Instructify

Experience an online archaeological project at Interactive Dig: El Carrizal
By clicking to Interactive Dig: El Carrizal from Archaeology Magazine, students can see photo updates and read first-hand accounts of this in-progress archaeological project.

Video DownloadHelper helpfully helps you download helpful videos. Helpfully.
The fine folks at Video DownloadHelper have created a plug-in for Firefox that makes video downloading as simple as pressing a button.

60 Second Recap summarizes classic literature
Everyone needs help wrapping their heads around a book from time to time. If you teach literature, that time occurs every day. You can outsource some of the necessary explanation by sending your students to 60 Second Recap, a site that summarizes the plot, characters, and themes of a book in 60-second episodes for each.

Get Library of Congress Videos on iTunes U
You now can access lots of free audio and video from the Library of Congress on iTunes U. There’s a lot of great material suitable for a history class, such as early films made by Edison himself (or his company, at least). There are also fascinating oral histories from actual slaves in the Voices from the Days of Slavery collection.

BY BILL FERRIS

Many years ago, Walt Disney drew a little cartoon mouse who in turn built a theme park with his own four-fingered hands. Or something. Today, your elementary students can create cartoons of their own, as well as stories, drawings, cards and more at Kerpoof, an online creativity site brought to you by Disney.

Kerpoof gets kids creating with a simple interface that has a surprising amount of options. The movie section is particularly impressive — you can have several characters onscreen at once, and direct their movement, actions and speech. Compared to online animation tool Xtranormal, Kerpoof gives you far more control over your characters — Xtranormal’s free version only allows two characters, and they can’t walk around. However, Kerpoof doesn’t allow you to switch camera angles, nor do the characters have voice simulation (which may be a positive, depending on your point of view). (more…)

BY BILL FERRIS

This week’s by the numbers segment shows you easy ways to be more productive, as well as the tools to help you do it. Read all about it after the jump.

Stripped GTD: 3 Habits That Make You More Productive
If you’ve heard of David Allen’s Getting Things Done system but are a bit intimidated by the implementation process (he recommends setting aside two full days to reorganize your personal organization system), Stepcase Lifehack has a streamlined version, boiling GTD down to its barest essentials. Check out these habits and dial up your productivity.

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BY BILL FERRIS

This week’s MBTN features an express flight to Mars, Web 2.0 project ideas, alternatives to book reports, and online sites where you can learn a new language. Read about all of it after the jump.

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BY BILL FERRIS

Check out these upcoming educational grants, as listed on Grant Wrangler.

Last minute:

Gladys Marinelli Coccia Awards — Deadline August 1
This award recognizes young (14 to 17-year-old) female social entrepreneurs who start enterprises for the common good. The winner receives $2,000 for the enterprise, travel, and access to social enterprise resources from Youth Service America.

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BY BILL FERRIS

I like construction paper on classroom bulletin boards as much as the next guy. Cut-out letters on a solid background are a classic look. But 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.

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BY NICK YINGLING

Information aesthetics, or infosthetics for those in a hurry, is a term coined to describe the relationship between information visualization and creative design — the emphasis there being the word “creative.” Sure, any chump can make a pie chart to display some information, but how about a pie chart in 3D? That’s a very oversimplified example, but you get it, we get it, everybody gets it.

Spezify is a new search engine that draws upon various forms of multimedia and information sources to respond to your queries, and then presents you with the results in a cool visual display. Results are culled from various sources, such as Flickr, Wikipedia, Twitter, and Amazon (among plenty of others). The result is a very appealing mash of text and images.

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BY BILL FERRIS

Set course for Wikipedia! Facebook ahoy! And so on. These quaint nautical terms arose from a time when people depended on maps and charts much more crude than the Mapquest and GPS-enabled phones to which we’ve grown accustomed. The internet, a mistress as untamable as the seven seas of yore, is the subject of the Internet Mapping Project, a modern-day cartographic endeavor commissioned by Kevin Kelly, author of the Cool Tools blog and lots of other ‘net niftiness. Kelly has called for amateur Rand McNallys everywhere to “Please draw a map of the internet, as you see it. Indicate your ‘home.’”

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Edit, add effects, create vector graphics and choose color palettes

BY NICK YINGLING

Human eyeballs are delicate organs, while bird talons are razor sharp and unforgiving. Go ask the citizens of Bodega Bay if you don’t believe me. Or ask this actress.

In the aesthetic world of visual design, though, a bunch of birds can be your eyeballs’ best friends. Aviary, a free image editing suite, is a great resource for you to do visual design. Everything is web-based, which not only allows you to save space on your system but also allows you to use the program on any computer, anywhere.

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Have you ever wanted to make your own animated movie? The script, the soundtrack, the camera angles – if it were all up to you, you’d do an awesome job — probably better than Steven Spielberg, right? Well, move over Steve-o because with Xtranormal’s Text-to-movie website, you can create your own animated flick. Okay, so with the free version of Text-to-movie, your animated features probably won’t win an Oscar, but that doesn’t mean this product isn’t useful in the classroom. With a few simple steps, you or your students can create a movie. (more…)

The Panamericana School of Art and Design created a clever ad campaign that would make a great exercise for your art class. It’s simple, too. The test consists of a sheet of paper with a series of Xs or Os. Students are challenged to use these letters as starting points to create as many drawings as they can.

It’s a beautifully simple idea, and would make a great activity to start your class, not unlike a journal entry in English comp. FYI, some of the drawings may not be appropriate for your students, so you may want to take the idea without sending them there. Are you already using ideas like this one? Let us know in the comments! -BILL FERRIS

School of Art and Design Creativity Test via Toxel.com

Related stuff:

Spin the color wheel to make art projects look great

Lightning Bug lights up your writing ideas

How often have you found yourself thinking about screen printing projects? Not that much, I’d guess. Well check out this awesome idea. If that doesn’t get you motivated to transfer some print ideas of your own I don’t know what will.

This guide to DIY Screen Printing on Instructables takes you through the process from start to finish. Not even just start to finish, it’ll tell you what supplies you need beforehand and how to clean up after you’re done. This project says that the supplies will cost less than $10, so that’s not a bad cost to cover.

Instructables will rope you into registering with their site to get access to additional images and additional access. Don’t sweat this — registering a username with them is quick, painless and you won’t be bombarded with spam emails. The handiest of those extra materials is a PDF file for you to download, allowing you to print it and take it in to the classroom.

This project seems like an obvious fit for an art classroom, you don’t need me to point that out. But last time I checked, schools also still have sports teams and various student organizations. How much would it cost to send away for a bulk order of t-shirts? I don’t know. But how about this scenario: you buy the blank shirts, buy the $10 for DIY screen printing supplies, and make the shirts on the cheap. Meanwhile, the rest of the group thinks you’ve sent the order off to a professional place…you pocket the difference!* -NICK YINGLING

*Editor’s note: Embezzlement is illegal. Neither Instructify nor Nick Yingling advise or condone illegal activities (though sometimes Nick will encourage people to perform illegal acts because he is a twisted manipulator of others. Think of a sort of Loki/Pan trickster character). You will be a terrible jerk if you steal and betray your colleagues’ trust. Besides, your organization will probably ask for receipts.

DIY Screen Printing on Instructables

Related stuff:

Turn Useless Totes into Stylish Messenger Bags

Do It Yourself Learning

Create Liquid Ice Sculptures

20 Kids * 20 Kites * 20 Minutes
From the Big Wind Kite Factory in Hawaii, this link provides a complete rundown of instructions and supplies to get 20 of your students building kites and getting them in the air in 20 minutes. Sounds like a cool springtime project for an elementary art class.

Top 10 Tools for a Free Online Education
Want to learn programming? Maybe you’d like to learn to play an instrument or speak a language. Lifehacker has 10 great tools you or your students can use to learn cool new skills.

10 Must-Try Social Media Sites for College Students
While Instructify’s audience is predominantly K-12, a lot of your students will head off to college someday — possibly in a few short months. These 10 sites can help them thrive in their new learning environment by helping them find internships, stay organized, or maybe just find a ride to class.

20+ Must-Read Education Technology Blogs for Teachers, Students, and e-Learners
If Instructify whets your appetite for even more ways to bring nifty tools into your classroom, check out this list, which is pretty much what it sounds like. The fact that they’ve omitted Instructify is clearly just an oversight. -BILL FERRIS

Photo credit: .mands. on Flickr.

Don’t hand-count that stack of worksheets you need to pass out in class tomorrow. Let your printer do the counting for you. A recent article on Lifehacker features this great tip from one of their readers.

Say you’ve got a stack of 200 worksheets you need to divvy up into stacks of 25 for your classes tomorrow. Put your pre-printed worksheets into the paper drawer of your printer as if they were regular sheets of printer paper. Open a new, blank Word document, and print 25 copies (or whatever number you need) of the blank page. Your printer will spit out exactly the number you require. Repeat as needed (just don’t forget to remove any extras from the printer lest someone else print over them).

This little trick finds that rare axis of simple and clever that makes me feel embarrassed for not thinking of it myself. Give this a try next time you have to sort handouts or worksheets. Your fingers will thank you. -BILL FERRIS

Use a Printer for Counting Stacks of Pre-Printed Documents via Lifehacker

Lightning Bug is a web resource to help writers of all sorts get their brains storming and their ducks in a row. There’s an array of tips, tricks and hints all designed to help you and your students find, develop and finish a story. The first step is to check out what kind of writer you are: whether you’re the active, private, linguistic, musical or artistic type of writer, and then you can begin to find out more about what your writing type entails. For instance, if you’re a linguistic writer, you might want to research and read a lot before you put pen to paper. Likewise, if you are a “private” writer, you might want to keep a journal of your personal thoughts before you get into writing.

After you’ve found your writing type, Lightning Bug offers up all sorts of writing exercises and outside resources to help you get your ideas in motion. If you want to get your students writing, this site is a great place to get them thinking. Some of the peril of becoming a writer is not knowing what to write, so this is just the type of resource that could come in handy when it comes to getting those creative juices flowing. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Lightning Bug

Related stuff:

Do a writing warm-up with One Two Fiver

Take a lesson from The Writing Teacher

Generate Students’ Creativity with Simile of the Day Generator

Need creative ideas? Try 911 Writers Block