Instructify

Here’s a look back at the most popular Instructify posts from July.

In memoriam — Screentoaster

LiveBinders: A virtual link-sharing notebook

Ditch the flashcards — review with Smart.fm instead

Scribus is a free desktop publishing program similar to Adobe InDesign

Making video book reviews can net students free books

Simply Noise drowns out distractions for better productivity

Explore ecological concepts while having a howling good time with WolfQuest

Smilebox: 21st century scrapbooking

Follow Instructify on Twitter for quick updates on cool stuff for teachers

What does your night sky look like? Find out with the Starry Night Sky Chart

BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

No longer just a way for kids to waste hours on the couch during perfectly good daylight hours, video games have gained renown as a legitimate means of educating and informing people. Take Games for Change, where the idea is to use gaming to directly affect positive change in the world.

(more…)

BY KEVIN HODGSON

We all leave behind a trail of digital footprints when we use technology, whether it is from searching with Google, adding a comment to a blog post, or logging into a social network. While most adults might be cognizant that, given the archiving abilities of the internet, our trail will never really go cold, it is doubtful that many young people realize this. Sites like MyFootprints are designed to fill that gap by giving students the tools and experience to understand that what they are doing today with technology might have ramifications for tomorrow.

(more…)

A study says iPad owners are “selfish elites.” http://bit.ly/aphKpU #

RT @garystager: .@amichetti Why fetishize “collaboration” when educators have known what to do for centuries, but choose not to? #

Powered by Twitter Tools

BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

There are many ways to increase a person’s vocabulary, from the classic pick-a-word from the dictionary each day (my father’s preferred method), to the little desk calendar with a daily vocabulary word on each page. But in this day and age people aren’t always working from the same desk each every day, and lugging around an unabridged Oxford English dictionary isn’t practical.

Enter EasyWords, a free downloadable application that helps you memorize and learn new words right from your computer. EasyWords runs in the background and, at an interval that you set, presents you with a vocab question. Once you select the correct answer, it goes away again. It’s pretty unobtrusive — you can just click close if you don’t want to be bothered right then.

(more…)

RT @dogtrax: Interesting: Course Syllabus for a university honors course on graphic novels http://bit.ly/a3cDcM #

Powered by Twitter Tools

BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

If you’re teaching English-language learners in your class — which includes pretty much every teacher in every school — then you need to check out the great resources at ESL Basics. English is an incredibly frustrating language for many to learn, what with its hundreds of synonyms, and spelling and grammar so complex that even most native speakers can’t master them. Well, for those trying to learn English, ESL Basics is a great free resource to try and make sense of the oddities of the language.

(more…)

BY CHRISTOPHER PANNA

Should animals have the same rights as people? Should the English-speaking world adopt American English? There are some topics on which everyone has an opinion. Offering a controversial debate question is a great way to energize your students and open their minds to multiple points of view.

Whether you want to have an impromptu class discussion or explore an issue in more depth, a pair of online resources can serve as starting points. Opposing Views is a veritable marketplace for all things debatable and The Economist is a news magazine with a debate section on its site. Both provide conflicting opinions from verified experts in a point-counterpoint format.

(more…)

Why The Next Big Pop-Culture Wave After Cupcakes Might Be Libraries: http://n.pr/9EQI1t #

RT @TheEngTeacher Try Out Google’s Chromium OS On Your Laptop Or Netbook With Flow http://bit.ly/bSMutv via @makeuseof #

The American Association of School Librarians’ list of Top 25 Websites for Teaching and Learning http://bit.ly/bUKJKh #

RT @rmbyrne Ten Uses for Drop.io in Education via Free Technology for Teachers http://tinyurl.com/38bmtlk #

STEM teachers, take a free online course from NASA. From NASA, people! http://bit.ly/dvEgyv #

Powered by Twitter Tools

BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

Do your students need to study for that upcoming geography test? Perhaps the SATs are coming up? Well, flashcards are so 1994. It’s time to head over to Smart.fm. Smart.fm is a free learning and review system that is like your own personal study partner — a study partner that happens to have a super-slick multimedia review system in her backpack.

(more…)

BY KEVIN HODGSON

Organization is often the key to collecting and sharing websites and web-based resources. Many of teachers have sites we want to share with colleagues or students, but printing out a sheet of URLs will likely motivate people to merely toss it in the recycle bin. A site like LiveBinders is one possible way to organize information and present it in an easy and user-friendly way. The metaphor that LiveBinders uses to explain its site is that of a “three-ring binder” that is stored on the internet.

(more…)

Arne Duncan announced an initiative to create a National Learning Registry that organizes digital educational resources http://bit.ly/aTRkoD #

RT @dogtrax: The Newsweek Inforgraphic about how far the digital world has come in 10 years http://bit.ly/bvjmcW #

Shapeways lets you design and create 3-D objects using 3-D printing technology. It’s not free, but seriously cool. http://bit.ly/9oZA2E #

Paleo-Future presents the scientastic future that never was. Flying cars, moving sidewalks, you get the picture. http://bit.ly/6fpEio #

Powered by Twitter Tools

BY REBECCAH HAINES

While reviewing another space-related website, I came across this one, Starry Night Sky Chart, and decided it was cool enough to warrant its own post. At this site, you can enter your ZIP code and get a picture of what the night sky will look like in your area.

This website is part of a larger website, Starry Night Education, that offers extensive (paid) resources for teaching space science and astronomy. However, the interactive sky chart is free. Its operation is pretty simple. Enter your ZIP code and you will be presented with a picture of what the sky will look like at approximately 9 p.m. as you face south on that day. You can change the viewing time and a few other simple options, like labeling constellations and planets.  You can also see what the view would look like if you were standing on the moon — how cool is that?

(more…)

RT @francesca0477 A salad spinner centrifuge. Genius! Kudos to these ladies of science. http://yhoo.it/dt6I8i #

Students, Meet Your New Teacher, Mr. Robot http://nyti.ms/aTEAso #

RT @dogtrax: New blog post: Book Review: Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology http://bit.ly/bCm7wu #

Follow Instructify on Twitter.

Powered by Twitter Tools

BY BILL FERRIS

Forty-one years ago today, man first set foot on the moon. Could Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin have known that less than half a century later we’d all be living on cities on the moon, driving flying cars to work?

Until science catches up with science fiction, your students can still get excited about the space program and science with Moonbase Alpha, a 3-D multiplayer game from NASA. (more…)