BY BILL FERRIS
Want to feel insignificant? No, you say? I’ll take that as a yes.
If you were already feeling like a tiny speck of dust in the universe, these YouTube1 videos will show you just how tiny we are in the grand scheme of the universe. Each video sizes up Earth against the larger planets in the solar system, and the sun, which in turn gets dwarfed by the hypergiant stars in our galaxy.
BY BILL FERRIS
This week’s MBTN features larger file attachments for Gmail users, following your favorite authors on Twitter, and how to shoot better video. Read more after the jump.
We’ve heard a lot about some renegade microbes in the news lately. The Swine Flu hysteria closed down many schools across the country and continues to be an issue worldwide. With all the press that H1N1 has gotten, you might think that all microbes are harmful. In fact, the vast majority of microbes are not at all harmful, and many are downright helpful. At Microbeworld, you can discover the abundant positives of microbes.
Go beyond basic Spanish vocabulary at Speak Like a Spaniard
If you teach Spanish, you’re probably very familiar with sentences like, “Juan es muy guapo.” Correct me if I’m wrong, but this sort of phrase gets muy boring — both for you and for your students. We all know that every culture expresses itself with more color than such pedestrian sentences indicate. Help your students experience some of that color with the Speak Like a Spaniard blog, a compendium of idiomatic phrases, slang, and colloquial speech commonly used in Spain.
Color Scheme Designer improves the look of bulletin boards, art projects, websites
Picking a good color scheme is, for me, like calculus — an ordered, complex set of laws that I’ll never, ever understand. Thankfully I can use cheats like referring to the color wheel, or this slick online Color Scheme Designer.
Free course opportunity from Game Design Concepts
Game Design Concepts is an experimental class in game design and pedagogy being taught by Ian Schreiber, a game designer with several years in the video game industry. You had better act fast — the class starts Monday, June 29th.
Top 5 screencast tools
A screencast is a slick way to demonstrate lessons or concepts to your students. You can use screencasts in online courses, sub plans, or for visual storytelling assignments. In this advanced age we live in, you can make lots of high-quality screencasts with free web applications. Here are Instructify’s top 5 screencast tools.
Download free images for educators at Pics4Learning
Pics4Learning is another handy resource for teachers who need images to use in class that: 1) look cool, and 2) won’t get them in trouble for copyright violations.
BY BILL FERRIS
Keep your lit students reading this summer with The Book Seer, a handy online book-recommendation tool. The interface is simplicity itself — students enter the title and author of the last book they’ve read (or for better results, the last book they liked), and the heavily bearded, titular Book Seer suggests books by similar writers or pertaining to similar subjects. The recommendations come via Amazon and LibraryThing. Not that it matters, but as a fun bonus, the site’s favicon is a stylish handlebar mustache.
Computer science and programming language can both be pretty intimidating. In fact, they can be a little forbidding if you try to jump in feet first. The thing about computers, though, is that they aren’t going anywhere, and they’re just going to keep talking their crazy language. That’s why it’s great to have a little help to chip away at that mystique.
Google Code University is a great resource that computer science students and educators can use to stay current with tools and computing technology. Everything is Creative Commons, too, so it should be easy to work it into your classroom.
BY BILL FERRIS
A screencast is a slick way to demonstrate lessons or concepts to your students. You can use screencasts in online courses, sub plans, or for visual storytelling assignments. In this advanced age we live in, you can make lots of high-quality screencasts with free web applications. Below are Instructify’s top 5 screencast tools. All of them are free and easy to use.
June 2008. We were so young! Vern later married that girl and Teddy joined the military. Chris moved away and become a lawyer. Me? Well, I would grow up to make an obscure reference from the epilogue to Stand By Me.
Here’s what we were up to in that bygone age:
Say it Right the First Time with Pronounce Firefox Extension
How to Easily Create a Claymation Movie Class Project
PWN Your Social Network with GoCrossCampus
Five Tools to Liven Up Art Class
Visit the University of North Carolina on iTunesU
Cook up Plastic out of Milk in Your Very Own Kitchen
Produce an Educational Video in Your Classroom
Free Interactive Math Manipulatives
Blog at Conferences Like a Pro
Who Knows What Evil Lurks in the Briny Deep? Monsters of the Deep Sea
Free course, y’all! (I write Southern now.) Game Design Concepts is an experimental class in game design and pedagogy being taught by Ian Schreiber, a game designer with several years in the video game industry. Registration in the course is free, but there is a required textbook. No problem there, right now it is listed for less than $20 on Amazon. You had better act fast — the class starts Monday, June 29th. Sorry for the short notice on this one.
The aim of this course isn’t to teach you the technical code work involved in designing a game, but rather the theoretical and conceptual design issues. You know, the kind of stuff that keeps a really good video game from ending up like Lee Carvallo’s Putting Challenge.
At the end of this course you should be familiar enough with the processes to start developing your own games. This can be particularly beneficial if you’re kicking around the idea of being a consultant for some game-based learning developers. At the very least, though, it will help a teacher in any capacity gain a more critical eye when evaluating games for their classroom.
Games aren’t just for fun, but for learning too
Stereotypes about video gamers debunked
TVO Kids – flashy, freaky, functional fun
Photo credit: striatic on Flickr.
BY BILL FERRIS
Pics4Learning is another handy resource for teachers who need images to use in class that: 1) look cool, and 2) won’t get them in trouble for copyright violations. According to the Pics4Learning site, “Unlike many Internet sites, permission has been granted for teachers and students to use all of the images donated to the Pics4Learning collection.” No fuss, no muss, and most importantly, no cease-and-desist letters from angry copyright holders.
BY EMILY JACK
If you teach Spanish, you’re probably very familiar with sentences like, “Juan es muy guapo.” Correct me if I’m wrong, but this sort of phrase gets muy boring — both for you and for your students. We all know that every culture expresses itself with more color than such pedestrian sentences indicate. Help your students experience some of that color with the Speak Like a Spaniard blog, a compendium of idiomatic phrases, slang, and colloquial speech commonly used in Spain.
BY BILL FERRIS
Picking a good color scheme is, for me, like calculus — an ordered, complex set of laws that I’ll never, ever understand. Thankfully I can use cheats like referring to the color wheel, or this slick online Color Scheme Designer. Just move your cursor around the color wheel to find your central hue, choose between mono, complement, triad, tetrad, analogic or accented analogic, whatever those mean, and CSD will present you a selection of colors that will look great on our class blog, bulletin boards, art projects, school newspapers, activity T-shirts, or even your daily wardrobe (if you’re like me, you’ll need a lot of schemes based on khaki).
BY BILL FERRIS
This week’s MBTN features foods that will keep you healthy, a new job-search site for teachers, and tips for stopping conflicts. Read more after the jump.
Save time typing with text-substitution app Texter
I must have wasted at least an hour of my life typing “Sincerely, Bill Ferris” over and over. Signatures, addresses, and standard responses to frequently asked questions eat up a lot of time over the long haul. Take those precious minutes back with Texter.
Google adds Creative Commons image search
It’s hard to believe that Google figured out how to search for my house from space before getting around to searching for photos licensed under Creative Commons. Google Image Search now lets you narrow your results to pics that carry the Creative Commons license.
Use a large-scale block posters to revamp your bulletin boards
Consider for a moment what your bulletin board would look like if it instead had a six-foot by four-foot picture of the solar system, or a huge reproduction of a Van Gogh. You can do that and more easily and cheaply at BlockPosters.
Prezi makes visually dynamic presentations…im-PREZZ-ive! (Ugh, sorry.)
The thing that sets Prezi apart is that it is quite visually stunning. This dynamic and entirely Flash-based web application allows you to zoom in and out on different areas of focus quickly and seamlessly.
BY BILL FERRIS
A while back we looked at some of the world’s weirdest plants. I don’t know how, but the list didn’t include anything from Socotra. Part of an archipelago in the Indian Ocean off the Horn of Africa, Socotra is home to plant and animal species that look like they’re from another planet. Socotra has been isolated from the African mainland for millions of years, and its plant and animal life show it. According to this article from Dark Roasted Blend, “Like the Galapagos Islands, this island is teeming with 700 extremely rare species of flora and fauna, a full 1/3 of which are endemic, i.e. found nowhere else on Earth.”
moxie design studios
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