Instructify

We’ve made it through March, which means the end of the school year is within sight. Get your second wind (or third, or fourth) by taking a look at the best posts from March 2010.

Making movies with Stopmotion Animator

Instructifeature: Showcase your skills with an electronic teaching portfolio

Create mind maps just by typing with Text 2 Mind Map

Instructifeature: Improving school improvement with Web 2.0 tools

Guess what you can do at Learningscience.org?

Get 137 years’ of Popular Science at your fingertips for free

Inspire social action through gaming with Evoke

THOMAS is ready to help you teach government

Enrich your genetics lessons with Scitable

Convert PDFs to Word for free with AnyBizSoft

BY BILL FERRIS

Samsung will give away 50 SAMCAM 860 document cameras to teachers as part of its Active Learning Grant Program. Award decisions will be based on need, so make sure to spell that out in your application, which by the way, is due by June 1.

FYI, the cameras are valued at around 800 bucks, so they’re probably pretty snazzy. Getting $800 worth of equipment for free would feel pretty snazzy, too, so send in those applications soon.

Samsung Active Learning grant

BY KEVIN HODGSON

What student doesn’t like to imagine what their life will be like in 25 years? Given the rate of technology advancements, it’s an interesting exercise in imagination to conceive the future. Amy Zuckerman and James Daly (along with illustrator John Manders) do just such an exercise in their picture book 2030: A Day in the Life of Tomorrow’s Kids, a fascinating glimpse into how they envision the world. This is not all fantasy either, as Zuckerman and Daly consulted scientists, engineers, technology experts, and “futurists” about what might be possible in a few decades, given the world as it is right now.

Not surprisingly, concepts like climate change play a role in some of the devices in the book (such as clothes that convert energy back to the grid and school buildings that can be pieced together like Lego units). In fact, I was struck by how some of the ideas in this book coincide nicely with the vision put forth in Thomas Friedman‘s book, Hot, Flat and Crowded, which dealt with ways to change our thinking around energy.

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Here’s what’s going on at the NASA Earth Observatory, brought to you by Fred Beyer at EarthSciTeach.

Flooding near the Betsiboka River, Madagascar (pictured)

Acquired March 23, 2010, this natural-color image shows an agricultural area immediately south of the Betsiboka River, roughly 40 kilometers from the coast. The beige-and-green area filling most of the image is flooded. (more…)

BY REBECCAH HAINES

This article is also posted on LEARN NC.

As educators, most of us are familiar with the dreaded School Improvement Plan (SIP). Every few years each school is required to create an extensive, detailed document that outlines its plan for constant improvement until the next document is due. In the interim, success on reaching goals is evaluated, documented, and sent off to the central office. As any teacher who’s been involved in this process can attest, creating this document can be extremely labor intensive.

My personal experience participating in our school’s last SIP committee was no different: Reams of data had to be collected and analyzed. Goals had to be pinpointed, voted upon, and revised. Success indicators had to be determined and recorded. It took our committee of eight or so teachers nearly the entire school year to prepare this document. Not only was the process labor intensive, it used a tremendous amount of paper. Drafts, revisions, and submissions to the staff required new copies each time.

Several years ago, there weren’t a lot of options for streamlining the SIP process. But the recent explosion of Web 2.0 tools, thankfully, offers schools many time-saving options. No longer does the process need to be so time consuming. By using the following collaborative tools, schools can go through the SIP process much more efficiently and collaboratively, and with much less paper. (more…)

BY KEVIN HODGSON

The Writing Fix is an incredibly rich online collection of activities and lesson plans around the craft of writing. Created by the Northern Nevada Writing Project, The Writing Fix can be a boon to just about any teacher struggling to come up with an idea to get students writing in a variety of genres.  And given that the site has received about four million hits in 2009 alone, I would say its resources are being widely used.

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BY GRETCHEN SCHAEFER

When it comes to students building models in class, why should they make the same old sugar cube igloo as everyone else when they can create paper replicas of the Capitol building? Creating a 3D model on the computer can be fun for aspiring architects and designers, but the fun doesn’t have to stop at the screen. Waybe is a program to bring your digital models to life using plain paper, tape, scissors, and Google.

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BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

Teaching ecology and environmental conservation principles from the classroom can be a tough job. It’s a subject that really requires that hands-on, in-the-field type of involvement to really engage the student and provide tangible educational concepts for reflection. Conservation Maven can help with this.

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BY BILL FERRIS

Popular Science magazine has made the archives of its entire 137-year catalog available for free online. If you’ve a scientific bent, you’ve probably read an issue or two and gotten some ideas for class from the venerable magazine. Just think what you can do with more than a century’s worth of content? Find cool projects, explain difficult concepts in plain English, and perhaps most importantly, show students that science has lots of practical and fun applications in everyday life.

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BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

Teaching students how our government works can be a dull subject — two houses, a president, a judicial branch, checks and balances, separation of church and state, we all had the same cookie-cutter run down. But how can we dig deeper than just the surface lessons about the folks we send to Washington D.C.? Well, the Library of Congress has created THOMAS, an online resource about the real goings-on of our government, named after out third president, which has an immense amount of information right down to the bills that were passed this week.

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BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

When I went over genetics in my biology class in high school, it was Punnett Squares, a bit of Darwin, and not much else. Fast forward more than a decade and the field of genetics has grown exponentially. Things like the human genome project have furthered our understanding of the building blocks of all life in amazing ways. But how do we take all this new knowledge and get it out of the professional scientist’s hands and into the classroom? One answer is the website Scitable, a giant repository of all things genetics. (more…)

BY BILL FERRIS

AnyBizSoft has made version 2.5.3 of their PDF to Word program free — a wise move, considering the presence of free alternatives like pdftoword.com. If you need to convert lots of PDFs into Word docs, this downloadable program is a great choice. It’s fast, and the results are reasonably similar to the original PDF.

If you haven’t tried to convert PDFs to DOC format before, something almost always gets lost in the translation. To put AnyBizSoft’s converter through its paces, I ran a semi-complex LEARN NC flyer through the converter. (more…)

BY KEVIN HODGSON

Evoke is a alternate reality gaming (ARG) activity designed to help young people learn about global issues and take part in social action projects. Sponsored by the World Bank Institute and developed primarily by Jane McGonigal (well known in the ARG world), this simulation game seeks to collectively engage participants aged 13 and older in learning about issues affecting the world, and then moving them into social action in their own communities.

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BY GRETCHEN SCHAEFER

This article is also posted on LEARN NC.

Teachers have long used portfolios to highlight their education and teaching experience, show evidence of growth, and share examples of their own learning experiences in the classroom. A portfolio is a valuable tool when seeking a new position, for assessing professional growth in an existing position, or to keep a record of your teaching career. In a typical oral question-and-answer interview, you can explain how you taught a certain lesson or unit, but with a portfolio, you can show evidence of how and why the way you taught that lesson worked best for your class.

Your portfolio might even include a reflection that explains how you changed the instruction method or materials used, and how the lesson has evolved since the first time you taught it. Sharing student work as part of your portfolio can illustrate how the students responded to the lesson as well. It can also serve as a record of your professional development — in addition to keeping a current resume on file, certificates and awards can be added to a portfolio to show how you’ve continued your education beyond initial certification.

Traditionally, portfolios were often created using three-ring binders or scrapbooks to organize a collection of physical information. But the paper teaching portfolio usually exists only as a single copy, so it can’t be accessed by others without physically receiving it. An electronic portfolio, on the other hand, can be accessed by more than just one person at a time, which can be valuable when you are submitting resumes for several positions. It allows hiring committees time to review your work before meeting you in person, and it removes some of the worry that that single copy (with no backup) might be lost if handed to the wrong person. In addition to being accessible by multiple people, an electronic portfolio provides concrete proof that you have a grasp of how to use technology effectively — and how to incorporate it into your professional practice. (more…)

BY KEVIN HODGSON

Stopmotion Animator is a freeware download that allows users of PC computers to use a webcam to easily and quickly create stop-motion movies. The software is set up to “grab” frames off the webcam, then gather them together into a single .AVI video file. Stopmotion Animator allows you to tweak some settings as well. For example, you can set the number of frames you want shot with each mouse click (a single frame per shot will make the video more fluid in motion but will take a lot longer to make, so I suggest that the setting be placed at three to five frames per shot).