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With all the hubbub about the One Laptop per Child initiative, it’s nice to see how these little gadgets affect children’s lives. Our Stories lets you see children using their new laptops, and in the process, gives you a glimpse of their lives, and the conditions that make OLPC necessary in the first place.

No less a figure than Queen Rania of Jordan bids you welcome, and invites you to listen to the oral histories of children from around the world. Go to the Our Stories world map and click on one of those cute OLPC icons. Each icon hovers over a country that has received a laptop. Once there, school children tell a brief story about their countries and the issues affecting them. Verow, a young boy in Tanzania, discusses the dangers of malaria to children. In Venezuela, Kimberly talks about how the government could do more to help children living on the street.

Our Stories is a great opportunity to discuss cultural differences with your students. It’s also a great jumping-off point to conducting oral history projects of your own. Communication is one of the best paths to learning. Our Stories shows just how powerful Communication can be. -BILL FERRIS

Our Stories

If you’re a history teacher, you probably already know you can’t beat primary sources. This is especially true given the fact that many textbooks are a load of hooey. But like any piece of evidence, students must learn how to evaluate and apply primary sources. And since you’re just one person and can’t screen all the evidence ahead of time, it’s up to you to teach students to assess materials for themselves.

Making Sense of Evidence, a resource from George Mason University’s “History Matters” course, gives students the tools they need to make sense of primary sources in history. Historians will help students examine everything from the meanings of words to historical context. They list questions to ask, and discuss the unique aspects of all manner of sources such as oral histories, letters and diaries, photos and newspapers.

This site is a great way to look at history without leaning on textbooks. If we empower students to learn about history straight from the source, they just might think it’s more interesting than they thought. -BILL FERRIS

Making Sense of Evidence

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Photo Credit: Stuck in Customs on flickr.com.

Are you out of ideas for your classroom displays? Do you feel like you’ve accomplished all you can in the unforgiving medium of construction paper? If so, get inspired again by visiting the Classroom Displays Blog.

Londoner Linda Hartley posts some of the most creative displays from across the pond. They’re tagged by subject, holiday, and all sorts of criteria. So if you’re looking for ideas to steal a little inspiration for your upcoming winter bulletin boards, this is a good place to turn. Now dig your scissors and construction paper out of the trash and get creative again. -BILL FERRIS

Classroom Displays Blog

If you want to start using wikis to augment your teaching but aren’t sure where to begin, peruse this Educators wiki. Teachers from across the country conduct a show and tell of their wiki projects and how they use them in class. You’ll see teachers using wikis to organize sing-alongs at elementary school assemblies, posting questions about upcoming Physics exams, spicing up library workshops, and lots more. If you’re looking for ideas of how to implement collaborative technology into your class, you’ll definitely want to check out these sites.

The list was created by the PBwiki Educational Advisory Board, a group dedicated to making wikis useful and available to teachers everywhere. Pretty much all of the sites were done with PBwiki. Now PBwiki is wonderful tool (and free, even), but a few of the descriptions feel like product testimonials. There’s really nothing you can do with PB wiki that you couldn’t do with some other wiki service.

But that minor quibble aside, you should definitely poke around the Educators Wiki. Because no matter what sort of wiki you use, good ideas are good ideas. -BILL FERRIS

Educators wiki

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During this holiday season, we at Instructify hope you put down your computer to spend time with loved ones, drink some egg nog, and recharge your batteries for next semester. To help you do this, we’ll be cutting back on posts for the remainder of the year.

But don’t fret, we’ll be back in full force January 2. Until then, cough all the chalk dust out of your lungs and relax. -BILL FERRIS

Photo credit: krisdecurtis on flickr.com

Brainstorming is a Breeze with bubbl.us
Ever used a mind map? They can be fun ways to brainstorm new ideas. Thanks to free online mind-mapping tools like bubbl.us, your brain can jump around to your heart’s content.

Make PowerPoint More Than a Snazzy Overhead Presentation
Scott Elias is tired of your PowerPoint presentations. Yeah, you heard me. You’re lucky that Elias isn’t the complaining type, though – he’s offering you some solutions.

Motion Mountain Presents a Free Physics Textbook
MotionMountain.org presents an all online .pdf textbook for your downloading pleasure. While the text is constantly being updated and is not quite complete, there are over 1400 pages of material available in six sections.

Understand Your Local Election
Former high school math teacher Lee Creighton presents a detailed breakdown of his local government’s recent “instant runoff” elections. This thoughtful, thorough blog post could be the foundation of an integrated math/social studies lesson plan.

See a Comet from Your Own Backyard
If you’re looking for a way to make the distant abstractions of science more real for your students, consider suggesting they take a look at Comet Holmes. This cosmic traveler will continue on a curved path through the constellation Perseus through March.

Humans are inexorably drawn to the mysteries of space. Maybe it is the everyday experience of being able to walk outside and see constellations and shooting stars. Maybe it is the popularity of science fiction films and books that promise of galaxies far, far away. Maybe it’s that after first learning of Galileo in school, students can dream of discovering their own planets and solar systems. Whatever the reason, space has always been an intriguing topic for both young and old.

What if we were able to turn our telescopes around and get a closer look at what is happening right below our feet? The folks at NASA have done just that with their Earth Observatory site. I don’t believe I have ever come across a resource that aggregates so much useful information in one easy-to-navigate tool. Teachers, head right for the Experiments tab and give your students interactive ways to study global warming and plant biomes around the world. If you love reading blogs (and I know you do!), check out the Expedition to Siberia blog that offers almost daily updates and pictures of this fascinating trip.

And for those of us who are reluctant to believe things we can’t see, you can watch images of global climate change that reinforce lessons we learn in the classroom.

This is a fascinating site. Go in and take a closer look at the Earth, not as the beautiful blue marble in space, but as the land beneath our feet. – DAVID BARGER

NASA Earth Observatory

Here’s a novel idea: teach kids about music they like to listen to.

In an age when music and art programs are being slashed from school budgets, music producer Quncy Jones and Steven Van Zandt of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band are leading the charge to revitalize school music programs with rock-and-roll.

Van Zandt is starting Little Steven’s Rock-and-Roll High School (editor’s note: that’s a very un-rock-and-roll name), a curriculum where students will learn about rock’s history and cultural impact.

“Rock-and-roll is a uniquely American art form,” Van Zandt told The Washington Post. “We receive emotional information as well as intellectual information from it.” The Post quotes Quincy Jones as saying, “Our schools have an obligation. The culture is the soul of a country, and they aren’t teaching the music which has helped mold the culture.”

Of course, this could all be a sinister plan from parents to get kids to stop listening to that infernal racket. If rebellious music like rock and hip-hop is taught in school, maybe it’ll lose it’s appeal. Personally, I think giving students more options than just band and choir would be a great way to increase kids’ appreciation for music. And that’s coming from a career trombonist in my high school band. -BILL FERRIS

Top Musicians Are Composing Own Curricula via The Washington Post

If you’re looking for a way to make the distant abstractions of science more real for your students, consider suggesting they take a look at Comet Holmes. This cosmic traveler burst into our relatively quiet earthly neighborhood with an unexpected brightening on October 24th, and will continue on a curved path through the constellation Perseus through March.

In late November it was plainly visible to the unaided eye even in bright urban skies. It has since dimmed to the point where it is probably no longer visible without binoculars, though it currently appears larger than the full moon in the night sky as a sort of faint fuzzball. This comet has a history of suddenly brightening, so it may again become visible without optical aid as it makes its way through Perseus over the next several months. You may want to acquaint yourself with the portions of the sky around the constellations Cassiopeia and Perseus. That way, you can look in that direction on clear evenings to see if it has flared up so that you can tell your students how to see it for themselves.

In spite of the lack of media attention given to Comet Holmes, plainly visible comets are relatively uncommon events in our neck of the celestial woods and are therefore worth sharing and talking about. If nothing else, the sudden appearance of a comet can give us a sense of what Galileo felt when he first realized that the heavens were not permanent and unchanging, and how this jarring notion helped give birth to modern science. They also give us pause to turn off the machinery, to get outside, to look outward and to contemplate (as our electricity-free ancestors did nearly every night) our place in the universe, which is not a bad way to spend an evening. -DAN KELO

See Comet Holmes Tonight! via Sky and Telescope
Comet Holmes via Wikipedia

There lives in the minds of many K-12 students a very clearly drawn Venn diagram. One circle holds all that is fun in the world, and the other circle holds all the work. As teachers, you’ve got to fill up that intersecting area. For every time a kid hears “no, you can’t play until you finish your homework,” you’ve got to counter with “today I brought my guitar to class, let’s learn vocab to the tunes of the Dead Kennedys.” (Shout-out to my tenth grade English teacher.)

At ReadWriteThink, you’ll find a veritable playground of materials at your disposal: tools that lead students through creating (among other things) acrostic poems, book covers, timelines, and yes Venn diagrams. There aren’t a lot of whistles and bells, most of these tools are not games, but they are interactive, and that’s what makes them so much more fun than their paper equivalents.

All of the tools are accompanied by at least one (usually numerous) lesson plan ideas. So for all you teachers who ascribe to the “spoon full of sugar” philosophy, ReadWriteThink has about a cup and a half of what you need. -MARIELLE PRINCE

ReadWriteThink

Witness the birth of a nation in bite-sized chunks. Famous Moments in Early American History is a collection of short presentations about…well, famous moments in early American History.

View the beginnings of the American Revolution in “The Shot Heard Around the World.” Or see what all the hubbub was about during Paul Revere’s famous ride in “Paul Revere, Messenger of the Revolution.” Each flash presentation contains several primary source images, including woodcuts, drawings and engravings.

Famous Moments in Early American History contains concise history lessons ideal for younger students first learning about American History. The videos also provide examples for students who want to play with PowerPoint or other presentation software for school projects. -BILL FERRIS

Famous Moments in Early American History

Photo Credit: Maulleigh on flickr.com.

If you have never really analyzed the process of language and how it works, you are probably not alone. From the “why didn’t I know this already?” drawer comes How Language Works: The Cognitive Science of Linguistics. The site is broken up like a text book, complete with chapters, subheadings and diagrams.

The material is laid out pretty clearly, and the chapters range in topic from word meanings to word forms. The text explores function and use in sentences and events. Authored by Mike Gasser, a cognitive science and computer science teacher from Indiana University, How Language Works is a great resource for teachers and students alike. You might just start to understand why we say the things we say, and why we don’t say the things we should. –JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

How Language Works

Does it bother you that when someone asks for that great PowerPoint presentation you use, you can’t e-mail it to them because your school e-mail account won’t let you send attachments larger than just a few kilobytes? Sure, you could toss it on a thumb drive and schlep on over to your colleague’s classroom… assuming she’s in the building. You could burn through your budget by burning the information to CD. Or, you could just use MediaFire, a file hosting service that doesn’t require registration and will let you upload files up to 100MB.

MediaFire will store your files for up to 7 days if you don’t register, so you’ll have to make sure to send the links to your content out pretty quickly, but it’s worth it to not have to provide your personal information to yet another site. That anonymity also makes it perfect for transferring student files, eliminating the time-honored excuse “The school system e-mail server ate my homework.” But beware- neither you nor your students should include any personal information in the file that you wouldn’t want shared. It’s great for that classroom PowerPoint or a zip file with a student’s project in HTML; it’s not suitable for report cards, address lists, or answer keys. -ROSS WHITE

MediaFire

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Aren’t elections awesome? In addition to getting kids excited about democracy, they can be a conduit to all kinds of projects. At one school, students held a mock election on voting machines running elections software built by computer science students. At another, students built an edible map of their town and looked at how local governmental policies could affect the town and, by extension, the food they were about to eat.

My pal, former high school math teacher Lee Creighton, has got the adult in me excited with a detailed breakdown of his local government’s recent “instant runoff” elections. In his look at how elections work, he discusses the merits of the simple majority, possible flaws in how the winner of the Heisman Trophy is selected, and how early exit polls can sway the results of an election when voters decide they don’t want to “waste their vote.” This thoughtful, thorough blog post could be the foundation of your next integrated math/social studies lesson plan, as you walk students through a variety of election types and have them work out the results. -ROSS WHITE

Cary’s Instant Runoff Elections: Fair?

photo by rochelle, et. al.

Ever used a mind map? They can be fun ways to brainstorm new ideas. Their best feature is they’re designed to mimic the way the human mind works – that is, jumping from one idea to another. Thanks to free online mind-mapping tools like bubbl.us, your brain can jump around to your heart’s content.

Bubbl.us makes mind mapping easy and interactive, which is vital to brainstorming – a slow or clunky interface could lead to stifled creativity or lost ideas. But bubbl.us makes adding new ideas as simple as hitting your Tab and Enter keys.

Best of all, you can collaborate online by sharing your bubbl.us mind map with others, or save it as an image and email it to colleagues. In your classroom, bubbl.us is an ideal way to brainstorm class projects, fundraising ideas, field trip plans, or simply as an excuse to get students to work together. -BILL FERRIS

bubbl.us