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I sometimes find myself planning lessons, looking for a quick video clip to show my students. A short video is often an effective way to introduce, extend, or clarify  information that I’m teaching. I start to think about my sources…the library? Nope, videos are too long and many are too old…YouTube? Nope, I don’t want to search for DNA and find a band (though YouTubeEDU is fixing this issue). Hmm…where else can I go? Well, if I am teaching DNA or Genetics, I can mosey on over to the Secrets of the Sequence website.

This is a site where you can find about 50 short videos related to current DNA and genetics research.  It is created and maintained by Virginia Commonwealth University.  The topics range from a video about the genetic links of alcoholism to cloning champion trees.  You will find many videos that illustrate lots of applications of DNA science, and more importantly, they are interesting and engaging.  When you click on a video, there are two options for viewing.  You can stream it right from the site, or you can download it to your computer.  Additionally, there are national standards-aligned lesson plans for each video available in both PDF and Word format.  The lessons guide you through the video, indicating stopping points for class discussion, as well as disussion questions, and a related lab or activity for after the video.

Eureka!,  I think as I’m finishing the preparation for my brilliant lesson.  I’ve found a website that gives me not only those short videos I want, but some ideas on how to use them if I’m really stuck for planning.  I hope you mosey on over and find inspiration as well. – REBECCAH HAINES

Secrets of the Sequence

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Now that ScreenToaster has rolled out a truckload of features for free, older screencasting apps are doing what they can to keep up. Screencast-o-Matic was the first screencaster we wrote about on Instructify, and they’ve added a bevy of bells and whistles to work their way back into our hearts. Now you can upload your screencast straight to YouTube and choose between more capture sizes.

The best new features, though, are the improved audio and video quality, and the ability to export your screencast to Windows Media Player (AVI), Quicktime (MOV) and Flash (FLV) formats (no exporting in sight for RealPlayer, which I can only hope the folks at Real take as a hint and just bury their player already). That means you can download your screencast and edit it later, so if you flubbed your lines and want to overdub new audio for your electronic sub plan, or you want to add credits or a title screen to a demonstration, you can do so with the video-editing software you probably already have on your computer.

As companies keep adding features to their screencasting apps, I have a hunch these tools won’t remain free forever. For the time being, though, you can create some high-quality screencasts without spending a cent. -BILL FERRIS

Screencast-o-Matic

Tutorial showcasing new features

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Before Hannah Montana, before the Wiggles, before the Backyardigans and other execrable music for the younger set came the great children’s records of the 1940s and 1950s. Now that I’ve reached the age where I believe everything older is automatically better, I’m considering turning my own kids onto some of these classics from a bygone age.

Kiddie Records Weekly plays vintage music for tots from the golden age of children’s music. You can download these records, or listen to them in streaming audio. When they were originally released, several of these records came with a read-along storybook. Kiddie Records Weekly provides digital versions of these books, allowing you to follow along just as your parents (or grandparents) might have. The album covers are a treat as well, featuring colorful illustrations, classic childhood characters, and the long-lost art of cursive writing. So if you’d like a change of pace from another Dora the Explorer sing along, let your elementary students try out something from Kiddie Records Weekly. -BILL FERRIS

Kiddie Records Weekly

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Planning lessons that will keep a class engaged and motivated takes enough time on its own without adding all the other things teachers have to contend with like parent meetings and conferences. Here are some time-saving tips that teachers can use to make the most of their precious free time. Their simplicity may surprise you.

Make a map of your agenda

Perhaps the best way to start organizing your life to maximize your time is to have some sort of daily planner or scheduler that outlines your responsibilities. This may sound like remedial stuff here, but when it comes to balancing your free time and making sure you use it efficiently, a planner is an indispensable tool.

So many options

Nowadays we don’t have to carry around those bulky leather folders with the huge notebook-sized pages our parents lugged around. This is the digital age, and teachers have myriad choices to help keep themselves organized. Most PDAs have a calendar function, as do many cell phones. Many have the ability to set alarms and notices that will remind you of important upcoming events. Take advantage of all the technology you have at your fingertips.

Whatever the avenue you choose, the most important thing is that you put in the effort and sit down regularly to make a schedule. Over time you’ll find that this planning will become second nature. There is no bigger time thief than moving forward without a plan.

Schedule time in for yourself as well, since decompressing from the rigors of school is just as important as anything else, so that you can bring your best teaching ability to your students.

Be a neat freak

The temptation to keep every single scrap of paper and materials can at times be overwhelming. Avoid it at all costs. Make your community happy by recycling as much of that wasted paper as you can. As for other class materials that have to be kept, establish a workable file system so your classroom materials are easy to find at a moment’s notice.

Stay organized in the classroom as well

Keeping your desk neat and tidy isn’t the only way to make the most of your time. What about all those papers and handouts for the class? Encourage your students to polish their organization skills as well by requiring them to keep tabs on their own assignments.

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. You’ll be doing both of you a favor by encouraging better organizational skills.

Making the most of your time as a teacher can be difficult, but when it comes to organization, five seconds of pre-planning can save you hours of searching in the long run. -KATIE WILSON

This post was contributed by Katie Wilson, who writes about the universities online. She welcomes your feedback at KatieWilson06 at gmail.com

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It’s the closeout sale! Only a few days left! Rock-bottom prices! Okay, just kidding. Poetry will still be available May 1, all year even. It’s timeless and often available for free. But hey, who doesn’t work better on a deadline? So let’s just pretend, as of May 1, poems are off the market and you need a quick, quality poetry resource to share with your students NOW. Enter: Poems Out Loud. This site is a new project by ex-laureate Robert Pinsky. I guess the good ones never quit — it’s been over a decade since Pinsky started work on the Favorite Poem Project, and he continues the mission admirably.

At poemsoutloud.net you will find, no surprise here, audio recordings of well-regarded contemporary poets reading their own and others’ work. Pinsky has always posited that love for a poem has to come before analysis, and the commentary and interviews on the site’s blog seem to be driven by that theory — focusing on the emotions surrounding reading (or writing) certain poems. I’m sure Pinsky would be tickled to see blog comments coming from students with their own reactions. But remember…this offer ends soon! -MARIELLE PRINCE

Poems Out Loud

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My high-school buddy Umar was obsessed by the number 137. For reasons I didn’t understand, it’s a very magical number for physicists (if anything can be magical for men of science). Now that I’m grown, I have a (slightly) better understanding of 137 thanks to Sixty Symbols, a site that explains the meaning behind a bunch of (that is, 60) scientific symbols. Those symbols include “α,” the fine structure constant, which kinda relates to 137 somehow (hey, I’m not a scientist).

Sixty Symbols features short YouTube videos of physicists and astronomers just chatting about the meaning behind various symbols. It makes for good background information on why certain symbols mean what they do, and I always enjoy watching people talk about something that interests them. Your physics students may enjoy learning about a few of the symbols and terms that show up in their homework, too. Sixty Symbols might even inspire some of them to learn more about 137. If they do, send them my way so they can explain it to me. -BILL FERRIS

Sixty Symbols

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PaperBackSwap lets you exchange any book you own for one of the millions of books other users are offering. Swapping is simple. Take any book (paperback, hardback, or audio) you’re ready to part with and post it to your virtual library. Any time another user requests a book from your library, simply send it using labels printable from the website and pay only postage (about $2.40 via media mail).

Once the book is received, you earn a credit. Use your credits to request new books and receive them in the mail about two weeks later, at NO CHARGE TO YOU! It’s a fun and cheap way to replace old books you’ve read with new ones. -JASON DON FORSYTHE

PaperBackSwap

If you’re a PBWiki user, you’ve probably gotten an email that the venerable and easy-to-use wiki app is changing its name. Why they’d want to do such a thing is beyond me — few things have as many positive connotations as peanut butter, in my opinion.

Nevertheless, changes they shall make. That means they have to dump all their old merch, such as PBWiki T-shirts. If you’d like one of these for free, all you have to do is guess PBWiki’s new name. Guess correctly — or even come up with a guess that’s interesting or clever — and you get a free shirt.

Maybe this is just a way to offload old duds, or a desperate attempt to crowdsource their new moniker. Whatever. The first thing I learned in college was to never pass up a free T-shirt. So send in your guesses, and enjoy the new addition to your wardrobe. -BILL FERRIS

Official Announcement – We’re changing our name! via The Daily Peanut (official PBwiki blog)

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Free summer agriculture workshops
If free sounds good to you, then you need to check out one of the North Carolina Ag in the Classroom workshops being offered this July at the Sheraton Imperial in Durham, North Carolina.

Celebrate DNA Day 2009 on April 24
Though the official DNA Day is April 25,  this year the National Human Genome Research Institute will offer activities on April 24, 2009 to accommodate classroom schedules.

Reverse-search images with TinEye
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).

Make ancient civilizations interactive at the British Museum
Ancient Civilization from the British Museum is a beautifully done interactive site looking at different civilizations from China to America, and everything in between (including Ancient Africa south of Egypt).

And they’re off! If you forgot to place your wager on this year’s Great Turtle Race from National Geographic, you can still follow along as 11 leatherback sea turtles make their way from Canada to the warm waters of the Caribbean.

The Great Turtle Race raises public awareness of leatherback turtle migration, plus threats to the creature’s survival, through the magic of sports. The site has lots of nifty race stats, such as how many hour-long dives each turtle makes. You can cheer on your favorite turtle, and elect to receive daily updates on how it’s doing in the field.

The site is more than just race-themed environmentalism, however. It also has great turtle information, like the fact that leatherback turtles dive as deep as whales do, feasting on jellyfish and other jelly creatures they encounter. You and your students can play a turtle race game, piloting your own turtle as you try to eat jellyfish and avoid seaweed and garbage.  Or test your turtle knowledge with an online quiz. Everything you wanted to know about sea turtles, plus the stuff you didn’t know you wanted to know, you can find it here.

In keeping with the racing theme, the turtles all have ridiculous names right out of the Kentucky Derby like Nightswimmer and Lindblad the Explorer. Which reminds me, if you had any action on Backspacer, get ready to cash in. -BILL FERRIS

The Great Turtle Race

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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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Ancient Civilization from the British Museum is a beautifully done interactive site looking at different civilizations from China to America, and everything in between (including Ancient Africa south of Egypt).

The material is presented as six themes covering religion, technology, trade, writing, building and cities. Each section has an overview write-up, then students can see examples by picking a highlighted area from the map. The sub-sections include illustrations and examples so when they talk about pyramids, for example, they can a explore an interactive model of a pyramid, with a more detailed map of Ancient Egypt to provide background.

In addition, if students click on the clock at the bottom of the screen, a time line will appear. Clicking on the globe at the bottom brings up all the civilizations covered on the site.

It’s a really robust site with great information in nice digestible bites for kids or adults who want something more engaging a dusty old book to learn from. -ALICE MERCER

Ancient Civilization from the British Museum

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Photo credit: David Paul Ohmer on Flickr.

Wikipedia is just something we use and we know, so there’s no need to really know where it comes from. It is just internet magic. Okay, so you really must know more about Wikipedia? Are you ready for things to get really meta-abstract? Wikipedia has an entry on wikis, an About page for their site and a Wikipedia page for Wikipedia! Does your brain feel like Swiss cheese yet?

That’s probably too much info jamming you up right now. That was my point — I inflict some information overload, then while you’ve vulnerable to suggestion I hit you with the link I really want you to visit. Check out this tutorial from North Carolina State University Libraries. In under 6 minutes “Wikipedia: Beneath the Surface” offers up a great overview on this collaborative community.

What I found really engaging about this video was its focus on the discussion and history tabs. Many readers might just read the article on their subject, gather whatever info they want to know and they’re on their merry way. The discussion and history really help give the reader insight to the zeitgeist of an issue, such as how some people prefer modern pulsating nasal irrigation devices over traditional neti pots. Really. You might also explore issues like Wikiality, vandalism and misinformation.

Wikipedia has the dubious distinction of being the place students go when taking certain liberties for writing papers. The Wikipedia community can also be a place to help illustrate proper citation and research — irony completed. Your students might soon be on their way to reading between the lines in Wikipedia articles. -NICK YINGLING

Wikipedia: Beneath the Surface

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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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Are you tired of the same old boring state reports? Really, how much thought is involved in looking up the state bird of California (the California Quail — yawn). Would you like students to learn something new and interesting about the states? Explore the States on the Library of Congress’ America’s Story website could be just the answer to that need. Here are some examples of the great stories you’ll find:

1. Old Spanish Days Festival in Santa Barbara, California talks about a local festival, but manages to fit in some great information about the various countries that have controlled California since it first had that name.
2. The Circus Parade shares this tradition from the Circus World Museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
3. The Seed Spititng Contest at the Chiefland Watermelon Festival in Florida.

Change up your state report routine and add some spice to your students studies of other states at America’s Story. -ALICE MERCER

America’s Story: Explore the States

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Photo credit: Marxchivist on Flickr.