry-based science resources

Need some global statistics to emphasize a point you’re trying to make in an ecology or civics lesson plan? Trying to drive home the point in a health-related lesson about the spread of disease or the scope of our ever-growing obesity epidemic? Then check out Worldometers, a real-time online ticker that tracks statistics ranging from food consumption, to energy use, to how much people spend on video games.

The page is simple and sweet, nothing but statistics updated every second. Some of those statistics are a bit shocking in their size and how fast they grow — the global number of emails sent goes up by about a million a second! While it might be hard to formulate a classroom activity around the site, it certainly can open some student’s eyes as to how quickly things happen or are consumed on a global scale.

Worldometers

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As a science teacher, I’m always looking for a way for my students to see “real scientists.”  While live guest speakers are wonderful, they are not always available.  Well, Make Magazine interviewed “great minds working in science and technology to find out what intrigues them and learn more about the work they do.”  The results of those interviews can be found in short videos at this website.

Each video is approximately three and a half minutes, and features the scientist speaking about what they do and how they got interested in it.  Additionally, most have other images of the areas in which the scientist works, or the tools that they use. Some featured scientists include anthropologist Louise Leakey (yes, from that Leakey family), astrobiologist Lynn Rothschild, and Adam Summers (Fascinated with Sharks).  There is a wide range of study topics for the interviewees, from anthropology to mirrors to green technology, so you will find something to engage each of your students.

The Elements of Humanity: A Fascination with Science and Technology - Interview videos

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Media specialists and information-literate teachers have been teaching students the Big6 Skills Model of Information Problem-Solving for years. By using this research approach, students can easily master the six-step process (just three steps for K-2!) and take responsibility for both the process and the product of their research. This is an important skill set for student school success, but can this help them even more in real life? Perhaps.

Students are faced with all sorts of tests, both in school and beyond, and these tests require not just mastery of the content, but also the process. It is not enough to learn the amendments to the Constitution and the associated landmark court cases; students must see how these historical events have relevance beyond the end-of-course test. Productive citizens need to be able to find and analyze information, organize and evaluate their ideas, and apply this process to their everyday lives. This is profoundly challenging in the media-rich world we live in today.

Reflection

A key component of the Big6 is the final step — reflection. Too often, students complete an assignment and quickly move on to the next thing without considering the process that got them there. Sure, they get feedback about the final product when they get their grade, but what have they learned about themselves, their work, and the research process? Whether they are pleased with the outcome or want to do better next time, it is important to assess the process, not just the product. Reflecting (or Reviewing for the little ones) provides students with an opportunity to consider their path and adjust according to what worked. Critical assessment of the process provides them with a list of fruitful strategies as well as indicators for areas where improvement or redirection are necessary. Reflective students have a better sense of how to approach their next information problem-solving situation.

Implementation

How can we encourage reflection? Make reflection part of the process by encouraging students to keep track of their experiences with the research process over time using a blog or journal to record self-assessments, or use a checklist like this one for grades 3-6 or grades 7-12.

Ask students questions about both the process and the product to jump-start their reflective writing. For example:

1. Did you use your time well?
2. Does your product meet (or exceed) the assignment requirements?
3. Is your final paper a thoughtful response to the assignment?
4. Would you be proud for anyone to read this paper?

By teaching an information process like the Big6, we help students not just to know where to start with a major research paper, but more essentially, to think about their thinking, and to understand their strengths and tackle their limitations. By modeling this or another learning and problem-solving process, we demonstrate that we, too, are lifelong learners, and we are willing and able to adjust to new information. Developing and refining a system that incorporates self-correction will prepare students for much more than the test; start your students off with a flexible information problem-solving approach like the Big6 and they’ll be learning how to learn in no time!

Big6 Kid’s Section

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Looking for a completely science-focused web site to aid you with a STEM focused classroom? Then direct your attention to Planet Science for a wealth of science-based goodness. While the front page can be a bit overwhelming with how much it tries to present at once, there are many great resources here.

The teacher section has good multimedia content and some really well-thought-out experiments that you can use to teach basic science concepts. There are also sections of the website geared towards students and parents which have a less academic feel to them, but also contain fun activities geared towards getting kids excited about science.

Something that should be noted — Planet Science is brought to you by our good friends from another area of the planet, the United Kingdom. Keeping that in mind, the narration on multimedia will have British accents and the grade level searching is a bit different than what you may be used to (not to mention the humor might be lost if you’ve never watched some BBC comedy). That shouldn’t, however, keep you from finding some STEM related gems in this large collection of all things science.

Planet Science

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