BY BILL FERRIS
Happy holidays from Instructify. And by happy holidays, I mean, we’ll see you in 2011.
Whether your holiday of choice is Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or Festivus, and whether your nog of choice is egg, or…well, I don’t know what other types of nog are available…anyway, please take this time to relax and reconnect with the people most important to you.
We’ll be back on January 3.
Take a look at the most popular articles of December 2010:
Mission US: Finally, a full-length video game designed for schools
Foursquare’s possibilities for learning
Visual economics lessons at Reffonomics
Teachers, librarians can get free copy of Cory Doctorow’s With a Little Help
Set up a safe, sane social media policy for your school
Learn how the web works: 20 Things about Browsers and the Web
Tell stories visually with comic strip creators
Collaborate with distant classrooms with Skype in the Classroom
It is no surprise that NASA is a great resource for science teachers, and this page on Solar System Exploration does not disappoint.
The website is as well organized as you’d expect from NASA, with the usual sections for kids and educators. Like a lot of NASA sites, you can find kid-friendly information and lesson plans. What is different, however, is a thematic search for educators. Five themes — “What We Explore,” “Early Solar System,” “Planetary Processes and Weather,” “Astrobiology,” and “How We Explore” — all include a six-tabbed page at which you can find background information, science questions, education activities, related NASA missions, and careers. It is very well organized and would be helpful for any time-strapped educator.
An additional fun and different feature I found in the Kids’ section was Space School Musical — think High School Musical with a NASA twist. You can view the segments online and even download the transcripts so that you can have your kids sing along with new classics such as S-P-A-C-E and Moon Dance. Other nifty features include a multimedia gallery complete with interactives, videos, audio, and downloads. There is also a section on the planets (and other celestial bodies) that include facts and figures, pictures, and featured lesson plans and/or activities.
Finally, there is a section on NASA’s exploratory missions that can be searched by various criteria. Once you select a particular mission, you can find out its goals, accomplishments, and key people. I used this particular feature with my students in which they created an illustrated time line of space exploration.
Related stuff
Space.com – can a URL be any simpler?
What does your night sky look like? Find out with the Starry Night Sky Chart
BY BILL FERRIS
What would a year be without a year-end top-10 list? A big, fat failure, that’s what. Take a few minutes and look back at the most popular posts of 2010.
This is a slightly odd site, to be sure, but Boy the Bear’s Age Gauge is also an interesting way to place yourself in the span of historic events. The premise is that you enter the day you were born, and the site calculates how old you were at certain moments in time. Looking at the output for my birthday, I was suddenly transported in memory and time to the day of the 9/11 attacks (I had friends in New York City), the Y2K scare (I was working the late late shift that New Year’s night as a newspaper reporter because we all thought havoc would take place; it didn’t) and even the O.J. Simpson fiasco (I was actually in Los Angeles, visiting a friend, and we saw the police chase scene and the white van go by us as we stood on a bridge overpass).
I can imagine the Age Gauge possibly being used for personal narrative history projects for students, although the site’s list of historic events does not appear to be regularly updated (no Iraq War, for example). An interesting tangent from the main site is that you can also track similar items around entertainment (popular songs at certain ages, pivotal moments, movie releases, etc.).
Back when I was in elementary school, we thought it was pretty cool to have Oregon Trail on our school’s Apple IIes — the green text and graphics on a black screen were the height of technology. As primitive as that seems, imagine the sort of classroom technology that came before that — WAY before that – like in 1650, for example? Well, at this graphic time line created by the New York Times, you can learn just that as you explore The Evolution of Classroom Technology.
If you’re a teacher who likes to use technology to enhance your lessons (and if you read this blog, I’m sure you are), you will find this time line an interesting retrospective. I was surprised by the longevity of the Scantron (1972), for example, and the fact that essentially we still use this system for our End of Grade testing. Hmm… It could also be interesting to show your students how classroom technology has changed over the years. Maybe seeing that the pencil was once considered a great leap in technology for a student will quell the complaints about the school laptops booting up too slowly.
So, spend a little time over your the Christmas break thinking about how glad you are that you can ask for an iPad for your classroom rather than a Magic Lantern (1870s prototype slide projector), even if the Magic Lantern has a much cooler name.
The Evolution of Classroom Technology
Related stuff
You have work past the crackle, static, and white noise of the recordings, but RadioLovers is a website that has archived old radio shows from the pre-television days. Bob Hope, Groucho Marx, and Laurel and Hardy are just a few among the classic voices kept alive at this site, which features free downloads of the files in MP3 format. RadioLovers features comedies, mysteries, science fiction, and even music programs.
If you are doing a unit around media literacy, this site might even be helpful in showing how entertainment has often been commercialized. Listen to the openings of some of these programs and you realize that the first few minutes are often used to showcase the show’s sponsors. You could easily draw some parallels to the use of product placement in various movies and television shows these days.
For students interested in podcasting, these old radio shows are valuable for learning about pacing of story, voice inflection, and the use of sound effects (which is not often a topic covered in a traditional writing class, is it?)
On the issue of copyrights, the site discloses that it believes the radio shows are now in the public domain and no longer protected. Whether that would hold up in a court of law remains to be seen (or not). Even so, these files give a glimpse of entertainment from times when writing, sound effects, and voice were the prevailing means for delivering a stories to a large audience.
BY BILL FERRIS
Yesterday, reports were coming out that Yahoo! was shutting down Del.icio.us, the social bookmarking site (Yahoo! also announced they were shutting down AltaVista, which was newsworthy in that apparently AltaVista hadn’t been shut down years ago). Today, TechCrunch is reporting that Yahoo! has no plans to deep-six Del.icio.us, but is instead looking to sell it.
I know a lot of teachers depend on Del.icio.us to share useful advice or resources with their colleagues, or to keep track of interesting stuff they plan to use in class, so this announcement should be a relief. However, TechCrunch also poses the question of whether Yahoo! did indeed plan to kill Del.icio.us, then changed its mind due to the PR backlash it received.
Assuming a sale goes through, there’s still no guarantee Del.icio.us will be around forever. Whoever buys it will still have to find an effective business model for it — no easy task, considering it seems like most social media companies’ business models can be summed up as, “Get bought by Yahoo! or Google.”
If you’re feeling a little antsy about your Del.icio.us bookmarks, Xmarks has recently risen from the grave. Xmarks lets you sync your bookmarks across multiple computers and web browsers, and may be a viable option just in case Yahoo! can’t find a buyer or they change their mind.
Does this announcement have any impact on your teaching? How will you be bookmarking in the wake of this new announcement?
Yahoo Trying To Unload Del.icio.us, Not Shut It Down via TechCrunch
BY AARON FOWLES
If you’ve ever been dropped into a foreign country against your will, and then forced to spend eight hours a day surrounded by a language your you’re not familiar with but expected to know, then you might begin to grasp what it’s like to be a student who is an English language learner in the United States.
Babelwith.me attempts to bridge the language barrier automatically and in real time. One person creates a chatroom, which is assigned a random short URL, then distributes that URL to everyone who wishes to participate in the chat. Each user selects their language, then the messages in the room are translated into that language.
So, you might have John writing in English, Jan writing in Polish, Juan writing in Spanish, and Jean writing in French, yet they are all able to communicate (tolerably). Online translation is still a work in progress, and we are nowhere near the universal translator of science fiction.
With your own students, Babelwith.me can be a very powerful tool. If you teach students from many different language backgrounds, consider that these students often spend entire days with each other, yet are largely unable to communicate. Babelwith.me makes that communication quick and easy for them.
Add powerful language tools to your website or blog with ImagineLearning’s free translator widget
How Technology Talks: Sharing and Learning Language through Technology
You may not find comic books in every kid’s backpack anymore, but the medium of comics still attracts young audiences as sure as trouble waits for Batman around each corner. These comic-creating sites are easy to use, require no registration, and will have students crafting visual stories in no time. Choose the background and characters, insert speech bubbles, and POW!! Your very own comic.
Write Comics: This site features amusingly drawn characters and common backgrounds like houses, schools, and city streets. It could work well for scenes of everyday life.
Strip Generator (pictured): This one has no backgrounds and simple black & white characters, but offers props to insert like furniture, toys, and food. Still, the basic artwork here puts your focus on the text.
Witty Comics: The stuffy characters on this site are offset by the backgrounds featuring famous landmarks from around the world. What would two people talk about as they stood among ancient Greek ruins?
Hero Machine: Here you create a single superhero instead of a comic strip. You can customize almost every aspect of his/her features and costume. Adverb Man? Geometry Girl?
Designing comics helps students learn to communicate with both words and pictures. This can be tied to any subject by giving students a clear objective for the comic, such as a topic for the characters to discuss or a certain message for the strip to convey.
ToonDoo makes creating comic strips easy
Here’s a look back at some of the best post from December 2009:
Build an online portfolio with Carbonmade
Teach history with these comic collections
See the history of aviation at NASA’s Lessons of a Widowmaker (and Other Aircraft)
YouAreHere teaches kids to be smart consumers
Get these extensions for your Google Chrome browser
Try yWriter for long writing projects
NORAD lets kids track Santa in Google Earth
Take your class to the Lincoln Memorial Interactive
There are many things that I don’t know about the web, even though I spend a fair amount of time on it. I’ll bet you’re the same way, too. Thankfully, there are sites like 20 Things I Learned about Browsers and the Web is a helpful primer designed to fill in our knowledge gaps about how the web works and how it is constructed.
This site is really a sort of an ebook, put out by Google (it’s always good to see who is publishing the content), in which topics related to using the web and browsers are explored in comprehensible ways, complete with neat little illustrations by Christoph Nieman.
The topics in 20 Things range from cloud computing, to protecting your computer from malware, to the evolution of the web over time. Sure, Google has a huge stake in all of this because the more we use the web, the more we see their advertisements. But this book is user-friendly, packed with good information, and it’s free. I did not see any signs of Google overtly pushing its Chrome browser above any others (such as Firefox or Explorer). The book is set up for you to browse linearly, or for you to jump around the chapters. There are also plenty of embedded hyperlinks that allow you to go deeper into content, should you wish.
20 Things I Learned about Browsers and the Web
BY BILL FERRIS
The National Youth Science Camp is now accepting applications for their 2011 residential summer program for high school seniors. The Camp takes place June 30 through July 24, 2011in Bartow, West Virginia within the beautiful Monongahela National Forest.
NYSC delegates — you know a camp is fancy if they call the attendees delegates — come from all 50 states and several countries. The folks behind the camp can describe it better than I, so I’ll let them:
“The National Youth Science Camp is a residential science education program for young scientists the summer after they graduate from high school. Students from around the country are challenged academically in exciting lectures and hands-on studies, and have voluntary opportunities to participate in an outdoor adventure program, gain a new and deep appreciation for the great outdoors, and establish friendships that last a lifetime.”
First, the bad news — only two kids per state get to go. However, those fortunate few won’t have to pay a cent for travel, lodging, or food. NYSC organizers want to make sure they get the best, most talented students regardless of location or income situation.
You can find application information here. Applications must be received by January 21, 2011. Make sure to read the eligibility requirements, too. Important note: All students have to apply directly to their state NYSC coordinator, not the NYSC itself. Fear not, they’ve got the selection coordinator database here.
Go on a scientific expedition to the south pole with PolarTREC
Here are some recent Twitter updates from the last week or so:
The world does indeed seem increasingly smaller in scale, thanks in part to the array of technology tools now at our disposal. In particular, making a connection with another class somewhere in the world has never been easier, thanks to blogs, social media, and more. For instance, the online voice/phone platform Skype has allowed my students to talk and collaborate with students from other parts of the United States. And not long ago, a colleague of mine here in New England had her kindergarten students chatting away with kindergarteners in Hawaii. That’s a pretty powerful learning opportunity that was not really available five or ten years ago, other than with paper-based pen-pal projects (which still have a lot of value today, by the way).
Now, Skype is trying to make those learning connections a bit easier to make. Skype in the Classroom is a free and simple database of educators who want to collaborate with other teachers, using Skype. You add your name and your connections to other teachers grows.
The Skype directory is still in “beta” mode as of this writing but it is expected that it will launch publicly in December 2010. A teacher will need a Skype account, of course, but there are free levels of service as well as paid ones. Skype now comes with video conferencing and screen-sharing options.
50 Ways to Use Skype in the Classroom
Skype adds 10-way video calling
Instructifeature: A window on the world — Using Skype in the classroom
moxie design studios
