November 6, 2009
Experience an online archaeological project at Interactive Dig: El Carrizal
By clicking to Interactive Dig: El Carrizal from Archaeology Magazine, students can see photo updates and read first-hand accounts of this in-progress archaeological project.
Video DownloadHelper helpfully helps you download helpful videos. Helpfully.
The fine folks at Video DownloadHelper have created a plug-in for Firefox that makes video downloading as simple as pressing a button.
60 Second Recap summarizes classic literature
Everyone needs help wrapping their heads around a book from time to time. If you teach literature, that time occurs every day. You can outsource some of the necessary explanation by sending your students to 60 Second Recap, a site that summarizes the plot, characters, and themes of a book in 60-second episodes for each.
Get Library of Congress Videos on iTunes U
You now can access lots of free audio and video from the Library of Congress on iTunes U. There’s a lot of great material suitable for a history class, such as early films made by Edison himself (or his company, at least). There are also fascinating oral histories from actual slaves in the Voices from the Days of Slavery collection.
November 6, 2009
BY BILL FERRIS
You now can access lots of free audio and video from the Library of Congress on iTunes U. There’s a lot of great material suitable for a history class, such as early films made by Edison himself (or his company, at least). There are also fascinating oral histories from actual slaves in the Voices from the Days of Slavery collection. For a look at how people entertained themselves before TV, radio and the interweb came to be, you can look at early American animation, and even olde timey Vaudeville performances.
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November 5, 2009
BY BILL FERRIS
Everyone needs help wrapping their heads around a book from time to time. If you teach literature, that time occurs every day. You can outsource some of the necessary explanation by sending your students to 60 Second Recap, a site that summarizes the plot, characters, and themes of a book in 60-second episodes for each.
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November 4, 2009
BY JASON DON FORSYTHE
How often have you seen a great discussion-provoking video on the web and thought, “If only I could grab this video and try and work it into a topic I want to discuss,” then you hear the internet laugh at you as you try to save it? How do you use this without having to send people to a web page? Or what happens if this page constantly rotates its content like at CNN.com?
Well, for users of Firefox, the task just became very simple. The fine folks at Video DownloadHelper have created a plug-in for Firefox that makes video downloading as simple as pressing a button. Read the rest of this entry »
November 3, 2009
BY BILL FERRIS
Stuck inside classrooms, a lot of students don’t get to experience the hands-on aspects of history and archaeology. Though driving a mouse isn’t exactly hands-on, by clicking to Interactive Dig: El Carrizal from Archaeology Magazine, students can see photo updates and read first-hand accounts of this in-progress archaeological project.
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October 29, 2009
BY BILL FERRIS
See the history of United States foreign relations. The State Department has launched the Office of the Historian website, chronicling U.S. foreign policy throughout our nation’s history.
The site is full of historical documents, photographs, and milestones. As you might expect, there’s a lot available. You can sift through all that history by searching according to presidential administration, theme, or by country. Read the rest of this entry »
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October 28, 2009
BY BILL FERRIS
All writers need editors. Lots of writers have their own editors inside their heads. Some of these editors enjoy telling writers they’re no good, and that they’re wasting their time. The National Novel Writing Month Young Writers Program lets kids tell that internal editor to shut up so they can get some work done.
First, a little background: National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo) occurs every November, challenging authors of all skill levels to pen a novel of 50,000 words in only 30 days. The exercise is designed to get people to start creating for the fun of it without the pressure of trying to craft the next great literary classic. Last year 119,000 writers took the challenge. I did this myself in 2002 and found it to be a fun (and exhausting) exercise.
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October 26, 2009
BY BILL FERRIS
In our never-ending quest to help teachers get valuable video content in front of their students’ eyeballs, we’ve found this offer: you can download WinX DVD Author and WinX DVD Ripper for free during October. Normally selling for around $30 each, these programs allow you to burn pretty much any video file — MOV, MPEG, AVI, WMV and FLV are supported, among others — directly onto a DVD disc. You can also create your own fancy DVD menu. Eh? Eh?
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October 21, 2009
BY BILL FERRIS
Do you like birds? Perhaps more to the point, are you teaching a unit on birds? If so, make All About Birds the next site you visit. Created by the Cornell Lab or Ornithology, All About Birds strives to be “the Web’s best and most comprehensive resource for North American birds, bird watching, and bird conservation — accessible to everyone for free.” It’s a lofty goal, but if this site didn’t achieve it, I can’t imagine anyone else has.
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October 20, 2009
BY BILL FERRIS
Scribblar makes student collaboration really easy. It presents users a large white canvas and arms them with an array of pencils, line and shape tools, and colors. Students can add images easily as well, either by uploading photos or by inserting snapshots of websites. These functions are all very intuitive, even for folks without a lot of graphics experience.
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October 19, 2009
BY BILL FERRIS
As teachers, we’re tasked with molding students into intelligent, productive citizens. That includes more than just homework. Volunteering is a wonderful trait to instill in students, and at the very least, looks great on a college application, too. You can help your students get involved in their community by directing them to Serve.gov.
At Serve.gov, students can find hundreds of volunteer service opportunities within a few miles of home. They can search by their service interest area, enter their zip code, and they’ll get a Google-Maps-Enabled list of results with details, dates, and driving directions.
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October 16, 2009
Cornell’s Round Robin blog is for the birds (sorry)
Round Robin: The Cornell Blog of Ornithology has a lot of fascinating bird content, including video, audio, and images. The blog has articles about migration, learning flight calls, even an obituary for Ithaca, a 37-year-old golden eagle.
What are parents afraid to tell you?
It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas parent-teacher conference season. A lot of parents will be meeting you for the first time, leading to all the hazards of first-time interactions — awkwardness, shyness, and occasionally, tension. TheApple.com’s list of 10 Things Parents Won’t Tell Teachers provides several unspoken irritations of parents.
See the sun up close at The Sun in Motion
One of the first lessons I learned as a kid was not to look at the sun. Extreme astronomer Gary Palmer wants you to disregard that advice and take a good long look into that burning ball of hellfire via the safety of your computer monitor at his site, The Sun in Motion.
Share questions, notes and ideas with Wallwisher
Wallwisher gives your students a set of interactive sticky notes they can use to post questions or ideas. Once you set up your Wallwisher account, you’ll get a shareable URL. Students can post their comments and questions simply by double-clicking the wall and typing their notes. They can also add pictures, links and images.
October 16, 2009
Through the magic of the interweb, you can watch Bill Ferris’ and Jason Don Forsythe’s presentation at the LEARN NC 2009 Fall Interactive Conference. “Technology integration with Instructify,” along with the other eight terrific sessions, is available right now on the conference’s session archives page.
Really, you ought to catch the other sessions, too — there’s stuff on project-based learning, putting together a professional development plan, blended learning, and lots more. All videos include a replay of the conference’s ongoing live chat, with all the supplemental links, ideas, and witty banter therin.
Technology integration with Instructify (19:49)
LEARN NC Fall Interactive Conference 2009 — Session archives
Related stuff:
Attend LEARN NC’s 2009 interactive conference virtually
October 16, 2009
BY BILL FERRIS
Wallwisher gives your students a set of interactive sticky notes they can use to post questions or ideas. Once you set up your Wallwisher account, you’ll get a shareable URL. Students can post their comments and questions simply by double-clicking the wall and typing their notes. They can also add pictures, links and images.
If you have a digital projector, you could display Wallwisher at the beginning of class so students can post questions about their homework. It’s also a handy tool for brainstorming or sharing notes, especially if kids are working on a group project from two different locations.
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October 15, 2009
BY BILL FERRIS
One of the first lessons I learned as a kid was not to look at the sun. As lessons go, it was a pretty easy one to learn, since ignoring it kinda hurts. Extreme astronomer Gary Palmer wants you to disregard that advice and take a good long look into that burning ball of hellfire via the safety of your computer monitor at his site, The Sun in Motion.
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