Instructify

This site, and others, feature lots of great places for your students to create content, and to locate materials like audio, photos, and videos to mashup, or include in their own creations. We have reviewed sites that have photos that have a creative commons license, but what if the picture or audio clip you want to use is copyrighted (not in the public domain, or licensed in Creative Commons)? Now we’re going to talk about legal concepts, but since we aren’t lawyers (we just may pretend we are in our classrooms), this is not legal advice, yahda, yahda…

First the good news: there is a legal concept called “Fair Use” that allows educators to use snippets of copyrighted material. Fair Use applies to educators, journalist, and satirists (us and Jon Stewart, yipee!). It says you can use copyrighted materials, BUT the use is governed by these four principles:

1. Purpose and character of the use - Why are you using this material?
2. Nature of the material - In what form are you using the material?
3. Amount of the portion used - How much of the original work are you using?
4. Effect on the potential market - Does your use hurt the original owner financially(1)

Now the not-so-good news. Naturally enough, the law on this is purposefully vague to leave it up to the courts to decide on a case-by-case basis. I know it’s never been my dream to be a Supreme Court test case (maybe a nightmare). Because of this, there have been two responses by educators, we play it safe and avoid the use of copyright protected materials, and/or we have come up with some “rules of thumb” to guide our use of copyrighted materials (e.g. you can use 10 seconds but not more than 10% of copyrighted audio, you can excerpt a paragraph from a chapter, etc.).

I’m going to finish up this article with a list of some guides that give some rules of thumb, but I will be following up with another piece about different approaches to this copyright conundrum. -ALICE MERCER

(1) Tony Jongejan’s Presentation on Copyright at NECC 2008 - Where I got the principles listed above

TechLearning Copyright Guideline for Administrators - A guide with a handy-dandy chart from Hall Davidson

Related Stuff:

Download Free Copyrighted Books with WOWIO. Yes, it’s Legal.

15 Awesome Tutorial Websites You Probably Don’t Know About
A couple weeks ago I decided to take up juggling. Right away I was amazed at the high quality tutorials I found online. If you have a random hobby you’d like to try, or you’re looking for a project during these summer months, check out this list of sites.

100 Unbelievably Useful Reference Sites You’ve Never Heard Of
Here’s a great big list of sites you can use to find everything from literature to library references to health care. You can also find fun stuff like the Dialectizer, which can translate your text to sound like Elmer Fudd. Who doesn’t need that?

10 Brain Training Tips To Teach and Learn
Keep your brain fit for optimum learning potential. The folks at SharpBrains have these ten tips to turn you and your students into efficient thinking and learning machines.

Video Toolbox: 150+ Online Video Tools and Resources
Need to edit a class video project? Want some advice on how to create a video podcast? Or do you need to convert video to a different file format? Mashable has all that and more in this great post. -BILL FERRIS

Photo credit:  zen on flickr

Top 10 Office Supply Hacks - Get some extra mileage out of the supply closet. Lifehacker has 10 bonus uses for everyday office supplies. Keep snack foods fresh by using binder clips as chip clips. Did some clod write on your white board with permanant marker? Dry erase ink will make it come right off. You’ll want these ideas handy before class starts again.

17 Writing Secrets  - Want to bump your students’ writing from good to great (or at least from middling to halfway decent), Writer’s Digest presents these 17 writing secrets to help students make good word choices, and remind them of the importance of fixing stuff that’s kinda wordy and lame revision.

101+ Web Resources for Students - Courtesy of StudentHacks.org, this list is pretty much what it sounds like. It features everything from dictionaries to Shakespeare’s complete works to resources for the yearbook staff. If your students are looking for some handy Web tools, this is a great place to start.

100 Helpful Web Tools for Every Kind of Learner - Different students learn in different ways. What works for visual learners may not make sense to a kinesthetic learner. If you’re fixing to differentiate your instruction, check out these tools that cater to different learning styles. -BILL FERRIS

Photo credit: MarkyBon on flickr

It’s a good thing they didn’t let me design the Instructify site. We probably would’ve ended up with a generic graphic of a chalk board on a background of brown and light blue, one of about three color schemes I know looks good.

If you have art students as inept as I at choosing colors, LaurenMarie at Creative Curio reminds us that picking good color combinations is as easy as looking at your trusty color wheel. I felt pretty foolish when the article reminded me that you can find complimentary colors simply by looking at opposite sides of the color wheel.

This is helpful advice for students in your painting class or who are experimenting with Web design. If you’re not an art teacher, it’s equally handy for choosing which color of paint matches your couch, or just trying to put an outfit together when you get dressed in the morning.

The problem with everybody having access to programs like Photoshop is that it convinces artistically talentless folks like myself that they’re graphic designers. Maybe if more of us n00bs learned the basics of color and design, the Web would be a better looking place. -BILL FERRIS

The Color Wheel and Color Theory via Creative Curio

Related Stuff:

Five Tools to Liven Up Art Class

Paint your Masterpiece with ArtRage 2

Are you ready for your close-up shot? Are your students? If so, there are a couple of video contests out there to show off your filmmaking skills. First up is AFI ScreenNation: Claim to Fame Challenge which is open to students 13 and older to write about their hometown’s claim to fame. Requirements are that the film is five minutes or less, and that you interview at least three people. The prize? A Sony DCR-SR45 ~ HDD Handycam Camcorder w/ 30 GB Hard Disk Drive, Tripod.

Next up, a slightly different contest. From WatchKnow.org, make a video from a list of topics from K-12 education. The idea of this project is to build a library of instructional materials - sort of like this blog. Material submitted will be available under a creative commons license. Right now the project is in beta, and they are looking for input, but it should start in full force in the fall. -ALICE MERCER

WatchKnow.org
AFI ScreenNation: Claim to Fame Challenge

Related Stuff:

Produce an Educational Video in Your Classroom
How to Easily Create a Claymation Movie Class Project
Give Your Shaky, Low-Res Videos a Makeover
Get Ready for your Closeup: Kids’ Vid

Photo credit: kino-eye on flickr.

Ever wanted to make plastic? Okay, have you ever wanted to make something out of plastic, but didn’t know how? Just curious? Instructables, recently mentioned here, has a nifty video for making plastic with milk and vinegar. This makes a “plastic” called casein (I think it makes a nifty knitting needle).

The nice thing about Instructables are the related videos, which have extensions like making “green” plastic toys. There are also comments, which with this video helped to explain some of the science behind the process. Teach your kids, and yourself something new with Instructables. -ALICE MERCER

Homemade Plastic via Instructables

Related Stuff:

Extract DNA from Bananas

No longer will you take hours and hours to put together picture presentations for Open House, awards ceremonies, or end-of-the-year graduations. Liven up any presentation with the use of Photo Story 3 and your digital pictures. The program is so easy you can have a professional-looking presentation in just moments.

Photo Story 3 is a free download for Windows users. All you do is import your digital pictures into the program with the click of the mouse and you are ready to go. The program instantly assigns a different transition to each photo to give it that made-in-Hollywood look, and you’re done. The small file size makes it easy to send your photo story in an e-mail.

If you’re not happy with your initial story or need to edit something, it’s not a problem. The program allows you the freedom to move pictures around once you have imported them to help tell your story or sequence your presentation just right. With just a click of the mouse you can touch-up, rotate, change the assigned transition, or crop your pictures. You can also liven up your presentation by adding music or personal narration. You can help tell your story by adding titles or captions. Once you have completed your photo story you can view it on your computer, TV, or a Windows Mobile-based portable device.

Throw out those boring old book reports and let your students use this program to create movie trailers to tell about the books they’ve read. Initiate lessons and inspire students in the areas of science, social studies, and reading. Allow your students to create a multimedia project to present what they have learned from thematic units you have taught.  You don’t need to spend a million bucks to make your presentations look like a million bucks. -MONIQUE ST. LOUIS

Photo Story 3

Related Stuff:
Tell Your Story with VoiceThread
Make PowerPoint More Than a Snazzy Overhead Presentation
Share and SlideShare Alike

I loved playing with Legos as a kid. Trouble was, I was always a brick or two short of creating the perfect fort for my G.I. Joes, thus leaving them vulnerable to Cobra attack.

If only I’d had Lego Digital Designer back then, I could’ve designed the forts, plus helicopters and tanks for good measure. With Lego Digital Designer, you have access to hundreds of virtual Lego blocks of all shapes, sizes and colors (plus a wide assortment of little Lego people, too).

Lego Digital Designer lets you build from scratch as well as with pre-loaded kits. LDD will also walk you through the more difficult designs. The download is free, but if you’re willing to spend a few dollars, it lets you order a custom set of blocks to make your digital masterpiece a reality.

This is a great re-creation of a classic childhood toy, and is a good way to prime your students’ creative juices. Now that I’m an adult, I won’t be using Lego Digital Designer for childish pursuits like designing G.I. Joe fortresses. I’ll be using it to design my next house instead. -BILL FERRIS

Lego Digital Designer

Not too long ago, I wrote about Johnny Lee, who made a marvelous interactive whiteboard from a $40 Wii remote. This is a great example of how doing-it-yourself is a viable option when it comes to learning how something works, and how you can make it work differently. Not only is do-it-yourself learning fun and educational, it is inspirational, too. Edutopia, website of The George Lucas Educational Foundation, presents this great article about the different ways you can access DIY projects and the resources that will help you along the way.

Check out the growing communities of DIYers online, where aspiring hackers swap instructions for all kinds of projects. Web sites such as Instructables and Make offer project plans, videos, and tips any teacher can find useful. The excellent Howtoons has simple, inexpensive projects that kids would enjoy, presented in a fun cartoon format. These simple projects are not as elaborate as Lee’s, but the sense of satisfaction is the same.

If you’re wondering what to do with your students in order to help them use their creative and technical skills, this article has some great places to start. Who knows what they might be inspired to create, or as Lee did, re-create. - JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Hack Attack: Do-It-Yourself Projects Enhance Learning

I’d really like to use some mind maps. I know I can benefit from using one, but I really don’t have the time to sit down and think one up and then design it and then oh great its 3 a.m. and I’ve got to wake up for work in a few hours.

Pay a visit to Mindomo. Now you’ll be free to stay up late working while filling actual content into the thousands of already created templates - spread out across several different topics and several different languages. -NICK YINGLING

Mindomo

Related Stuff:
Brainstorming is a Breeze with bubbl.us
Branch Out Your Thinking with Exploratree

Lights, camera, video…in the classroom? You betcha! If you think kids like watching videos, wait until they start making them. Creating stuff is at a higher level of Bloom’s Taxonomy than bubbling in a test sheet. But where to begin?

This handy and easy-to-understand guide from Education.com on producing an educational video is a great place to start. It breaks the process down into pre-production, production, and post production, step-by-step. You don’t need a lot of fancy equipment, as most digital cameras today have a video mode on them (my experience with Flip has been fantastic). I would add only one point to this otherwise superb article - for editing there is a free resource for Windows users in Movie Maker. It is not the most stable program (in the interest of disclosure, I have had Adobe Premiere Elements lock on me too, just not as often), but I’ll share a resource that should help you with these problems, PapaJohn - Movie Maker 2 - Issues-1.

A few other resources to help you out are Mathew Needleman’s excellent Video in the Classroom.com site. If you think your kids are too young, wait till you see what he’s done with 2nd graders. If there is an NYU Film school for videos in education it’s the AFI (American Film Institute) which does a lot of workshops teaching educators how to effectively help students make interesting, high-quality videos. -ALICE MERCER

Producting an Educational Video via Education.com
PapaJohn - Movie Maker 2 - Issues-1
AFI ScreenNation
Video in the Classroom.com — Integrating Video Production in the Elementary Classroom and Beyond

Related Stuff:
All Educational, All the Time–TeacherTube

Photo Credit: Stacy Lynn Baum on flickr

Lights, camera, action! Looking for a way to bring your students’ book reports, science/social studies projects, or writing projects to life? Let them create a Claymation Movie.

Claymation is a type of stop motion animation created by moving an object in very small amounts and taking a picture between each movement - think the California Raisins or Wallace and Gromit. You then run all of the pictures together at a fast pace to create the illusion that the object(s) are really moving.

Thanks to the low cost and high availability of digital technology, you can create your own claymation movie with only a computer, digital camera, tripod, and clay. You start by placing a clay figure(s) in front of a backdrop. A cut-out box works great for this. You take a digital picture then move the object(s) a very small amount and take another picture. You continue in this sequence until you have moved the object(s) through all of the motions to tell your story. To liven up your movies or create more drama, incorporate props with your clay object(s). You then insert the digital pictures into a program like Movie Maker. You can make the duration of each photo frame as short as necessary to give your clay figure(s) the illusion that they are moving when you play the movie. If you want to enhance your Claymation you can add narration by using Audacity or add some sound effects by using Sound Dogs. -MONIQUE ST.LOUIS

Claymation Movie - Shooting Hoops, courtesy a 2nd grade student in Burke County, NC

You want me to draw a picture for you? Well, I’ve got the programs to do it. Who doesn’t want more self-expression? Who has longed for something more interesting than MS Paint? Here, dear readers, are alternatives!

1. art.com artPad will let you paint with two tools, a brush (which you can change the size on) and in an homage to Jackson Pollack, a paint can that you can use to splatter paint from.
2. Flash PAINT will give you a grid to work on (nice for linear work), and you can change the paint/pencil depth create a realistic pencil or watercolor effect.
3. offtype.net has the easiest interface, and starts you immediately on a canvas. This one is great for young ‘uns, or folks with limited computer skills. Oh, you can also embed (put a copy) of the drawing canvas in your blog or Webpage.
4. Cubescape will give you a three dimensional option, PLUS you get to blow up (as in explode, not expand) your work, or replay its construction.
5. viscosity - it’s difficult to describe what you are creating here. Imagine a multi layer pudding in a clear bowl, and swirling a spoon through it moving the layers and colors. That’s sort of what you end up with. Anyway check out the example above. It’s really easy to use, and the results are interesting.

art.com artPad
Flash PAINT
offtype.net
Cubescape
viscosity

I’d like to credit Larry Ferlazzo for tipping me off to most of these. -ALICE MERCER

Related Stuff:
Looking for Kid-Friendly Art? Try Haring Kids
Mathematics from the Right Side of Your Brain
Create Happy Little Digital Trees and More with Inkscape
Paint your Masterpiece with ArtRage 2

There are few artists more suited to use in the primary and elementary classroom than the late Keith Haring. Many of you may not know who Keith Haring is, but you’ll recognize his quirky and iconic “men” (see the example above). His work was used for a number of public campaigns benefiting children and AIDS, from which he died in 1990. Now that work lives on at the website, Haring Kids.

Haring Kids is wonderful not only because of the art (which is kid friendly), but the writing is also suitable for early readers. The site boasts a variety of activities. First, kids can find animations of typical Haring figures. What’s the Story? is a great writing prompt for language arts. You can also find e-Cards, printable coloring sheets, and games (like Hangman and tic-tac-toe), all of which are rendered in Haring-script and with his figures. The art and project sections show examples from children.

This site is great for both art and language art instruction. So add some (primary) colors into your classroom with Haring Kids. -ALICE MERCER

Haring Kids

If you’ve ever wanted to write a book, but you never thought about how it could possibly come to fruition, then you should know it’s easier than you think. With Blurb, you can create a book of just about any size or shape, with any number of pages, and a fully customized look and feel. The content is all up to you, though, so you’ll be responsible for the hard part.

Once you finish your masterpiece, you can download the easy-to-use editor software to arrange and layout the book the way you want it. After that, pricing per individual book starts at $12.95. You can order as few or many as you like, and your work can be featured on the site for purchase by others if you wish. You’ll retain the copyrights, and you can even set your price to determine your own profit level.

Blurb’s self-publishing platform could make for an awesome class project. Your students could be responsible for creating a collaborative project full of their own musings, pictures, stories and drawings. If you’ve got a web-savvy class, you can also take advantage of the blog-to-book feature and have them blog throughout the year, and then collect their works into a group project or individual books. The service and software are so easy to use, who knows, maybe you’ll see an Instructify book sometime soon. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Blurb