Instructify

Have you ever needed the answer to some pressing question, but found yourself no where near a computer and yielded only a cell phone to get your answer? I know I’ve been there many times, especially when traveling, and while you can sometimes text message search engines (or call a web-savvy friend), you can’t always get the answer you need. After being in such a predicament, I’ve often resolved to finally getting a smart phone, but now I don’t have to!

ChaCha  is a service that allows anyone with a mobile phone to text 242 242 (CHACHA) or call 1-800-2CHACHA and ask any question in conversational English and receive an accurate answer as a text message within a few minutes. It basically makes any cell phone a “smart phone,” and the idea is genius really: they don’t use a search engine algorithm with automatically generated responses, but rather a network of knowledgeable human “guides.” And since ChaCha uses people to respond with answers, you can easily reply with follow-up questions as if you are exchanging messages with a friend.

So let’s say you can’t remember who Gabriel falls in love with in Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd (it’s Bathsheba Everdene, by the way), or you need a quick weather update, or you just need to find the closest vegetarian restaurant to your current location, you can just call or text ChaCha and get a great answer quickly.

The service is totally free, too (except for any text message or minute fees  that may apply based on your cell phone plan), so you don’t have to worry about encountering any hidden costs when you get your phone bill. So make your cell phone a bit smarter, and maybe make yourself a little smarter while you’re at it!

ChaCha

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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

When I was not sure which path my career would go, I very seriously considered teaching English in Japan. The salary seemed fine, but I was more interested in getting some exposure to a completely new world. Because of extenuating circumstances that aren’t worth getting into here, I opted to remain a patriot for the time being. Nonetheless, I scoured the Web and found plenty of resources available to answer my questions about where to begin planning my travels abroad to share my English skills.

First, here is a great series of posts by blogger NomadicMatt. He’s broken his knowledge and expertise of teaching abroad into five parts, which covers everything from job types to specific places to teach and what to expect in various countries. There is also plenty of information on what is required of teachers planning to go overseas to teach:

All countries require that you be a native speaker. This means from the UK, US, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand. While some countries will hire Filipinos, they typically prefer Western employees.You will also need a bachelor’s degree from a 4 year accredited university. It doesn’t matter what your degree is in. Whether you have a degree in biochemistry to English to yoga doesn’t matter so long as you have a university degree. A four year degree is a MUST in the higher end countries like Korea and Japan.

These posts have lots of great information if you’ve already talked yourself into going, but it might be helpful to hear another side of the story, too. Read this post, about “The Ugly” side of teaching in Japan. It sheds a little bit of light on some of the aspects of over-the-pond tutelage that they won’t tell you about in the brochure. Also, Mottekaero jDonuts begs the question Is English Teaching Worth It? - JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Teaching English Abroad pt 1
Teaching English Abroad pt 2
Teaching English Abroad pt 3
Teaching English Abroad pt 4
Teaching English Abroad pt 5
Teaching English in Japan: The Ugly
Is English Teaching Worth It?

Photo credit: jmurawski on Flickr)

The summer movie season is in full swing. For a lot of your students, the last thing they’re thinking about right now is reading books. It may be too late to reach them this summer, but when they return you’ll definitely want to point them toward Digital Booktalk, a site that creates movie-style trailers for books.

Digital Booktalk was created by the University of Central Florida’s Department of Digital Media. Their goalwas to entice reluctant readers to try books they may not have given a chance because they’re, you know, books. Works like Mutiny on the Bounty look pretty action-packed in trailer form, even by today’s standards. Want some intrigue? Have a look at the trailer for Counterfeit Son.

If you want to do a class project, or if some students need a little nudge to get involved in your discussion of MacBeth, Digital Booktalk also accepts student-produced trailers (you may want to read up on producing videos for class first).

Though you and I still love a good book, movies have become our culture’s entertainment medium of record. With Digital Booktalk you can bridge the gap between the page and the silver screen. -BILL FERRIS

Digital Booktalk

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Web English Teacher presents this list of travel-based books and their accompanying lesson plans. Most of it is perfect (and required) summer reading and includes Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Heart of Darkness, among others. The selection of lesson plans for each travel tale contain links to outside sources, including writer biographies, vocab lists and e-notes. There’s even a cool video lesson on Jack Kerouac.

The works featured here all deal with travel, so they make perfect summer excursion books. If your students are traveling, urge them to keep a diary of their own adventures, and compare those stories to the ones here. The reading levels vary from elementary to high school, so there’s something on this list for any student who wants something to read on his travels. - JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Web English Teacher’s Travel Lit Lesson Plans

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I’m completely fine with a writer who bends the rules. There’s a little thing called style, right? I’m sure that as an educator you’ve no doubt had a student try to pass off errors as style. I know I tried when I was in school.

As they grow and mature as writers, it’s necessary for your students to crawl before they can walk. They should at least know the ground rules before they start breaking them in the name of style. And as we all know, there are plenty of rules. There is one rule—out of a whole set of rules about the use of quotation marks—that can be very effective in conveying irony, sarcasm and subtlety. Or, it can be very effective in unintentionally looking ironic, sarcastic and boldly unusual. That rule is the use of quotation marks around words and short phrases.

The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks is a great site that features the abuse of quotation marks and the amusing results. While this site is intended to show the humor of misinterpreting other peoples’ bad punctuation, you can use it as an effective tool to demonstrate to your students what not to do. You might even want to mention that anyone can submit a photo to this blog. It could give your students a strange motivation to pay attention to punctuation as they walk around in their day-to-day lives. What sort of strange world would that be? –NICK YINGLING

The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks

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Do your students need help pronouncing a tricky or unfamiliar word while doing research? Or are you an ESL teacher helping kids with their English pronunciation. If you use Firefox (and you definitely should), you should add the Pronounce extension. Just highlight the word that’s giving your kids trouble, right click and choose “Pronounce” from the menu. Firefox will then speak the word out loud with correct English pronunciation.

We’ve covered pronunciation tools before, such as howjsay. The Pronounce extension has a slight edge for two reasons: since it’s integrated into your browser, you don’t have to go to another website to look up the word, thereby saving you time. And second, the pronunciations come from Merriam-Webster OnLine, so you get the the definitive American pronunciation, as opposed to howjsay’s British pronunciation of words like “aluminum” or “blueberry.” -BILL FERRIS

Pronounce
Pronounce Tells You How to Say It via Lifehacker

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You’ve heard a lot about this “social networking” stuff kids are talking about. Whether you’re a complete networking newbie or you’ve got a MySpace, Facebook and Twitter account, make sure to check out iCue, a site from NBC News that combines peer connection with learning and multimedia.

iCue is an online learning environment that will let your students collaborate online while learning. While it does have fun stuff like games, iCue’s coolest features are the Cue Cards, which play video clips, as well as view images, documents, and video transcripts, related to the subject you’re looking up. Like an online baseball card, “flip” the Cue Card over to read useful info about the person speaking, his or her political views, the source of the video clip, earned run average, and lots more. Each card is tagged with notes and keywords, and if NBC’s notes don’t cut it, you can write in your own. Also like baseball cards, you can save and share them, so you can finally get hold of the Barack Obama rookie card.

Once they’re in iCue, students can build their friends network, interact with peers through discussion forums, and comment on others’ Cue Cards or ideas. iCue forums also have a “Thought Starter” which you can use to spark student discussion about an event in the news.

For its debut, iCue features content focused on politics, since there’s apparently a presidential election coming up. Over the summer they’ll add resources for courses including US History and English language and composition. Who knows? Once your students get started on iCue, discussing political candidates and collaborating on history research may just take precedence over updating their MySpace pages. -BILL FERRIS

iCue

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Wikis can be a useful tool in the classroom because they allow your students to not only create content, but maintain and edit it as well. With Wetpaint’s free Wiki creation tool, you can set up a specific type of wiki for whatever your subject matter might be. Students can then begin plugging in info based on your specifications. One of the most powerful aspects of creating a wiki is that they can be used for virtually any subject. If you’re reading The Sound and The Fury, students can add character descriptions, chapter and section summaries, or symbols used. If you’re an Algebra teacher, students can aggregate the wiki with their “favorite” proofs and theorems.

Wetpaint’s creation tool is simple and intuitive, and only requires a valid email address to sign up. It’s easy to set up and invite your students and set permissions on who is able to view your wiki. If you want to bridge the gap between the web and the classroom, this is a great place to start. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Wetpaint Free Wiki Websites

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Tired of kids doing the same games from your list of activities? Would you like to add the element of random chance into your curriculum, but still have solid academic (yet fun) online activities for kids to do? Let Computer Lab Favorites at Scholastic.com change up your mix. This site generates new content and activities suitable for independent work at the lab.

The activities are presented on a wheel, which features four color-coded subjects (English, Math, Social Studies, and Spanish). It comes in two levels K-2 and 3-5, and a “spin it” button to let you do a random selection, adding the element of chance to your session. Activities include phonemic awareness and reading games from Clifford, science from Magic School Bus, writing activities from “Dog’s Life” and other “Flashlight Readers, and the poetry machine.

This is a great resource for high interest, easy-to-use independent activities on your classroom computers, and a rendezvous with Madame La Chance. -ALICE MERCER

Computer Lab Favorites at Scholastic.com

Who can resist a quiz game with digestive sound effects? I know I (and millions of others) can’t. If this sounds like something you, or perhaps a select number of your students would enjoy, check out Viral Vinnie’s Gut Instinct from the BBC.

Fear not, there’s more than great animation and gross sounds in this baby. The quiz subjects available are English (Language Arts), Maths (Math in the U.S.), and Science. The subject matter is at the upper elementary level. You can also set up league play, with up to 30 other players - have everyone simply select the same subject, choose “play people I know,” and type in the same League Name, and you’ll all be in the guts of it together. Your avatar is a stomach bug, and when you lose you get a shower in prophylactic yogurt, or stomach acid.

Imagine the fun in your computer lab! LEAGUES with gut noises, it’s like bowling after the chili cookoff/beerfest. -ALICE MERCER

Viral Vinnie’s Gut Instinct

We should probably notice the trend of Manga and other comic literature making its way into the hands of students everywhere, but perhaps we shouldn’t be so fast to pull it away from them. The Graphic Classroom is a blog dedicated to helping teachers and librarians find high-quality literature in the form of graphic novels and comics. There are recommendations for different grade levels, ranging from illustrated classics like Treasure Island for middle schoolers to Art Spiegelman’s astonishing graphic novel Maus for ages 15 and up.

You can search the blog for ideas of graphic literature to use in your classroom, and even find some ideas of what is not recommended. (Journey Into Mohawk Land? Yeah, probably not…) Graphic lit is a medium that is as important as any in today’s age, so it is just as important for educators to understand how to teach it. Let your students know about Free Comic Book Day, which is this Saturday May 3rd. The Graphic Classroom recommends the anthology Graphic Classics, which includes stories by Edgar Allen Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle and Mary Shelley. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

The Graphic Classroom

It wouldn’t be right to say goodbye to Poetry Month without devoting one more post to a positively precious poetry resource. One of my personal favorites is QuickMuse, where contemporary poets step up to the plate to write a poem in 15 minutes or less.

Presenting your students with perfectly executed sonnets, masterpieces of Romantic philosophy, and works of epic length certainly has its instructional value, but when you ask them to write their own pieces after spending a unit studying pristine finished products, I imagine for many of them the blank page is hard to approach.

Help your students to loosen up by giving them a peek into the creative process. The QuickMuse poets are given a prompt – your students will definitely identify with the stress of assigned time-writing, and the “play-back” feature, which allows you to see the poem come together in real time, is just cool!

Please note: poets under pressure do not always produce G-rated material; make sure you preview anything you promote! –MARIELLE PRINCE

QuickMuse

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11 Odd but Simple Ways to Improve Your Health
There’s nothing like a good nasal rinse. Or how about a fast to detoxify your body? These offbeat health tips can keep your body running smoothly. After all the stress you put it through every day in class, you at least owe yourself a skin brushing.

1001 Books You Have to Read Before You Die
Need a good book to read? Check out this exhaustive (and exhausting) list of great books. You’ll find everything from Oscar Wilde to Douglas Adams, plus lots, lots, lots more. If you want to read all 1001 of these before you croak, you’d best get started soon.

George Orwell: 6 Questions/6 Rules
The author of 1984 and Animal Farm presents these rules for writers to live by. My favorite: “Never use a long word where a short one will do.” What a stupdendous idea!

16 Things I Wish They Had Taught Me in School

A lot of life skills don’t fall within the scope of science, math or English class. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to squeeze in some valuable real-world lessons into your teaching, though. The Positivity Blog presents this list of lessons the author had to learn the hard way. By imparting concepts like the 80/20 Rule (we get 80% of the value we receive from only 20% of the things we do) and the value of making mistakes to your students, you can help them be productive members of society.

How to Ace Your Job Interview: 88 Surefire Tips and Tricks
Your students are about to head out into the world, and that means they’re going to need to get a job soon. Make sure you pass along these tips from the Online Education Database about how to secure employment. The list addresses everything from cover letters to grooming. A lot of it seems like common knowledge, but you know people don’t make lists like these unless there were a bunch of clueless applicants out there. These tactics will give your students an advantage over the competition, and they might even come in handy for your own future job search.

Photo credit: lagiuspo on flickr.

The world keeps shrinking. Online technology makes learning about other areas and cultures feasible for everyone without the hassles of obtaining a passport and figuring out exchange rates. ProjectExplorer makes the process even easier by hosting several online excursions around the globe at one website.

ProjectExplorer is a collection of virtual field trips with video, pictures, and journal entries that chronicle the adventures abroad. The site currently features trips to South Africa and Shakespeare’s England (via historical sites rather than by time machine). Each trip has multiple tour guides for each grade level (one for elementary, one for middle, one for high school, etc.), so you can be sure your students will get the information most appropriate to them.

Traveling is a wonderful way to learn about history and culture in other parts of the world. It’s also a great way to max out a credit card and miss a lot of school, so it’s nice to know sites like ProjectExplorer won’t leave your kids behind. -BILL FERRIS

ProjectExplorer

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