Instructify

The 15 Strangest College Courses In America
“Underwater Basket Weaving” is apparently a real class. So is “Philosophy and Star Trek,” “The Science of Harry Potter,” and “Arguing with Judge Judy: Popular ‘Logic’ on TV Judge Shows.” These are actual courses that award actual credit, from universities you’d actually want to go to (Georgetown and UC-Berkley, for instance). Show these to your principal, and maybe your proposed syllabus for “A Study of Physics in Warner Bros. Cartoons” won’t sound so bad.

Top 50 Free Open Courseware Classes to Design Better Web Sites
Web design is a useful, highly marketable skill a lot of high schools don’t teach. Fortunately, you can help out some of your more web-savvy students with this guide to free courses that can develop their design skills. Maybe they’ll show their gratitude by redesigning your school’s website.

38 ways to find great edublogs
With so many educators out there who blog, how do you find the good stuff? Blog by Carol presents this list of 38 ways to find great edublogs, such as checking the Edublogs awards, using Technorati authority, and the time-honored method of asking people you already trust which blogs they read. Of course, if you need a place to start, Instructify isn’t too bad.

Top 5 Quiz Generators for Online Educators
Why do the grunt work of putting a quiz together yourself when you can find a handy piece of software to do it for you? Web 2.0 Teaching Tools brings you five time-saving methods for putting quizzes together online. Now you’ll have more time to read some of those great new edublogs you found. -BILL FERRIS

25 Books to Read Before Age 25 – So, I missed the boat on some of these; nonetheless, I think I knocked out most of the list during high school. If your students don’t already have to read the books on this list for their required summer reading, or if they are just avid readers, you might want to give them a head start before they hit 25. There are some surprising selections on this list from University of Washington’s The Daily, including Chuck Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters (a personal favorite).

100 Best Creative Writing Blogs – For your students who are interested in writing and blogging, here is a valuable resource from Best Colleges Online of 100 blogs to help them develop craft, get published, and practice editing. Personally, I wish I had this kind of resource available when I first started creative writing, so be sure to let your creative students know about these best o’ the best before they even get to college.

5 Unique and Inspiring Educational Nonprofits – I get excited to see insightful and original blog posts like this one from Razoo. Moreso, I get excited to see unique non-profit organizations doing great things for education. I’ve already mentioned one of the five, 826 National, but the others on this list are just as inspiring and original as Eggers’ efforts. Check out Spark and Soliya to explore things that your students might already be interested in, like foreign affairs and travel.

11 Tips on Setting Goals and Achieving Them – Goals are important no matter what stage in life you’re in. Dumb Little Man brings us this list of 11 simple ways you can get started on achieving what you set out to do. Goal setting starts as simply as “writing them down” and “making an action plan,” then stick-to-it-iveness will help you prevail.  -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Photo credit: Jo Jakeman on Flickr

Too often, developers think that just changing the fonts on a tool to Comic Sans will make it educator-friendly, when, really, there are a lot of big things to think about when designing for K-12 education. Because the developers of Edmodo are IT folks who’ve been working in public K-12 schools, they clearly understand that font choice is not the priority when it comes to making a usable, useful tool for kids and teachers. Ease of use and excellent privacy controls set Edmodo apart from the pack when it comes to free, online learning management tools. Edmodo has been called “Twitter for schools,” and while microblogging is part of the feature set, there is a whole lot more to Edmodo than 140 character text messages.

Edmodo allows you to post (and grade!) assignments, files, images, videos, and links, as well as post messages to your class, or to certain students in your class. You can have multiple groups (perhaps you teach several sections of students, or maybe you just want to use it for a single classroom’s group projects) that students access by being provided a code — not a complicated email-required signup process. Everything you do on Edmodo defaults to private, with an option to make anything public. The public page has an RSS feed, and would be a great way to broadcast important upcoming events (Field trip! Final exams!) in another way. Users can even set up Edmodo to send updates to their cell phones.

As you’d expect from a site created by two guys who really care about both technology and education, support is fantastic. They are available for demos or troubleshooting (when you create an account, you are automatically added to the Edmodo and support groups) and it’s not a corporation with canned responses, but folks who have a personal interest in making sure the service works the way it should. For more information, you can read an interview with the founders at Open Education, and an interview with a teacher using it in a North Dakota classroom. -GRETCHEN SCHAEFER

Edmodo

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First off, if you enjoy Instructify, you probably already know of a few other education blogs out there, but I found a few more that will make a nice addition to your RSS or Google Reader. Here is a handful, in no particular order.

Adventures in Educational Blogging – Written by Susan Sedro, who describes her blog as “A modest attempt at discovering if social technologies such as blogs and wikis can make teaching and learning more relevant and effective.” A modest attempt, maybe, but Sedro has some fun musings on the ways Web 2.0 is a valuable tool in our schools. A former 5th grade teacher and now Singaporean ex-pat, Sedro’s humor and knowledge come through in her writing. In a recent post, she muses: As you could predict, many students forgot to complete step 8. Fortunately, most of them did remember to paste the photo name and URL onto the photo sources form, so it was easy to locate the photo again and save it to their computer. Check out Adventures in Educational Blogging for a fun and easy-to-relate-to series of posts by someone who gets it.

2 Cents Worth – David Warlick, author of Raw Materials for the Mind: A Teacher’s Guide to Digital Literacy, Classroom Blogging, and creator of Citation Machine, gives his 2 cents on this blog for educators and those interested in literacy in a rapidly changing world. Warlick is transparent and open about his opinions and ideas, which makes him a compelling read and someone to keep on your radar. He’s got some interesting theories, and blogs about his travels as a speaker and classroom technology advocate. He also has a podcast worth a listen called Connect Learning.

Is Our Children Learning? – Yep, you read that right, it isn’t a typo. The title of this Bronx teacher’s blog is taken from a quote of our not-for-long president Georgie W, back in ’00 “The question is rarely asked: Is our children learning?”  This blog is less heavy handed in theory and practice, but has some great musings from the day-to-day life of a teacher “Ruben” and his experience in the NYC school system. Here’s a tidbit to give you an idea of Ruben’s big-city teaching life: Apparently, her friends told her they saw a spirit in the bathroom and she was scared that she could die. When she told her mom about it, her mom told her she had seen a spirit before too. How exactly do you respond to something like this?

High Techpectations – Another cleverly named teacher blog, this one is also about technology in the classroom and beyond, but is voiced by Lucy Gray, who serves as the lead technology coach at the University of Chicago Urban Education Institute. Lucy’s blog is full of great resources and insights, including a peek into her own life as a mother of two. She’s raising her own kids in a Web 2.0 world, and seems to have a grasp on technology as it pertains to education. She’s also got a great web presence on various social media sites from Twitter to Digg, you can find her by the name elemenous.

DetentionSlip – This blog is dedicated to news on the education forefront, because it’s important to know what’s going on in schools other than your own. Presented with a semi-snarky and often humorous voice, this blog is a great resource for gathering education information no matter how strange or unlikely it seems. This is a blog more for in-the-know teachers and parents though, so it might be best to keep your younger students from reading some of it. The pictures accompanying the often-ridiculous posts will keep you cracking up, though.  -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Photo credit: NightRPStar on Flickr

Three questions for you:

1. Do you enjoy reading Instructify? 2. Are you a teacher who likes writing timely content for an Internet-based audience, injecting your thoughts and opinions into your work (or, as the kids say, “blogging”)? 3. Do you have lots of free time?

Since you wouldn’t be here if you answered “no” to the first question, and since I know nobody answered “yes” to the third question, it basically comes down to #2. If you answered “yes” to that one, you may have what it takes to write for Instructify.

As a blogger for Instructify, you’ll find and report on nifty web apps, tools, time-savers and ideas that teachers can use in their classrooms. You’ll be paid on a per-article basis. You won’t be able to quit your day job, but you won’t be writing for free, either.

If you’re interested, please send your resume and two writing samples to instructify[at]learnnc.org.

We’ll accept applications until December 9, 2008. Good luck! -BILL FERRIS

Photo credit: Looking Glass on flickr

Have you ever seen the words “embed” or “embed code” on a web site, and wondered what that meant? Embed refers to code that you can use to create a small version of a multimedia (visual and/or audio based) Web application on another Web page outside the service that it resides on.

For example, you can put (embed) a YouTube video on a blog or wiki page. But first, you have to face the code — don’t worry, it won’t be painful. First, copy the code. Services like You Tube, Slideshare, Flickr, and many others will usually have the embed code on the page for the video (see above for an example. If you see the video or slide show somewhere else, it might list a link to the embed code). Then copy the code.

Next figure out what you want to do with the code — in a blog post, a wiki (Wikispaces, Wet Paint, and PB Wiki all take embed code), or simple web page sites like Jottit.com? You will either look for an embed tool (usually, it looks like a TV set), or if it gives you the option of seeing “Code,” click on that. Paste the code where asked. In some cases (say, embedding You Tube video) you may just need to paste the page URL without all those pesky brackets.  You can also use this trick to add video to Google Earth place marks (just go to the properties page for a place mark, and add the You Tube embed code).

I hope this lets you see how EASY it is to add multimedia to your wikis, blog posts, and other places on the web. -ALICE MERCER

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What is RSS, and Where Can I Get Some for my Little Ones?

5 Sources for Free and Legal Images -If you blog or use any sort of photography in your presentations, you might want to start thinking about making sure those photos and images are legal for you to use. If you want to skip that step, try using one of these five sources from The Blog Herald. The best part is that they are free, so you won’t have to dole out any hard-earned cash, and you’ll still feel fine about using the images copyright free. Of course, there is always Creative Commons Flickr if all else fails.

Classroom Survival Kit: 25 Items You Need to Have on Hand In Your Classroom – From TeachingChildren.ca, this list includes all of the essentials for teachers, not  necessarily students. Though some of the items sound more like things you might need if you were going to commit a crime (tool box, dice, metal nail file, duct tape), most of the items here are crucially handy to have around. I personally would have never thought of keeping “thank you” cards around until the last minute, but I guess preparation helps.

11 Things You Shouldn’t Leave for School Without- This article from Dumb Little Man is meant for the college-bound, and it is never too early for seniors to start thinking about preparing themselves for success. These are all online resources, so if nothing else, sites like Ottobib.com — an online bibliography — provide resources students of all ages can use.

10 Quick Lesson Ideas for Substitute Teachers – Substitutes have it tough. My own mother substitute taught many classes in my school system, and though she had it pretty easy because many people loved her, most other subs didn’t top the list of people students respected.  These tips from Work Sheet Library should come in handy for any subs out there who might otherwise spend their whole day asking students to “settle down.” My favorite on the list: magic tricks. Nobody can make fun of a substitute teacher who does magic tricks…right?  -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Photo credit: curly_exp(l)osure on Flickr

LEARN NC, the same group of good-looking, smart and cool people who bring you Instructify, is now on Twitter! LEARN NC finds the most innovative and successful practices in K-12 education and makes them available to the teachers and students of North Carolina — and the world.

So after you’ve got your regular-sized blog fix at Instructify, head on over to twitter.com/learnnc to get your dose of micro-blogging. Oh yeah, and we want that section of who’s following our tweets to get packed so full of people it crashes the Twitter site, so follow along! -NICK YINGLING

LEARN NC on Twitter

A few months ago, I posted about reasons you should be blogging, but now, I want to extend that idea and give you some more reasons why. As if the first post wasn’t convincing enough.

• Not Enough of You Are Doing It – For those of you who are already blogging, skip to the next tip. For those of you who aren’t: why not? Blogging is a great avenue to connecting with other teachers and sharing information. Of the blogs I search on a daily basis, not enough are based in personal experience and lessons learned from the classroom. Sites like ours are designed to share tools and tips, but you are the ones on the battlefield. Who knows? You might connect with someone and learn some valuable lessons yourself.
• Your students are already doing it – Your students are already spending a boatload of time on the web. In fact they’re the ones who are making it. Do your part and represent your teacher brethren and sistren by having an online presence. In order to understand what youngsters like these days, you have to get in there and take a look around yourself. I’m not saying you should be a snoop or a tattler, but it is a good idea to know how and what they are talking about in hushed snickers around Billy’s iPhone.
• Organization – Remember last year when you had that one great comparison of Tom Sawyer to Sawyer from LOST? How did that metaphor go again? Drat, if only you had blogged about it when you got home, you could use it this year, too. Oh well. Blogging can help you keep a searchable record of your lessons.
• Get Some Attention – The web is a big, big place, and just because you teach in Greasy Corner, AR doesn’t mean you can’t be a rockstar on the web. With social networking sites in your niche, it is easy to become a teaching authority by accessing information from all over the world and helping to aggregate it.
• The Tools Are There – Remember that the web is growing, so you might want to have a good grasp of the tools that are available before 20 more pop up. There are some great blogging platforms out there, many of which are free. Check out WordPress, Blogger, and perhaps a more appropriate, niche built-in platform like TeacherLingo.

Until next time, friends. Remember: there’s no better time than the present to get going. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

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A Few Good Reasons You Should Start Blogging

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Photo credit: aditza on Flickr

Top 100 Language Blogs: Whether you teach a foreign language or English as a second language, you’ll want to pay a visit to these language blogs. You’ll find useful info about food, travel and culture. And, you know, words too.

50 Tips and Tricks to Create a Learning Space in Second Life: Second Life, that online realm where you can interact with semi-realistic avatars of folks from around the world, can be a powerful educational tool if you know how to use it right. Read up on these strategies and turn Second Life into a virtual classroom.

40 Places for College Students to Find Free Unabridged Books Online and 20 Best Websites to Download Free EBooks: I like free books. You like free books. Now you don’t even have to go to the library to get books for free thanks lists that are pretty much what they sound like.

50 Useful Blogging Tools for Teachers: Still thinking about jumping into blogging? If you’re itching to get started, check out this list of useful blogging tools for teachers called…well, you get the idea.

Photo credit: zen on flickr.

The first time I heard someone talk about Seesmic, I thought to myself: “This person has to be saying it wrong. ‘Seismic‘ is a word, and it’s not pronounced ‘seesmic’!” Well, although it is very rare for me to be wrong about something (really, very rare), I was in this case. And not only was I wrong, but I was also totally in the dark about a new, conversational video-sharing site that is changing the way people are able to communicate with each other!

Seesmic is an innovative new site that lets users communicate and connect online through video conversation, and has become known as the “Twitter of video” because of its micro-blogging appeal. Unlike most video hosting sites, though, it’s intended for posting instant videos of what you are doing or thinking about and having others respond to the conversation over time. It’s kind of like a message board, minus the anonymity.

What’s also pretty neat about Seesmic is that you can record your videos directly onto the website (which is handy if you want to post a quick update, or don’t have a lot of editing to do). But you also have the option to use your own camera or mobile phone, upload an existing video straight from your computer, or link to a video posted on a social network.

Seesmic could be a great tool to host an online debate on something you’re discussing in class and share with your students the perspectives of other people from around the world. You can start a thread by posting a video about a specific topic and other users can respond, starting a whole video conversation about your topic. And because conversations on Seesmic don’t happen in real time, you will have control over what you share with your students (as not everyone in the world is a friendly debater!).

While the community is still growing, people on Seesmic are already using the site to have conversations about all kinds of topics, from debates about “hummus vs. haggis,” to discussions about quality and quantity in terms of statistics, to just about anything. So go on, ask an open-ended question or state your opinion on something, and see what kind of conversation you can start! -LAUREN FROHNE

Seesmic

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10 Virtually Instant Ways to Improve Your Life – I’m all for improving my life, but why does it have to take soooo long? Here are ten easy ways to pull yourself up by your boot straps courtesy of Stepcase Lifehack. If you find yourself wanting to change something about your life, then why not start out with the simple stuff like Don’t over-generalize and Don’t take things too personally.

12 Ways to Use Project Censored in Your Classroom – Project Censored is an intiative designed to help aggregate news stories that often go under reported. This guide offers ways teachers can educate their students in fair journalism methods and help them understand the practice and importance of research. There are in-class activities and projects on the list, so if your students are studying media and journalism, this is a good place to start them on the right path.

 101 Scholarships Just For Teachers – From TeachingTips.com comes this amazing list of scholarships available for teachers working their way through college. It might be too late for most of us, but if you have some students who are interested in becoming teachers themselves, give them this list to ease college’s financial burdens. Some are region specific, so all 101 might not be completely pertinent. By the way, be sure and check out some of the other amazing lists on TeachingTips, they’ve got some great stuff there.

101 Things to Do When You’re Bored – I don’t know how anybody could possibly get bored when there are hundreds of Instructify posts to read, but if you find yourself with some idle time, then try out a few of these activities to rescue yourself from ennui. Lists Galore recommends flying a kite, starting a blog, or you know, making a list. – JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Photo credit: Wetsun on Flickr

I’m completely fine with a writer who bends the rules. There’s a little thing called style, right? I’m sure that as an educator you’ve no doubt had a student try to pass off errors as style. I know I tried when I was in school.

As they grow and mature as writers, it’s necessary for your students to crawl before they can walk. They should at least know the ground rules before they start breaking them in the name of style. And as we all know, there are plenty of rules. There is one rule—out of a whole set of rules about the use of quotation marks—that can be very effective in conveying irony, sarcasm and subtlety. Or, it can be very effective in unintentionally looking ironic, sarcastic and boldly unusual. That rule is the use of quotation marks around words and short phrases.

The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks is a great site that features the abuse of quotation marks and the amusing results. While this site is intended to show the humor of misinterpreting other peoples’ bad punctuation, you can use it as an effective tool to demonstrate to your students what not to do. You might even want to mention that anyone can submit a photo to this blog. It could give your students a strange motivation to pay attention to punctuation as they walk around in their day-to-day lives. What sort of strange world would that be? –NICK YINGLING

The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks

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Looking for a platform for a school or classroom website? Have you always wanted to have a classroom blog that allows blogging between parents and you, or you and your students? If so, WordPress has everything you are looking for and a lot more – plus it’s the platform that powers Instructify, so you know it’s high quality.

WordPress is a free publishing platform. This site is extremely user friendly – in addition to being a quick sign-up, the site has great tutorials to help walk you through setting up your blog or website. All you need is a computer, Internet access, and an email address to get started. WordPress has more than 60 different themes for you to customize your blog to fit your needs. You can switch between your themes at any time with a few clicks of your mouse. You can also add event calenders, links and pages. Upload your own pictures, or included images from Flickr or Photobucket. Don’t forget to add a stats collector to your site that will give you instant statistics on the different visitors you have to your site.

The choice is yours whether to share your page with the public or a selected few. As for interactivity, WordPress gives you the freedom and security to allow you to have comments posted on your site with or without your prior approval. You can even set your site up to not allow any comments at all.

Blogging is a great way to keep parents informed about what’s going on in your classroom. If you blog with WordPress, you can allow parents to become active participants in your class activities. WordPress is also a great tool to allow students to collaborate on group projects. You can have as many blogs as you want. The sky is the limit. -MONIQUE ST. LOUIS

WordPress

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Bizcovering had an interesting post I came across, 10 Universal Truths About Teaching. The article covers some things that educators will inevitably encounter during their careers. Among my favorite was on ‘Meetings’:

They didn’t tell you about the meetings when you were training, did they? You know, the meetings that take place before, during and after the working day? The meetings where others teachers you don’t know talk about students you have never heard about – interminably, without pausing for breath or comment.

This article is well written and quite funny. They’ve also put together a fun graphic for each truth, accompanied by an appropriate quote. For example, the truth ‘Explaining Stuff’ is paired with this:

“To describe what you’ve read is like trying to explain music in writing.” – Peter Hoeg

It’s nice to hear some of these truths coming from a more business oriented voice, as writer R J Evans has also written a series on ICT Training. Blog Bizcovering does a nice job presenting this article amongst some of their less accessible for teachers material. The #1 Truth on the list is open ended, and we’d love to hear in our own comments section of some of the truths you’ve found in your teaching experience. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

10 Universal Truths About Teaching