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World history, revolutionized
WorldHistory is a new tool, that, when launched publicly, will offer you and your students interactive maps in which you can view historical content by time, place, event or person.

Put on your 3D glasses for BumpTop
If your desktop is like mine, your icons are pretty much all over the screen — program icons, Word docs, and other junk. Different projects and priorities are grouped together. In boring old 2D, this is just an eye sore. BumpTop puts that mess into 3D and throws in some physics for your desktop objects. The end result is a very manageable mess.

I dare you to plant these in your garden: the world’s weirdest plants
Have a look at the Rafflesia arnoldii, the “corpse flower.” The largest flower on earth, it grows as a parasite within the vines of another plant. Also, don’t expect to find its fragrance in a perfume bottle, unless you want to smell like a George Romero movie.

Keep track of presidential campaign promises with the Obameter
After having compiled a list of 500 campaign promises made by President Obama, PolitiFact is keeping track of each promise’s progress.

Free documentaries for your classroom with Snagfilms
My favorite feature of the site is the ability to create my own “virtual movie theater.” You can add up to five films, then embed your movie theater into any site.

At one point in time, I knew all 50 U.S. states and their capitals. I am confident I could still name a majority of them, too. What’s more is that at one point I also knew all the countries and their capitals. I could name even fewer of these now. Nonetheless, it was all the result of memorization techniques in order to regurgitate the information for a test (sorry, Mrs. Little) and now I couldn’t identify Chad from Libya on a map if you paid me. (I know, I am a total dummy, but let’s not focus on me here.)

So along comes Maps of World and its games to show me exactly what kind of dummy I am. This is a great resource for geography students and teachers to take advantage of in order to improve your identification of the world’s many countries and cities. The site boasts having high quality maps of just about anywhere, but it was, of course, the games that caught my attention. Especially the one that asks you to Know Your World. How hard could it be, right?

Mind numbingly difficult, that’s how hard. This game gives you 10 seconds to remember as many different countries and cities on a map as you can, then it takes away the text and leaves you with a bank map. The game prompts you with the various locations, which you must then locate using a cursor and your quick memorization wits. If you are a dummy like me, you’ll get to about round four before your brain explodes. Either way, the game is a fun way to improve your geography skills or for your students to study for an upcoming test. There are other games on the site, though, so feel free to peruse until you find something your speed. Too bad “Click on the Map” isn’t a game.  -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Know Your World on Maps of World

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It’s a big universe out there, full of stars, planets, galaxies, and something called dark matter (a concept that I still can’t quite grasp). The universe of children’s books is pretty big too, and it contains a similarly dazzling array of information, perspectives, and lessons for future generations.

BigUniverse.com is an online collection of illustrated children’s books, featuring electronic editions of commercially published stories, as well as user-submitted content. The books are searchable and are also organized according to subject matter, language, and age group. Subjects include everything a young mind could imagine, from fairy tales to study aids. You can read books created by other users for free, as well as selections from published books. However, if you want to read any of the published books from start to finish, you’ll have to purchase a membership, which is reasonably priced (and even more reasonably priced for schools and libraries). Becoming a member also helps you connect with other members, allowing you to share books and receive recommendations, which you can then store on your own virtual bookshelf.

The creators of BigUniverse.com intend “to use children’s books online as a way to connect the next generation — our children — and help them look past the differences between our various cultures and instead focus on our similarities, so we can come together to explore our big universe.” Teachers everywhere need only lead the way. –JIMI RADABAUGH

BigUniverse.com

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Photo credit: Pink Sherbet Photography on Flickr

I am a big fan of using video in the classroom to enhance a lesson. I’m not referring to using an hour long movie to replace my lesson for that day, but adding a 4 minute clip here and a 2 minute clip there can be the difference between kids falling asleep and keeping them engaged. Last year, I used a clip from The Simpsons to demonstrate how the internet can be used. The students loved the video and they understood the concept. It was very powerful.

There is no shortage of video available online. The key is finding something that is going to engage your students yet still be appropriate. I came across a post at the Free Technology for Teachers blog about using Nova in the classroom. The post mentions a site named Snagfilms.

In their own words:

SnagFilms is committed to finding the world‘s most compelling documentaries, whether from established heavyweights or first-time filmmakers, and making them available to the wide audience these titles deserve.
SnagFilms.com is a website where you can watch full-length documentary films for free, but we’re also a platform that lets you “snag” a film and put it anywhere on the web. With a library of nearly 450 510 films, and rapidly growing, you’re bound to find films that resonate with your interests. We make it easy for you to find a film that shines a light on a cause you care about. You can then open a virtual movie theater on any web site, so any one can watch your favorite SnagFilms for free.

SnagFilms can be summed up in four words: Find. Watch. Snag. Support.

My favorite feature of the site is the ability to create my own “virtual movie theater.” You can add up to five films, then embed your movie theater into any site. I’ve embedded my virtual movie theater here.

You can also embed individual films. The video quality is excellent and everything offered is free (which is always good).

Snagfilms

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Last year, before the presidential election, we first featured Politifact. I even worked in a Flavor Flav reference. But that was months ago, the election is over and I hate reading anything I wrote that’s more than three weeks old.  To quote so many ex-girlfriends, “I’ve moved on.”

Still, we wouldn’t like to see all that youthful energy your students had for politics die down. Neither would the folks over at PolitiFact — which is why, I’m guessing, they started the Obameter.  After having compiled a list of 500 campaign promises made by President Obama, PolitiFact is keeping track of each promise’s progress.

Readers can sort by a handful of subjects and can sort promises by rating. Not surprisingly, we can see that the overwhelming majority still fall into the No Action category. President Obama has been in office barely a week, so I wouldn’t view that number too pessimistically right now (This is still politics, though, so maintain some degree of pessimism: introduce students to the expression, “the speed of government”).

Before the election, I urged that students double-check their fact-checking. Now, sticking with my theme of hyphenated words that involve the word “check,” I’d encourage students to check-in and check-up on what’s being done by this new administration. Political re-engagement! Its not just for every four years! -NICK YINGLING

The Obameter: Tracking Obama’s Campaign Promises via PolitiFact

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Congratulations to Lance Bledsoe for winning the Instructify Comments Contest. He won with this contribution to Jerry Swiatek’s post, Professional development is just a “tweet” away:

“…Also, remember that you can use Twitter’s own search tool ( http://search.twitter.com/advanced ) to find other teachers in your geographic area who are on Twitter. For example, you can find all the tweets that contain the word “teacher” from people within 15 miles of Raleigh, NC.”

Thanks to Lance for showing this to all the Twittering teachers out there. Thanks to everyone for reading this blog, and we hope you all will continue to comment on Instructify. -BILL FERRIS

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Photo credit: snooze on Flickr

If you’re new to the site and are wondering why your snappy, insightful comment didn’t show up after you submitted it, don’t worry, we didn’t delete it. Instructify moderates comments for all first-time posters. This is an educational site, after all. Nothing will trigger your school’s firewall faster than a bunch of spam slipping through. We’ll try to approve comments quickly, though it’ll probably happen faster during business hours. Just don’t panic if you submit your comment and don’t see it appear right away.

The good news: once you’ve been approved, we’ll remember your email address and allow future comments without moderation.

So drop us a line. We’d love to hear from you.

Taking nothing away from the ferns, flowers and firs in your locale, but consider studying something more exotic. Bogleech.com presents Five of the World’s Weirdest Plants. It’s not just a list of obscure carnivorous plants –  bird or insect feces plays a big part of in the diets of Nepenthes lowii and the Roridula, respectively. If you’re not totally disgusted yet, have a look at the Rafflesia arnoldii (pictured), the “corpse flower.” The largest flower on earth, it grows as a parasite within the vines of another plant. Also, don’t expect to find its fragrance in a perfume bottle, unless you want to smell like a George Romero movie.

The middle of winter is a tough time to study plants, so you’ll have to go online anyway if you want your students to look at flora. Okay, so you could buy a potted plant instead, but do you really think you’ll find any plants as interesting as these weirdos? Then again, after you take a look at them, maybe that’s not such a bad thing. -BILL FERRIS

Five of the World’s Weirdest Plants via Bogleech.com

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A spoonful of podcasting helps the science go down. Yes, that’s a terrible lead sentence, but when a site has a name like Bytesize Science, how could I not think of utensil-sized portions? Or Mary Poppins? Bytesize Science delivers hot new scientific developments via their series of two- to three-minute podcasts. Your students can learn about paper-thin stereo speakers, underwater camouflage, or how chemists have improved artificial turf. You can download select episodes in Spanish as well, which would be helpful for some of your ESL students. To make things even easier, you can subscribe to Bytesize Science in iTunes or via RSS feed, so you can download each episode automatically. And since each episode is about the length of your average pop song, your students can learn intriguing scientific facts without expending a huge amount of time. Bite-sized indeed. -BILL FERRIS

Bytesize Science

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Do you ever wonder where the stuff you throw away winds up? Does it go through the transformative reincarnation process of recycling, emerging as a shiny new aluminum can or sheet of paper, or does it get unceremoniously tossed into the dump? For most of us, waste simply goes “away,” which is a nice way of saying, “I’d rather not think about it anymore.”

Project Learning Tree believes it’s a good idea for us to think about what happens to the stuff we throw out. That’s why they’re holding a workshop, Where is “away”?, February 16 and 17 in Elizabeth City, NC. This municipal solid waste workshop will cover multiple aspects of solid waste in recycling. Attendees can earn CEU credit, as well as a $75 stipend. This workshop is a good opportunity to learn material about recycling that you can incorporate into your class.

To sign up, just fill out this application. While you can mail or fax your application, I recommend emailing it — that way, you won’t have to wonder whether your application gets recycled or thrown away. -BILL FERRIS

Where is “away”? A Municipal Solid Waste workshop featuring Project Learning Tree

Photo credit: Kaptain Kobold on Flickr

Last week, I really felt like I was truly connected, just surfing along on the web’s many superhighway tubes. I cruised over to TED and watched a video of Anand Agarawala presenting the BumpTop desktop. Just as my web surfing was getting so pitted and rad, I noticed that this presentation was from way back in 2007. It was kind of a bummer, dude. Not gnarly. Other surfer slang.

But who cares? Even if it was from 2007, the idea is still very new and completely unique. This clever desktop interface, which Agarawala co-created, is still in private beta testing, so it hasn’t even hit the streets yet. That’s newer than new.

If your desktop is like mine, your icons are pretty much all over the screen — program icons, Word docs, and other junk. Different projects and priorities are grouped together. In boring old 2D, this is just an eye sore. If you show it to a baby, that baby’s natural instinct will be to start crying. BumpTop puts that mess into 3D and throws in some physics for your desktop objects. The end result is a very manageable mess.

Granted, Instructify strives to provide you with an actual tool you can start using now and I don’t like that we’ll need to wait. At least BumpTop is on your radar now. You can try signing up for a private beta invite by shooting them an email at info[at]bumptop.com and let them know that you’re an educator who could give some unique feedback. That might grease the wheels in your favor. I wanna hear some success stories you have about getting into that super cool kids club beta group! — NICK YINGLING

BumpTop

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Someday when computers are animatronic robot pals, all you’ll need to say to them is “LogMeIn, Hamachi.” Well, provided your robopal is named Hamachi.

First off, if you enjoy Instructify, you probably already know of a few other education blogs out there, but I found a few more that will make a nice addition to your RSS or Google Reader. Here is a handful, in no particular order.

Adventures in Educational Blogging – Written by Susan Sedro, who describes her blog as “A modest attempt at discovering if social technologies such as blogs and wikis can make teaching and learning more relevant and effective.” A modest attempt, maybe, but Sedro has some fun musings on the ways Web 2.0 is a valuable tool in our schools. A former 5th grade teacher and now Singaporean ex-pat, Sedro’s humor and knowledge come through in her writing. In a recent post, she muses: As you could predict, many students forgot to complete step 8. Fortunately, most of them did remember to paste the photo name and URL onto the photo sources form, so it was easy to locate the photo again and save it to their computer. Check out Adventures in Educational Blogging for a fun and easy-to-relate-to series of posts by someone who gets it.

2 Cents Worth – David Warlick, author of Raw Materials for the Mind: A Teacher’s Guide to Digital Literacy, Classroom Blogging, and creator of Citation Machine, gives his 2 cents on this blog for educators and those interested in literacy in a rapidly changing world. Warlick is transparent and open about his opinions and ideas, which makes him a compelling read and someone to keep on your radar. He’s got some interesting theories, and blogs about his travels as a speaker and classroom technology advocate. He also has a podcast worth a listen called Connect Learning.

Is Our Children Learning? – Yep, you read that right, it isn’t a typo. The title of this Bronx teacher’s blog is taken from a quote of our not-for-long president Georgie W, back in ’00 “The question is rarely asked: Is our children learning?”  This blog is less heavy handed in theory and practice, but has some great musings from the day-to-day life of a teacher “Ruben” and his experience in the NYC school system. Here’s a tidbit to give you an idea of Ruben’s big-city teaching life: Apparently, her friends told her they saw a spirit in the bathroom and she was scared that she could die. When she told her mom about it, her mom told her she had seen a spirit before too. How exactly do you respond to something like this?

High Techpectations – Another cleverly named teacher blog, this one is also about technology in the classroom and beyond, but is voiced by Lucy Gray, who serves as the lead technology coach at the University of Chicago Urban Education Institute. Lucy’s blog is full of great resources and insights, including a peek into her own life as a mother of two. She’s raising her own kids in a Web 2.0 world, and seems to have a grasp on technology as it pertains to education. She’s also got a great web presence on various social media sites from Twitter to Digg, you can find her by the name elemenous.

DetentionSlip – This blog is dedicated to news on the education forefront, because it’s important to know what’s going on in schools other than your own. Presented with a semi-snarky and often humorous voice, this blog is a great resource for gathering education information no matter how strange or unlikely it seems. This is a blog more for in-the-know teachers and parents though, so it might be best to keep your younger students from reading some of it. The pictures accompanying the often-ridiculous posts will keep you cracking up, though.  -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Photo credit: NightRPStar on Flickr

Two things I don’t particularly enjoy: geography and quizzes. I have a horrible sense of direction, and who really enjoys quizzes, anyway? Yet somehow I love the San Francisco Chronicle’s Annual Geography Quiz. It’s eerily similar to last year’s quiz in that the questions are fun, and in the words of quiz-creator John Flinn, it is, “a way for me to highlight some fun facts I stumbled upon in 2008, usually while in the process of looking up something else.”

This quiz might be a fun activity for your students. If nothing else, they’ll learn a lot of cool trivia about the world. You never know when you might need to know whether Mount Everest is taller than the Mariana Trench is deep, or what nation Zanzibar belongs to. -BILL FERRIS

2008 S.F. Chronicle Geography Quiz

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Photo credit: -Fearless-!- on Flickr

List of Educational Web 2.0 Apps to Jumpstart Your Productivity – From DiplomaGuide.com comes this list of 25 Web 2.0 tools you can use to get more productive. The 25 items are divided into categories including Note Taking, Organization and Homework, so these apps all have students in mind. You’ll find some familiars here, like Google Docs and Facebook, but there are also some neat and simple tools like The Awesome Highlighter, which lets you highlight text on webpages.

10 Things You Shouldn’t Buy New – We’re all feeling the crunch these days, and tightening our belts doesn’t just mean buying the generic brand of Ramen noodles. From MSN Money comes a list of 10 things you shouldn’t buy new, whether it seems like a deal or not. Books, toys and jewelry are all on this list. Makes sense to me.

5 Ways to Avoid Change in 2009 – Okay, so you and I both probably said “whaaattt?” when we read the title of this post, but not to worry, this LifeHack article is a tongue-in-cheek list of ways you can fall victim to being stuck in your old and unproductive, unchallenging ways. ’09 seems to be a time when a lot of people are excited for something new, so get on the boat and figure out some things you might be doing to anchor yourself down.

100 Best DIY Sites on the Web – Here’s a list of some of the best do-it-yourself sites out there, courtesy of Bootstrapper. They’ve got everything from Arts & Crafts to Tech to the ever popular Lifehacking. This list has some good DIY tools and tips available, all amidst some of the sites you might already be enjoying, such as 43 Folders or Makezine. Who knows what fun class projects you might be able to find in this mega-list? -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Photo credit: Stewf on Flickr

I’ve never been particularly great at World History. In school, I made my way through the dates and maps in my history books, but it never really came together for me in a way I could visualize in my own head. But I also didn’t have the wonders of the internet at my fingertips; luckily, your students do!

WorldHistory is a new tool, that, when launched publicly, will offer you and your students interactive maps in which you can view historical content by time, place, event or person. Just select a location and visually see all the historical events that took place there or just the events from a certain date range; or, track the events a certain historical figure was involved in. You’ll also be able to add your own genealogical information (e.g. a great grandfather who fought in a famous battle), which could be a cool, interactive way to engage your students in history lessons.

History content that is non-linear and interactive? It’s a revolutionary concept! Since it’s currently in beta testing and not immediately open to the public — you have to submit your e-mail address for an invite — you can view their demo videos to get a glance of the features and information WorldHistory will offer. -LAUREN FROHNE

WorldHistory

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Image credit: TechCrunch.