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Discover a treasure trove of primary sources at the World Digital Library
The World Digital Library provides access to high-quality digital scans of primary source materials from all over the world.

Tiny particles, big knowledge: The Particle Adventure
The Particle Adventure takes visitors on a tour of a world only seen through powerful microscopes — or in the case of dark matter, not at all.

Readability makes the web more readable
If you spend any measurable amount of time on ad-ridden, font-challenged, or kaleidoscope-colored sites, you may be interested in Readability — a browser bookmarklet that reformats the web.

“Xtra” easy animation with Xtranormal’s Text-to-movie
Have you ever wanted to make your own animated movie? With Xtranormal’s Text-to-movie website, you can create your own animated flick.

If the closest your students have been to the White House is Google Maps, consider taking a virtual field trip via The White House Museum. You can look at floor plans, read detailed descriptions of the various floors and rooms, discover what goes on in each section of the White House, and learn about the history of the executive mansion. The tour covers everything from 3D models of the Oval Office to the storied history of the White House bowling alley.

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With May comes commencement, and with commencement comes new teachers. Armed with crisp diplomas, a government-issued teaching certificate, and big plans for September, it’s always good to have some resources for that first job. Scholastic’s New Teacher Zone should be bookmarked by newly minted teachers as well as veterans.

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BY REBECCAH HAINES

Have you ever wanted to make your own animated movie? The script, the soundtrack, the camera angles – if it were all up to you, you’d do an awesome job — probably better than Steven Spielberg, right? Well, move over Steve-o because with Xtranormal’s Text-to-movie website, you can create your own animated flick. Okay, so with the free version of Text-to-movie, your animated features probably won’t win an Oscar, but that doesn’t mean this product isn’t useful in the classroom. With a few simple steps, you or your students can create a movie. (more…)

Here at Instructify, we’ve done our best to provide you with a reading experience that is easy on the eyes.  Unfortunately, not all sites share our dedication to keeping you headache-free.  If you spend any measurable amount of time on ad-ridden, font-challenged, or kaleidoscope-colored sites, you may be interested in Readability — a browser bookmarklet that reformats the web. (The creators at the arc90 lab define this newfangled term as “a bookmark on steroids.”)

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Check out these upcoming educational grants, as listed on Grant Wrangler.

Samsung Focus on Learning Grant Program — Deadline: June 15
Need a Samsung 850DX document camera? Samsung is giving away 50 of them to educators who can demonstrate a need for them.

Universe Adventure Student Video Contest — Deadline: June 15
The Berkley Center for Cosmological Physics and the Honeywell Corporation will give $1,500 in money and new equipment to the students who can create a YouTube video that “demonstrates one of the key fundamental scientific principles or physical laws that governs cosmology or astrophysics in the universe.”

Thomson Gale TEAMS Award –Deadline: June 15
Thomson Gale and the Library Media Connection will award $2,500 cash to three K-12 public or private school teachers who have collaborated with media specialists in the past school year.

New Science Teacher Academy — Deadline: June 30
Second- and third-year science teachers can become a fellow at the New Science Teacher Academy for one year by winning this grant from the National Science Teacher Association.

Coca-Cola Foundation Education Grants –Deadline: Rolling
Coke will support all kinds of educational causes, including dropout prevention, maintaining water quality, recycling and maintaining access to education programs. Plus there’s no deadline. Take a look at their application guidelines and see what you can propose. -BILL FERRIS

I have sincerely enjoyed my time here at Instructify, writing up my very smug and minimalist posts. I’m tired of my vast talents with wordery going unrecognized and I’m leaving. I quit! I’ll see you jerks never!

[Picks up newspaper. Spit take.]

Okay, um, hey, so it looks like the job market out there isn’t quite ready for me. I really need to pay closer attention to current events. About what I said before… I was just caught up in the moment, okay? You’ll need to excuse me; the urge to quit a job with some pizazz is pretty intoxicating.

The Tough Summer Job Market is a great posting by the Free Technology for Teachers blog. With graduation right around the corner, a lot of your soon-to-be-former students will find this information helpful. (more…)

When I first clicked on The Particle Adventure, I expected one of those sci-fi adventures where a group of scientists, one of whom is a beautiful woman, get shrunk to microscopic size to face the perils of the subatomic world.

It’s nothing like that. At all.

While it may not be the harrowing  journey I hoped for, The Particle Adventure does take visitors on a tour of a world only seen through powerful microscopes — or in the case of dark matter, not at all. You can learn about the basic building blocks of matter like quarks and neutrinos, as well as theoretical stuff. Students can also learn what keeps all these tiny marbles from rolling all over the place.

If you like what you see, you can order charts, posters and other educational materials. And if your students don’t recognize any of the terms on the site, a handy glossary will clue them in.

The Particle Adventure also talks about how scientists experiment with particles, including but not limited to particle accelerators and the Large Hadron Collider. I don’t know about you, but I find acceleration and collisions inherently interesting, even when it happens at a subatomic level. If I can’t have a group of tiny scientists shooting lasers as bacteria, at least I can have a few crashes. -BILL FERRIS

The Particle Adventure

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They Deafened Me with Science: The Element Song Returns

See the periodic table in context at WebElements

The early buzz about the world wide web was that it would throw open the floodgates of the world’s accumulated knowledge, creating a window into the cultures of the most far-flung places on earth. We instead got lolcats, pop-up ads, and meaningless quizzes about which superhero you are.

Fortunately, some wise folks had an eye on that original idyllic vision all along, and those folks now bring us the World Digital Library. A project of the Library of Congress and UNESCO, the site provides access to high-quality digital scans of primary source materials from all over the world.

These cultural treasures include maps, photographs, manuscripts, audio and video recordings and more, and there’s at least one item from every UNESCO member country. The WDL’s interface is phenomenal, offering beautiful, high-resolution scans with incredible zooming capability. Check out this 18th century Japanese woodblock print; you can zoom in close enough to see individual paper fibers.

The site is also exceptionally easy to navigate — perhaps dangerously so, if you like looking at pretty pictures and are prone to losing track of time. You can browse by place, time, topic, type of item, or contributing institution, and the site is navigable in seven different languages — Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

The possibilities for using the WDL in the classroom are nearly endless: Social studies teachers, obviously, will find a treasure trove of primary source materials, but they can also show works created contemporaneously from around the globe for any era, enabling students to develop a holistic sense of global history. Second-language teachers can have students view culturally significant items in their target language. English language arts teachers can identify exquisite images, audio, and video for use as writing prompts. And the ability to browse by topic provides opportunities for use by those often-neglected STEM teachers: Among the topics to choose from is “natural science and mathematics,” which can be further limited to astronomy, geometry, medicine, physics, etc.

An entry under the topic “mathematical geography” is a 15th-century Egyptian book called A Guide for the Perplexed on the Drawing of the Circle of Projection. Many thanks to the World Digital Library for raising our collective IQ. This is what I always knew the internet could be. -EMILY JACK

World Digital Library

Related stuff:

Visit the Library of Congress online

Access Primary Sources Online with the Perseus Digital Library

Check out ibiblio, the Online Library

Six Ways to Transform your Presentation
I’m still learning the whole presentation thing. I’ve probably made every classic presentation mistake, from mumbling to mistaking my PowerPoint slide show for an outline. Stepcase Lifehack has a great list of presentation tips for n00bs like me. Number one: ditch PowerPoint. I tried this for my last presentation and found it very liberating. This info will help you prepare a conference presentation, make your daily teaching more engaging, or come in handy for the forensics team.

26 Must-Have Free Fonts
Have you deleted Comic Sans from your computer yet? If not, I’ll wait here while you do that. Good. Now that that overused typeface is out of your life forever, what will you use for your bulletin boards and newsletters? Presidia Creative brings you 26 free fonts that will make your art projects and handouts look more slick. You’ll never need Comic Sans again.

Five Best Free Data Recovery Tools
Nothing places hard drives in more peril than finals week. At this time of year, the vengeful god Murphy inflicts horrible maladies upon the data of students and teachers worldwide for not heeding his law. Fortunately, atonement is within reach. Lifehacker has a rundown of five data-recovery tools that can bring Little Johnny’s term paper back to life just in time for him to print it out so his dog can eat it. -BILL FERRIS

Photo credit: Photocapy on Flickr.

Check out updates to, and tips on, Evernote
Venerable note-taking app Evernote has rolled out a few new features that ought to help you and your students.

Find bargains on supplies at Hoot of Loot
Need to stretch your supplies budget a little farther? Or should I say, “further”? Lucky for me, I can find the answer by picking up a cheap copy of a language arts textbook at Hoot of Loot, an online classified ads section for educators.

Youth Leadership Initiative schools kids on the political process
The Youth Leadership Initiative is a great resource for your civics classroom. First of all, you’ll gain access to the YLI’s teacher-developed lesson plans when you visit their site. Another distinct feature is the e-Congress program, where students are engaged by simulations in the entire lawmaking process.

The Learning Network: lesson plans and more from the New York Times
The New York Times, on its own, is a great resource for teachers and students. But when you add a special area just for teachers, it gets even better. The Learning Network helps teachers and students wrangle the information on their site into useful content for the classroom.

If your geography students haven’t learned the locations of all the states by now, maybe they need a little game-based incentive. Know Your States is a geography game where students have to plop all 50 states into their correct positions on the map. Sure, they can handle gimmies like Alaska and Hawaii, but can they find Rhode Island when they don’t have the rest of the eastern seaboard as a reference?

Know Your States isn’t the most robust game, but it’s a fun diversion, and will hopefully give your students a better idea of where Wyoming is, just in case their parents take them to Yellowstone on summer vacation. -BILL FERRIS

Know Your States

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Choke on Your Own Hubris as You Fail to Name All 50 States in 10 Minutes

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There are few places on Earth that seem to me more remote than Greenland.  Not to mention cold.  And dark.  During the winter, the sun really does not even rise.  Sounds like a place for your next vacation, right?  Thanks to NASA Cryospheric scientist Lora Koenig, you can experience winter in Greenland without making the actual trip and braving the minus-50 degree Celsius temperatures.  She spent this past winter in Greenland blogging about her experience.

As you read her weekly entries, you can come to understand some of the important work she is doing in Greenland.  She collected time measurements of snow surface temperature, microwave brightness temperature, and snow surface height.  These measurements all help with ongoing projects that NASA has involving several satellites.  In her entries, Lora tells you about her work and what life is really like in the winter in Greenland.  Even better, there are lots of pictures and a summit webcam and weather station!

In a classroom, this site could be utilized in different ways.  As part of a geography class, it could be used to highlight the different geographical features that exist in Greenland.  Your class could take a virtual field trip while immersed in the personal stories of the author.  In science, this website could be used to highlight important aspects of the  process of scientific inquiry.  This blog provides a great view into what it’s like to actually work as a scientist.  Using the weather station data, a math class could create graphs that track daily temperatures, and could even use other resources to add some local data comparisons to their graphs.  This blog opens up a new part of the world to your students.

As long as you can get past the chilliness that will seep into your bones as you peruse the site (I think I need to go put on a sweater), you’ll find at least a few ways that this resource could be useful to you and your students.  -REBECCAH HAINES

Winter Camp: A Blog from the Greenland Summit

Summit Camp Webcam and Weather Station

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Learn about hibernation

Meet Me at the Corner: Virtual field trips for kids, by kids

The New York Times, on its own, is a great resource for teachers and students. But when you add a special area just for teachers, it gets even better. The Learning Network helps teachers and students wrangle the information on their site into useful content for the classroom.

The Learning Network caters to three groups: students, teachers, and parents.  For students, the daily news is summarized, and there are daily features, like test-prep questions and news quizzes. For parents, there are tips on how to discuss current events with kids, and a family movie guide. The section for teachers is the most robust of the three, offering daily lesson plans throughout the school year, crossword puzzles, and even a guide to publishing a student newspaper. They’ll email the lesson plans directly to you, which might be a good way to encourage a technophobe to try out some new lesson ideas, and the archives are always available and searchable in all content areas for grades 6-12. -GRETCHEN SCHAEFER

New York Times: The Learning Network

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Nostradamus once prophesied: “Three great leaders will become enemies / Earthquakes and disaster falling from the heavens.” Pretty wild stuff, am I right? As resident numerologist and astrology blogger for Instructify, I can agree with Nostradamus on the earthquakes and whatnot — but great leaders becoming enemies? That’s a bit too far-fetched, especially when the Youth Leadership Initiative is there to teach future leaders how to play nice.

The Youth Leadership Initiative is a great resource for your civics classroom. First of all, you’ll gain access to the YLI’s teacher-developed lesson plans when you visit their site. You’ll probably have to do some custom tailoring for your own class, but it’s a nice head start that lets you work on planning. Another distinct feature is the e-Congress program, where students are engaged by simulations in the entire lawmaking process.

YLI also features a pretty robust mock-election simulation tailored right down to your own local legislative district. You guessed it: good ole’ reliable cyber ballots! We missed the boat on last year’s big election, but I’m hoping that there will be mock elections during non-election years. I would enjoy the comic possibilities in imagining my own megalomaniacal simulated candidates, so it would be cool if the creative team at YLI hits me up for some notes.

The Youth Leadership Initiative is a non-partisan unit of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, so you can rest assured that no particular agenda is being promoted. Seriously, not even the far-reaching “let’s all bow before General Zod” lobbyists have their claws in this program (although, if you’re interested, I have a newsletter you might want to read). The other hook is that this is an entirely non-profit program, which allows your class to participate at no cost. With all these positives, you might want to form your own exploratory committee to find out more about the Youth Leadership Initiative. -NICK YINGLING

Youth Leadership Initiative

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See who’s hating who at World Conflicts Today