Instructify

BY KEVIN HODGSON

Sometimes, the tools we stumble upon are just a way to add a little fun into the classroom. I’d put Font de Music into that category. Here, the site takes a small piece of writing — a short sentence seems to be about the limit — and adds a musical backing track, then makes the letters do a little dance to the music. You have some limited options, such as font style, and musical theme, and font color. Other than that, though, you can just sit back and watch your words get jiggy with it on the screen. If you’d like to invite others to your literary dance party, the site generates a link you can share. I did not find an embed code, though, which would be even more helpful.

You might use this site to spice up some lessons around vocabulary — what “mood” would you choose for an individual word? Or, if students were to create one of these musical pieces around their name, what decisions would they make around choice of font, color and music? It’s a simple, fun site with some possibilities for examining how multimedia and text influences our thinking around design choices.

Font de Music

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

Google started it, but other sites are running with the idea of creating a search engine built around reading levels. Twurdy (a mash-up of “too wordy”) is one of the easiest and most user-friendly sites that I have come across for searching and finding information on the web based on the concept of “readiblity.” The site, which is built on the back of Google Search, conveniently color-codes the various reading levels, and a quick click of a button allows you to match up approximate age levels with reading levels.

There are three settings that you can choose: Just Twurdy, which searches using Twurdy’s basic algorithm with medium speed and medium results; Simple Twurdy, which searches using Twurdy’s simple algorithm for fast speed but less accurate results; and Twurdy with Pop, which searches using Twurdy’s most complex algorithm which includes looking up the popularity of words within the text. It has a slower speed, but a higher level of accuracy.

For students, this means that a quick search on a topic yields web resources that are at their reading levels — I did one on the Galapagos Islands and the site was very useful. For teachers, it means that gathering resources appropriate to students’ reading levels might get a bit easier. An interesting experiment, too, is to put in the URL of a website and see what reading level is assigned to it. I did this with my own blog and it was fascinating to see the blog posts broken down by reading levels.

One drawback is that I wanted to be able to better narrow my original search field to just specific age levels (such as, all of the websites about the Galapagos Islands for a 10-year-old reading level). But overall, Twurdy was a satisfying experience and one worth considering for the classroom.

Twurdy

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BY BILL FERRIS

Wanted: The Asian longhorned beetle and the emerald ash borer beetle. These insidious insects are wreaking havoc on trees across America. Beetle Detectives, a site from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, has put out an APB for some science-minded sleuths to snoop around local flora to see if they can spot these bugs. If they do, your students can report the beetles’ whereabouts via the Beetle Detectives website. The site ranks classrooms according to how many reports they submit, allowing kids to win bragging rights over less-observant gumshoes.

The site includes vital information about both the Asian longhorn and emerald ash borer. It also shows several photos depicting the telltale signs of infestation — visible exit holes in the tree bark, a receding canopy starting at the top of the tree, and vertical fissures in the bark are just a few indications that a tree has been infiltrated. Grab your magnifying glass and head into the woods to help put a stop to these voracious vermin.

Beetle Detectives

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BY DAN FROELICH

March 2 is Read Across America day, as well as Dr. Seuss’ birthday. While that doesn’t necessarily evoke a day filled with technology-enriched activities, it has become so thanks to the availability of web conferencing, social media, and even blogs.

Readacrossamerica.org is the central location for all events and activities related to Read Across America day. Those of you willing to make a pledge to read with your students can do so online using this year’s pledge form. Using a Google Maps interface, you can see how many pledges have been made in each state across the nation.

Schools fortunate enough to embrace social media can “Like” Read Across America on their Facebook page. There’s a Twitter conversation already in the works, a Flickr stream ready to accept photos, and a SchoolTube channel chock full of videos. It’s exciting to see an event like this evolve into so many interesting projects.

In the last couple of years, schools have even taken to Skype calls to have authors call in to a class and read to students. This is something that only a few fortunate schools in the country could afford to do in a traditional face-to-face scenario. Teachers have even buddied up with other classes to read to each other from around the country and across the globe. The Skype In Schools community recently decided to post a Read Across America page. This was something decided upon by the members of the group, and not a direction taken by the administrators of the site.

Random House has created an online gallery of resources to help direct ideas for Read Across America with the support of the National Education Association.

So what are you doing this year? Do your plans include a more technology enriched collaborative effort? If so, please share your ideas in the comments below. Happy reading!

Read Across America

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BY BILL FERRIS

If you want to learn about rockets, who better to turn to than NASA? NASA’s Rocketry website covers everything elementary and middle school students want to know about rockets. The site has some serious geek bait, featuring multimedia, virtual rocket-building activities, the history of rocketry, and lesson plans for grades K-8. The site explains the various phases of rocket building and engineering, NASA-sponsored rocketry competitions, and even tells you how to talk like a rocket engineer.

NASA’s Rocketry site is a great starting point for any unit on rockets, engines or space travel, as well as for anyone who just wants to geek out on space ships for a while. Download the educator guide and blast off!

NASA – Rocketry

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BY BILL FERRIS

The Mini Page is all grown up. After delighting young readers for more than 40 years in newspapers across the country, this beloved insert has found a new home online. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library has published digital archives of The Mini Page‘s more than 2,000 issues dating from 1969 through 2007.

The collection, donated by The Mini Page founder and first editor, Betty Debnam, contains decades’ worth of lessons, activities, puzzles, pictures, and recipes based on a different topic each week. Biff Hollingsworth, a library staffer who works in the Southern Historical Collection, worked closely with Debnam to achieve her vision for how the archive should appear. “She’s considering this as a way to make sure all the issues she’s worked so hard on are given a new life,” Hollingsworth said.

Educators can put the archive to use in a variety of ways, according to Hollingsworth. If a class wanted to look at how African American history was celebrated over the last 40 years, for example, they can compare early Mini Page issues with today’s. In addition, since The Mini Page is written for early readers, the plain language might be helpful for ESL students learning to read a new language.

Visitors can currently search the collection based on date, title, people, places, and topics. Library staff are working hard to make The Mini Page archive more searchable, adding keywords and other metadata. Hollingsworth went on to say that if educators would like to be able to search via additional criteria, they can submit a request through the library contact page.

The Mini Page Archive 1969-2007

BY REBECCAH HAINES

The Great Backyard Bird Count (February 18-21) lets your students be “real” scientists simply by identifying and counting birds. The GBBC is an important source of nationwide bird data. Sponsored by the Cornell Ornithology Lab, the GBBC encourages bird watchers of all levels of expertise to spend as little as 15 minutes identifying and counting birds in their backyards (or schoolyards as the case may be), then submitting their counts to the website. The data collected from the GBBC is used by scientists studying population trends and patterns in wintering birds. This data can then be used to do things like designate new protected habitats.

There are several GBBC-related activities you can do with your students. Before counting, you can teach your students how to identify the 10 most common species. After counting, take a look at previous years’ data, and discuss what you see — patterns, trends, conclusions — all great critical thinking practice!

By participating with your students in the GBBC, you’ll be helping scientists gather important data, and you’ll be giving your students the feeling that they’re doing something real — and, you get to take them outside to do it!

Great Backyard Bird Count

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BY BILL FERRIS

ZooBurst lets you build virtual pop-up books online. Through a simple WYSIWYG interface, you can upload images and enter text you want for your story, and ZooBurst handles the pop-ups and page turns virtually. Be sure to check out the Gallery to see some pretty nice-looking examples.

The controls let you manipulate the color of the pages, the angle of the pop-up images, how fast images pop, how many pages the book has, and more. ZooBurst’s 3-D virtual environment lets you see each book from every possible angle.

My only complaint with ZooBurst is that I would’ve liked to see some clip art available, as not every kid will have a lot of digital images on their computer to choose from. Yeah, I know, clip art looks cheesy. However, in an exercise like this, I think it’s more important to give kids some tools, even rudimentary ones, in order to get them busy creating something rather than combing the internet for pictures, which can be a dicey proposition in a school environment.

Overall, though, ZooBurst is a fun storytelling application with a minimal learning curve. You can put together a story and tell it to your kids during story time. Or have kids work on stories in groups or individually to exercise their creativity, and maybe produce the next classic children’s book.

ZooBurst

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BY BILL FERRIS

What’s your bookprint? Scholastic wants readers to connect with each other based on their favorite books at their site, You Are What You Read.

At YAWYR, readers share the five books that most influenced their lives (their bookprint). After they create their bookprints, they can find other users who like the same books, and interact with them (or, in social networking parlance, “friend” them). You can also browse various celebrities’ bookprints — getting a recommendation for, say, Charlotte’s Web from Taylor Swift might carry more weight than a recommendation from you (no offense).

For more ideas on how to use YAWYR in class, there’s a teachers guide with activities like Pass it On, in which students pair up, ask questions about what books they like, and find books for each other at the library. There’s also a sample letter to parents designed to get Mom and Dad on board and support reading activities at home.

You Are What You Read

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BY BILL FERRIS

Google’s advanced search function lets you filter search results by reading level. Simply click the “Advanced Search” link next to the search bar on the Google home page (or directly underneath the search box on any search results page). In the “Need more tools?” section, you can tell Google to only return results within your reading level of choice (basic, intermediate, or advanced). Google will also give you a graph that breaks down the percentage of results that fall into each reading level.

This is a handy tool for elementary students. It’s also useful for folks who want to research a super-advanced topic they know nothing about, and want to find resources written in plain English.

How it works:

“The feature is based primarily on statistical models we built with the help of teachers. We paid teachers to classify pages for different reading levels, and then took their classifications to build a statistical model. With this model, we can compare the words on any webpage with the words in the model to classify reading levels. We also use data from Google Scholar, since most of the articles in Scholar are advanced.”

Since language isn’t always compatible with statistical models, you’ll want to use your own judgment when determining the reading levels of the results you get. Still, filtering by reading level may be a good way to make sure you and your students get the search results that are most helpful to you.

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

Jennifer Wagner’s Projects by Jen is a valuable resource for preschool through 6th grade teachers to engage in inquiry projects with other classrooms.  These projects are conducted through the use of high- and low-tech tools for sharing information among classrooms and teachers.

Wagner notes on her site that she has hosted about 60 different collaborative projects over the years and the topics run from counting Oreo cookies (a math project) to a community service venture. Her projects often cross over into several disciplines, but most involve sharing of data and then analysis of that data. A few years ago, my classroom was part of a greeting-card project, in which we sent out greeting cards to a handful of other classrooms and then received cards in return. We then tracked the cards we received on a classroom map.

Wagner also has a newsletter that features collaborative ideas (this costs a small fee), highlights classroom websites and teachers, and more. There is no cost for participation in Wagner’s various collaborative projects, so it provides a nice, easy way to expand learning beyond classroom walls. She also has a very neat ongoing venture called Guess the Wordle, which is a daily brain game using a word cloud and a question. Guess the Wordle is an interesting morning activity to get the day started. Some days, the answer might be a book. Other days, it might be a math problem. Or, as in the case of this one, it is the ingredients of a recipe — but for what?

Projects by Jen

Guess The Wordle

BY KEVIN HODGSON

There is always something to be said about simplicity, particularly when you are working with technology and younger students. This Is Sand is an ideal art tool for elementary students to create virtual sand sculptures. At first glance, thought, the site appears to be nothing more than a blank screen. But with a left click of the mouse, digital sand starts dropping from the cursor on the screen. Click the “C” button on your keyboard, and now you have a vast array of sand colors to choose from. In no time, This is Sand will have your attention as you slowly layer in colors. (When you are at the site, notice the small unobtrusive gray box in the upper left corner of the screen — this is the instruction manual.)

I was introduced to This Is Sand by my kindergarten-teaching colleague, who uses the site on the first day she introduces her students to our school’s Mac laptops. (See her video documentary of her students’ first day with the Macs.) The site’s artistic nature and user-friendly interface makes This Is Sand a great place to begin classroom instruction for younger students as they learn the mechanics of using a computer mouse to navigate a screen, finding letters on the keyboard, and choosing colors from a palette. The learning has less to do with the building of sand castles than with the computer literacy that comes with using the site.

The site defaults to making a neat little sound as the sand falls (you can turn off the noise, if you want) and users can submit works of art to the gallery. With younger students, a teacher could take screenshots of the work and then print them out or add them to an online class website.

This Is Sand

This Is Sand Gallery

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

SpellingCity presents a multitude of activities students can use to practice spelling. A teacher simply enters the spelling words, and SpellingCity presents several options for what to do with them. Choices include:

“Test Me,” which repeats each spelling word with a live voice and uses it in a sentence. I put in a few words from my students’ vocabulary list and clicked here. The site creates a text box for students to write the word after they hear it spoken by the automated voice. What I liked best was that SpellingCity then used my word in a sentence. The site has a large database of words and sentences that it draws from.

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BY REBECCAH HAINES

Have you ever heard a class of 6th graders spontaneously singing along to a song about the sun? Well, I have, and I have to say, it is pretty wonderful. And a little hilarious. You might ask, what kind of magical song could compete with all the popular music out there? “Why does the sun shine?” by They Might Be Giants, actually an old song, on a relatively new CD by the band, is what fits the bill.

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

My StoryMaker is the perfect tool for younger students just learning about plot design and character development for short stories. Hosted by the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, My StoryMaker walks students through the process of story creation using a variety of online tools.

My StoryMaker requires no login other than a first name. Kids choose a main character from a limited menu of possibilities, pick what they want that character to be doing (on a rescue mission? Finding love?) and then designate which secondary character is also involved in the story. These steps are laid out in a very basic, easy-to-use method. The story editor then launches and, in a nice touch, there is an audio tutorial matching up with the text tutorial on the next steps.

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