BY BILL FERRIS
As schools move away from rote memorization of facts, what happens to those kids who like to rattle off the state capitals or list all the presidents? They can put their knowledge of educational trivia to good use at Sporcle, a site filled with countless list-style quizzes that will exercise kids’ knowledge of…well, just about everything.
BY BILL FERRIS
Just because all your students aren’t artists, that doesn’t mean they can’t create their own comic strips. ToonDoo makes it easy to create a comic by using stock characters and scenes. If kids would rather provide their own protagonists, ToonDoo makes that a snap, too.
Students can choose from a variety of characters and locales. They can also create their own characters with the TraitR function (the name refers to character traits, as in “trait-er” rather than someone who will tattle on kids for cutting in the lunch line). For more options, kids can use the DoodleR tool to draw directly on the comic panels, or import and manipulate images with the ImagineR function.
BY BILL FERRIS
Let’s get the disclaimer out of the way — Get High Now has to do with optical and audio illusions. It in no way advocates getting hepped up on goofball. To quote from the site itself:
“Get High Now is an illustrated, mind-blowing magic carpet ride of more than 175 ways to alter human perception and consciousness—without drugs or alcohol” (emphasis added lest you think Instructify is promoting anything inappropriate for a school audience).
See? We’re still a family site, more or less.
Anyway, the Get High Now website is a companion to a book of the same name. Both catalog stunning illusions of sight and sound, explaining the biology and neuroscience that makes them possible.
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
As further proof that my pop-culture awareness stopped sometime in the mid-90s, this month’s random roundup features Indiana Jones, apparently Instructify’s go-to reference to convey that a history or archaeology tool is exciting or adventurous in some capacity.
Of course, now that they’re making a fifth Indiana Jones movie, I don’t feel quite so dated.
National Geographic’s Explore a Pyramid: Archaeology with No Risk of Snakes or Nazis!
When I was a kid, I wanted to be an archaeologist like Indiana Jones and I dreamed about being on Nickelodeon’s Legends of the Hidden Temple. Sadly, I’m not currently exploring foreign lands for ancient artifacts and getting chased by Nazis, nor did I ever get the chance to be a Blue Barracuda. But with National Geographic’s Explore a Pyramid, your students can have the opportunities that I never did, and learn while doing it!
BY BILL FERRIS
In Escape from the Mummy’s Tomb! your elementary students must recover Egyptian artifacts from inside a pyramid. As the title of the game has no doubt alerted you, you’ll have to wrest these artifacts from an undead mummy’s cold, dead, bandaged fingers.
After your students have finished their archaeological adventure, they’ll find themselves in a museum, where they must put the artifacts in their proper display cases. (more…)
BY BILL FERRIS
The scavenger hunt, the good twin of the wild-goose chase, can be a fun way to exercise students’ creativity and problem-solving skills. This video from Howcast shows you how to put together a scavenger hunt using modern tools like cell phones and multimedia. Using smart phones, the hunters in the video solve riddles via text message, snap pictures of interesting landmarks, and dial a secret number for the next clue by solving a math problem.
While I haven’t done this myself, it looks like a fun way to fuse technology and education. This idea is swollen with educational opportunities — incorporating study questions into the clues, challenging kids to find creative solutions, or promoting collaboration and teamwork — and you can adapt it for just about any subject.
BY BILL FERRIS
Before all these fancy-shmancy video games, folk used to play games on slabs of cardboard. “Board games” we called ‘em, and I don’t recall people getting bored playing them.
Now, a few of you creative types as like as not have games you play in your class. You think to yourself, “This is a pretty fun game, and my students actually learn something. I wish I could play this on an actual game board instead of drawing it on the blackboard like a caveman.” Well, you can make your game idea a reality with The Game Crafter.
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.
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…)
Welcome to May’s random roundup. This month’s theme: Little Johnny, one-man stand-in for school-aged children the world over. After a year-and-a-half of hard work, we figured this overused cliche deserved a post of his own before he gets back to studying.
Time-savers for teachers
For other notes and resources the students need, consider giving this stuff to them as a whole, at the beginning of a session or semester. That way you only have to keep a master copy for Little Johnny who struggles to keep himself organized.
Learning exercise: Promote healthy living this school year
If you’re concerned about your students’ health, you can do something about it by extolling the virtues of healthy exercise. Ask Little Johnny how his little league team did over the summer. Do you have any joggers or climbers in your midst? Take an interest, and maybe they’ll get more active.
Search Visually, Safely with RedZee
RedZee filters out porn and other inappropriate content, so you don’t need to worry that Little Johnny will “accidentally” stumble across something he shouldn’t be looking at on a school computer.
Swap your Stuff at Zwaggle
But Zwaggle might be a good resource to pass along to parents. If you can make their lives easier by showing them where to find Christmas presents on the cheap, they might make your lives easier by encouraging Little Johnny to buckle down and try a little harder for his nice teacher.
Keep Your Grade Book Online with Engrade
If students (and their parents) can track their grades at any time, it may motivate them to stay on task throughout the class. Come parent-teacher conference time, you won’t have to deal with parents who are angry about Little Johnny’s surprise “D.”
Instructifeature: How to Stimulate Class Discussion Using Discussion Forums
In the classroom, you’re limited by clock. There’s only so much time you can devote to class discussion. Students feel the time crunch even more keenly—they’ve got to compose a thoughtful response in mere seconds. And while thinking on one’s feet is a valuable skill, how much better would Little Johnny’s answer be if he had more time to compose his ideas? Using discussion boards, students have the time they need to think of the best answer they can.
Photo credit: khalid almasoud on Flickr.
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
Do you like annoying sounds and silly, cartoony graphics? Do you like educational games with quirky themes? Do you like doing your part to promote personal and environmental health? Well, have I got the site for you! TVO Kids is an educational and playful site for kids that contains a cadre of games and activities to help young students learn and be entertained for hours. TVO Kids is a subsidary of TVO.org, which is Ontario’s “public educational media organization and a trusted source of interactive educational content that informs, inspires, and stimulates curiosity and thought.” Just because the site is Canadian doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy it right here in the good old U.S. of A.
TVO Kids is built as an environment to keep children entertained while helping them prepare skills for easier learning, as well as engaging them in activities that are wholesome and fun at the same time. The young’uns can explore games that focus on nature, health, science and more — all built in a kid-friendly interface. To boot, there are videos, contests, and blogs to explore. The only peril to the site is that it might be too flashy and distracting to keep kids focused on one thing for too long. At least, I got distracted and I usually have a pretty good attention span. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN
Make science snappy for primary grades with Sid the Science Kid
Gaze into The Eyes of Nye to Understand Science
Harness Public Television for Your Classroom with Teachers’ Domain
I’m at the NCTIES conference in Raleigh. The intro session featured Vicki Davis of the Cool Cat Teacher Blog. Renowned for using nifty tools in her teaching, she shared a great philosophy for integrating technology into your classroom: focus on what you want to DO, and THEN pick your tools. Deciding you want a blog because that’s what everybody else is doing isn’t going to lead to a good learning experience for students.
In my first morning session, Wilson Diaz from Chapel Hill High School talked about how using the Google suite of apps (Docs, Groups, Calendar, etc.) helped him with both parents and students. He hit all the high points, such as using Google Docs for collaboration and such. However, he also noted that by using Google as a class information tool, it stopped parents from calling him with the same old questions. You know the ones — “If I only knew Little Johnny was having problems, I could have done something sooner!” or “Little Suzy told me she didn’t have any homework.” And so on.
In addition, Diaz said he uses Google to post assignments and due dates. That means, for example, if a kid loses a worksheet, he or she can download it immediately, rather than wait until after school to stop by the teacher’s room. It was a nice presentation on how to use a series of tools to eliminate headaches from the teaching process.
Overall, I enjoy NCTIES because it’s more hopeful than other conferences. It focuses on possibilities rather than problems. Don’t get me wrong, people discuss problems here all the time, but the solutions — usually creative and incorporating technology in ways that will engage students — sound like opportunities rather than obstacles. -BILL FERRIS
Who among us didn’t at least read the comics section of the weekend paper growing up? (Or even still?) Comics and graphic novels are a time-tested method of storytelling, and Pixton is a flash-based comic creation tool that is easy, free, and fun to use.
Once you create your account, you can browse other users’ comics, or create your own.
You have three options for creating your own comic: Quickie has predetermined sets and characters, and the user enters just text. Regular allows you to choose from a variety of backgrounds, and characters, and alter just about everything in the scene. Reposition your characters, by moving individual body parts, zoom in or out, and add your own text. (Sorry comic sans fans, that font is not an option.) Large Format is a one-scene mode. Have students use Pixton to illustrate their ideas, as a project for a literature circle group, or to explain the results of their most recent science lab. Foreign language teacher? Teach idioms and humor in their native format, and have the students make their own jokes. Create a comic to illustrate your classroom expectations. The options abound.
In addition to the free version, Pixton also has a licensed option for schools. For one dollar per student per month, you get more privacy controls, the ability to message between students and teachers, and some other customization. Digital storytelling is here to stay, and Pixton is a great tool for the task. -GRETCHEN SCHAEFER
moxie design studios
