Instructify

You’ve got a couple more days to apply for a Planet Connect environmental grant
The $1000 Planet Connect Environmental Grant deadline has been extended until November 15. If you read our post about last year’s grant, you know it’s awarded to the best solutions proposed by students to solve environmental problems.

Download chemistry podcasts at ChemPod
The most recent episode features two Nobel-Prize winners chatting about ribosomes and the reprogramming thereof. Count on developments involving the usual heavy hitters in chemistry, including DNA, RNA, MIT, and the GFP (that’s green fluorescent protein, a discovery that netted Martin Chalfie a Nobel Prize — do you see a trend in the quality of guests this program gets?).

Stop by Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood on the web
When I was a kid, I always wanted to go to Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Like actually go there, meet Speedy Delivery, check out the Trolley, all of it. If I’d only had the good sense to be born twenty years later, I could have paid a visit via the internet to the excellent Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood website.

Build your own typefaces with FontStruct
The most obvious use for FontStruct would be as an art project — students can really exercise their creativity, as well as learn about typography, an important skill for any future graphic designers. World-language teachers can get in on the act, too. FontStruct lets you develop letters for several different alphabets, including Katakana (Japanese), Bopomofo (Mandarin Chinese), Arabic, Hebrew, Bengali, and others.

BY BILL FERRIS

As the perpetrator of some of the worst handwriting in a fifty mile radius, I’ve grown to love choosing the right font. The right typeface can produce the sort of artful lettering my hands can’t. Or so I thought. FontStruct lets me use my hands (by way of my mouse) to create my own fonts that I can download and use. Oh, okay, so it’s not exactly handwriting, but it’s the most legible thing my hands have ever produced.

FontStruct works via a grid method. Simply fill in the grid with blocks of various shapes to form each letter. Some of the existing fonts on the site allow you to clone them, so you can get a better look at how the magic happens. There are a lot of shapes to try out on the grid, and creating an entire alphabet will take some time, but isn’t it worth it to have your own custom-built typeface?

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BY BILL FERRIS

When I was a kid, I always wanted to go to Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Like actually go there, meet Speedy Delivery, check out the Trolley, all of it. If I’d only had the good sense to be born twenty years later, I could have paid a visit via the internet to the excellent Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood website.

Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood on the PBS Kids website lets you look at classic clips from the show. Elementary kids can watch video field trips in which Fred Rogers takes in a performance by Yo-Yo Ma, visits a museum, and guides kids on a trip to the doctor’s office for a checkup. Kids can read stories, play games, and build a neighborhood of their own.

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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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BY REBECCAH HAINES

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

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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

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