Instructify

BY BILL FERRIS

If you use the polling program Poll Everywhere, they’ve just added a few more features. Audience members can now add Tweets directly to your PowerPoint slides (you can still moderate them before displaying, of course). You can also collect donations for your fundraiser via MobileCause. And just in case you’re thinking of making the jump from the free (poll up to 30 students) option to a premium plan, they’ve recorded several short videos that explain PE’s advanced features.

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BY REBECCAH HAINES

It being pretty early in the summer, I know you’re not really thinking about developing that perfect lesson plan.  However, in mid-September, when you’re frazzled from start of school madness, parents’ night, and you realize you don’t have a lesson for tomorrow, you’ll want to refer back to this website, Science with NOAA Research. 

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BY BILL FERRIS

This week’s MBTN features larger file attachments for Gmail users, following your favorite authors on Twitter, and how to shoot better video. Read more after the jump.

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Six Ways to Transform your Presentation
I’m still learning the whole presentation thing. I’ve probably made every classic presentation mistake, from mumbling to mistaking my PowerPoint slide show for an outline. Stepcase Lifehack has a great list of presentation tips for n00bs like me. Number one: ditch PowerPoint. I tried this for my last presentation and found it very liberating. This info will help you prepare a conference presentation, make your daily teaching more engaging, or come in handy for the forensics team.

26 Must-Have Free Fonts
Have you deleted Comic Sans from your computer yet? If not, I’ll wait here while you do that. Good. Now that that overused typeface is out of your life forever, what will you use for your bulletin boards and newsletters? Presidia Creative brings you 26 free fonts that will make your art projects and handouts look more slick. You’ll never need Comic Sans again.

Five Best Free Data Recovery Tools
Nothing places hard drives in more peril than finals week. At this time of year, the vengeful god Murphy inflicts horrible maladies upon the data of students and teachers worldwide for not heeding his law. Fortunately, atonement is within reach. Lifehacker has a rundown of five data-recovery tools that can bring Little Johnny’s term paper back to life just in time for him to print it out so his dog can eat it. -BILL FERRIS

Photo credit: Photocapy on Flickr.

Google does it again.  This time it’s a new layer for Google Earth that uses NASA-funded maps to show carbon dioxide emissions from various sources.  Of course, you can download Google Earth 5 and get the information so you can make your own maps, but you can view an example here.

In a classroom, maps like this can have many applications. The most obvious would be in a science class if you were studying climate change. You could compare and contrast the emissions from electricity production and the industrial sector.  Additionally, you could use the map to study your own area’s carbon footprint and compare it with other areas. Students could use the data within Google Earth to create a “tour” showing how various sectors and/or geographical areas contribute to carbon dioxide emissions.

I’m sure that once you play around with the maps and look at the data on your own, you’ll find many ways to integrate it into your own classroom. -REBECCAH HAINES

USA CO2 Emissions from fossil fuels 2002

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Whenever I see that I have a voicemail, I’m instantly demoralized. I’m not that busy, but man, am I impatient. Dial voicemail, dial in pass code, listen to robot tell me that there’s a new voicemail, dial number to listen to new voicemail, consider possible phone-related seppuku methods — you get the point.

Now, with K7 Unified Messaging, you can have your voicemails and faxes emailed directly to you. It takes a little bit of effort up front to arrange everything in a workable manner — after you set up your call-forwarding options to have your original number sent to the number K7 issues for you, you’ll pretty much be in business. The voicemails and faxes will arrive as attachments to the email that you receive. K7 will also have a private mailbox you can access directly by logging into the K7 website.

How might this be useful to you in the classroom? Its not. But whenever your central office sends a caller to your voicemail after you’ve left for the day, or if your students call to beg for an assignment extension, getting it before you go to work the next morning can be pretty handy. Also, if you end up with a bunch of messages, you might reclaim some more of your time in the morning. -NICK YINGLING

K7 Unified Messaging

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Have you ever had a colleague or student send you a file you have no idea how to open? If unfamiliar file extensions like “ODT,” “RGH” or “$S“ make you want to shout “!@#$%” you should visit OpenWith.org, a site that helps you find the program that will open whatever file you have — most of the time with free software. Spreadsheets, images, plugins, OpenWith can find all sorts of file types. Simply search for your mystery extension and OpenWith will find a program that can read it. You can also download a handy desktop tool to make looking up extensions even easier.  It’s an EXE file, in case you were wondering. That’s one file type you shouldn’t have to look up. -BILL FERRIS

OpenWith.org

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The National Center for Education Statistics is “the primary federal entity for collecting and analyzing data related to education.” Basically, if it involves a statistic about education, you can find it at NCES. Their Kids’ Zone is a branch of the site geared towards children, and provides activities for statistics and/or education.

Users can look up any school, college, or university, public or private, to get information like student-teacher ratios, class sizes, and tuition costs. In addition to demographic information, the NCES Kids’ Zone has tools to help kids create their own graphs using their own data, and games and quizzes in several subject areas. Some are great, and some are just silly (like matching universities to mascots, although I will admit to being pleased to see my own alma mater represented, even if there isn’t any true academic merit to the game — go Black Bears!) but poking around, you can find some gems. The Math Teasers would make a good weekly puzzle or challenge question for extra credit, and if you’re into things-of-the-day to get your students thinking, the home page has a daily word, quote, and historical fact.

NCES is also asking for kids to submit their own suggestions for activities for the site, which might be a great way to have kids think about technology, games, and learning. -GRETCHEN SCHAEFER

NCES Kids’ Zone

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Still hanging on to your dusty old tape collection?  If you haven’t digitized your cassettes yet, you might want to get started. CBS News contributor David Pogue wrote an interesting piece on data rot, which is what happens when you have information that’s either too decayed to use, or relies on technology that no longer exists.

If you’ve moved all your important data to the digital realm, don’t act all smug just yet. Digital media isn’t the indestructible storage option we thought it was. Today we have more ways to store information than ever before — and that’s not always a good thing. According to Pogue, new formats pop up faster than ever, which means they also go obsolete much more quickly. What good is a digital document if no one makes the software that reads it anymore? This means we have to choose carefully how we save our important files, and remember to update them to newer formats (that is, once every few years, for the rest of your life).

Even fairly stable formats like TIFF files can fall victim to the relatively frail storage objects that house them. Pogue quotes Dag Spicer, senior curator at the Computer History Museum, who said:

“A hard drive lasts about five years…The low range of CDs’ and DVDs’ longevity is five years. So the basic lesson is: Look after your own data and make sure that you take steps to keep it moving onto new formats about once every ten years.”

Where to begin? Your school’s collection of VHS tapes of science experiments and school plays might be a good place to start. Pogue tells the sad tale of filmmaker Lydia Robertson, who has never even seen a film she made in high school because the machines that play it aren’t around anymore. I too made a movie in high school, shot on VHS tape. How long until data rot claims the VCR? In the case of my film, not soon enough. For everyone else, it’s probably time to convert those videos to Quicktime. -BILL FERRIS

Bye, Tech: Dealing With Data Rot via CBS News

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Photo credit: pollas on Flickr.

Very few of us think data is fun, unless, of course, you’re an accountant or some kind of math or physics whiz. I would guess that even fewer of our students get excited about the prospects of analyzing and graphing numbers and data. This doesn’t always have to be the case. Through the use of an interactive white board, graphing can be fun. It doesn’t have to be just about the numbers, it can be about interaction.

An interactive whiteboard is a whiteboard connected to a projector and computer that allows users to control it through touch. A projector projects the computer’s desktop onto the board’s surface, where users control the computer using a pen, finger or other device (using the finger is the most fun for most students — it gives that magical feel to it). Through the use of an interactive white board such as a Smartboard or ACTIVBoard and one of the many great graphing web tools out there,  graphing and analyzing data can be fun and exciting.

One of the more popular online graphing tools available is Create-A-Graph.  This great tool comes to us from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which is the primary federal entity for collecting and analyzing data related to education. Exciting stuff, huh? Well, exciting or not, they’ve created a great tool.

Create-A-Graph gives you the choice of five different styles of graphs, from bar charts to XY graphs. The choices are great, but your capabilities for interaction with the Smartboard are limited. This site is very data-driven. All of the data must be typed in via keyboard and there is no way to “play” with the graphs using the interactive capabilities of the white board. It was fun to “mark up” the site using the Smartboard’s notebook software, which allows the user to draw on the screen using a pen or a finger, but there was no way to play with the graphs themselves. If you’re looking for a great online graphing tool, Create-A-Graph is the obvious choice, but if you’re looking to fully use the capabilities of the white board, it wouldn’t be my first choice.

However, there is a graphing website out there that allows you to fully use the drawing and interactive capabilities of an interactive white board, IF you can get past it’s name: Crappy Graphs. It’s too bad the name might prevent some educators from using this site in class because it truly is a great tool. The site allows users to create freehand line graphs or Venn diagrams, which really allow students to be creative and experience the “magic” of drawing on the board with their finger (regardless of grade level, all students love this.) For example, one might want to graph the Food to Mess ratio of various foods. Students can draw, using their finger or pen, the line graph, then easily add text and name the X and Y axes. With Crappy Graphs, drawing and creating the graph is so much fun, students will not even realize they’re learning. This is a fantastic and fun tool to introduce students to the wonderful world of data and graphing, if only we could convince it’s creator Brian Shaler, to change it’s name.

The third and final tool is not as data-driven as the previous two. It’s more of a diagramming tool, but it allows educators to fully implement the power of the interactive smart board. Lovely Charts allows you to create incredible flowcharts, site maps or people diagrams. What makes this site so perfect for interactive white board use is the ability to drag and drop almost everything onto your diagrams. Then, by clicking on the Create and Connect option, I can connect, using only my finger, multiple items or people in my diagram. There are many images, symbols and graphics to choose from and all of them can be added to your chart by simply dragging them with your finger. If you want to get your kids out of their seat, get in touch with the kinesthetic sides of their brains, and get them excited about the capabilities and the “magic” of an interactive white board, then Lovely Charts would be a very good place to start. You can view an excellent screencast describing the tool here.

Interactive white boards, combined with online tools can be an amazing way for kids to have fun and not even realize they’re learning. Introducing students to data and graphing can be a difficult sell, but using an interactive white board can make this introduction a bit less painful for your students.- JERRY SWIATEK

Create-A-Graph

Crappy Graphs

Lovely Charts

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I get asked one million times a day how people can write a better report. I tell them all the same thing: nothing helps a report better than a good, solid number.

You could probably recall one thousand times when you’ve seen a student write “a lot of evidence supports my paper’s claim, but I don’t have a real definitive number to back my writing up.”

Google Insights for Search is a useful tool that can help make your students’ search for web usage statistics one hundred times easier. Users can gather volume patterns based on search terms across different regions, times, and categories. Interested in how many people in China searched for “YouTube” in 2007? You’ll need to sign in to your Google account to view numbers, but that’s no problem since a Google account will cost you zero dollars.

Of course, this does limit the figures a user will get to the realm of just Google’s search engine statistics. It won’t take into account any searches done via Yahoo or other search engines. Nonetheless, Google is a big name in the search engine game and should provide a good indicator on its own. It can be ideal for a student looking to gauge a topic’s popularity on the web. For a clever user performing a well-specified search the possibilities are…well, there’s a lot of them.  -NICK YINGLING

Google Insights for Search

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Good evening. Right now, I’m writing to you from my apartment at an undisclosed location in Carrboro, North Carolina. I won’t tell you where I am exactly, but how would you imagine the place? Do you picture half-empties strewn about, a Scarface poster, Twizzlers, a bowl of cereal left in the bathtub, an untouched copy of Ulysses, a fridge stocked with any possible drink that women may want? (You’ll need to search YouTube for that last one on your own.) That is so far off the mark, I’m a bit insulted. I don’t own a Scarface poster.

The reason I’m writing from home is that I’m testing out the free Virtual Private Network app, LogMeIn Hamachi. Designed to allow users to instantly access remote network resources, Hamachi takes only a short amount of time to set up and guarantees that you’ll have to perform ZERO configuration to get it to work. I set up Hamachi on my laptop at work, and then I raced home to set it up on my home computer.

All in all, Hamachi delivers a decent, reliable VPN experience. I only experienced one frustrating thing while I was getting acquainted with it. You are asked to log in to their “test” network as part of their product tutorial, but I must’ve been trying at the internet’s rush hour because it was at max capacity. It took me a long time, re-trying periodically, but I eventually logged in. But until I was able to do so I couldn’t advance any further through the tutorial, and that was annoying because I’m not the VPN master, and I actually wanted to finish the tutorial.

How will it be useful to you? Do you have a computer in your classroom and at home? And a laptop? Connect all of them. The days of files being trapped in just one computer are swiftly coming to an end. Hmm… “The Days of Files Being Trapped in One Computer Are Over.” That’s a good tag line. I think I’ll send that over to the team doing the marketing for Tron 2. -NICK YINGLING

LogMeIn Hamachi

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Back up your files already. Seriously, right now. In the information age, a hard drive crash can affect your life as much as a house fire (except for, you know, the possibility of being burned alive. All right, it’s really not that much like a house fire — a car theft, perhaps…). Think about it — your music collection, vacation photos, your screenplay that you’ve been meaning to finish someday — all of it is vulnerable to the whims of a fragile construct of plastic and metal.

In the dark ages of 2003, I once spent an entire afternoon backing up my work computer with Zip disks. Nowadays, Box.net lets you back up 1GB of whatever you like online, for free.  Creating an account and uploading your files takes less time than it took to write this article. And with that much storage space, you don’t exactly have to be choosy about what you upload. I just hit “select all” in my writing folder and hit “Enter.” A few hundred files are now backed up, just in case my hard drive decides to go into early retirement. A gigabyte won’t get you as far with music files, of course, but you can upgrade to more storage space for a small fee.

If there’s anyone in your life who needs this more than you do, it’s your students. With Box.net, they can eliminate all headaches due to  hard drive crashes, literal computer crashes (as in, falling off a tabletop), and whatever other maladies may affect their systems. Box.net allows users to share files, so it’s good for collaborative projects, too.

Data backup is the electronic version of the bomb shelter. Box.net will help ensure you’re ready for a hard drive meltdown. -BILL FERRIS

Box.net

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I’m sure you’ve heard the results of various Gallup polls throughout this election season. Rather than waiting for the nightly newscast to mention what the pollsters say, you can keep track yourself by going straight to the source. Gallup.com has the latest results, updated daily. Further, you can see the results from a seemingly infinite number of demographics, such as candidate support by race, gender, church affiliation, education, age, and many more.

Gallup records people’s opinions on pretty much every topic, from baseball to economics to Russia. So once the election is over, there are plenty more statistics available for your classroom use.

How can you use this information in class? Have your students follow along or chart the results. When one candidate’s numbers rise or dip, you could ask them their opinion on why the flux occurred. Or have them propose solutions to America’s falling consumer confidence. You can do a lot with this kind of data at your disposal. Now is a great time to put it to use. -BILL FERRIS

Gallup

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For centuries, structures made from adobe were inexpensive, durable constructions that could shelter a family and its possessions from the elements. Today, Adobe Share houses valuable data online, easily and inexpensively (that is to say, for free).

With Adobe Share, you can store up to a gigabyte of data on the web. Just select a file from your computer and upload it, and your important documents, pictures and music are secure. If your students want to collaborate on a document, they can also share files with others (hence the name Adobe Share).

Adobe Share is part of the larger suite, Acrobat.com, which includes several other cool apps like an online word processor (take that, Google). And unlike the Adobe Acrobat Reader software of its namesake, Acrobat.com won’t bug you about updating to the latest version every ten minutes. Like a lot of Adobe products, the interface is pretty slick, with a charcoal gray background, and menus that fade in and out when they’re needed. Pretty nice looking for a company named after mud bricks. -BILL FERRIS

Adobe Share

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