Instructify

15 Awesome Tutorial Websites You Probably Don’t Know About
A couple weeks ago I decided to take up juggling. Right away I was amazed at the high quality tutorials I found online. If you have a random hobby you’d like to try, or you’re looking for a project during these summer months, check out this list of sites.

100 Unbelievably Useful Reference Sites You’ve Never Heard Of
Here’s a great big list of sites you can use to find everything from literature to library references to health care. You can also find fun stuff like the Dialectizer, which can translate your text to sound like Elmer Fudd. Who doesn’t need that?

10 Brain Training Tips To Teach and Learn
Keep your brain fit for optimum learning potential. The folks at SharpBrains have these ten tips to turn you and your students into efficient thinking and learning machines.

Video Toolbox: 150+ Online Video Tools and Resources
Need to edit a class video project? Want some advice on how to create a video podcast? Or do you need to convert video to a different file format? Mashable has all that and more in this great post. -BILL FERRIS

Photo credit:  zen on flickr

Whenever I have trouble wrapping my head around a difficult concept, I turn to cartoons to explain them (note: that said, I would not recommend turning to Wile E. Coyote for demonstrations on the laws of gravity).

Being an English major, I need all the help I can get when it comes to biology. That’s why I couldn’t pass up Biology in Motion, an online collection of demonstrations and interactive activities that make learning biology easy and fun.

Check out activities that explain evolution, or demonstrations of digestion and the cardiovascular system. For the kid who always has to go to the bathroom, have a look at an explanation of how kidneys affect the solute concentration in urine. You can find these and lots more at Biology in Motion, and the site itself can do a lot better job of explaining what it offers than I can. Maybe there’s a cartoon for that, too? -BILL FERRIS

Biology in Motion

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I hope you’re all enjoying your summer vacation. Maybe you’ve got some plans for the Independence Day weekend. Then again, with gas prices shooting into the stratosphere, maybe you don’t.

In these days of pricey petrol, you’ve got to get a little creative to save money on gas. That’s why you should head over to SmartPlanet and read their post, Top 10 eco driving tips to beat fuel rises. These tips include common sense (car pooling), hypermiling (get into second and fourth gear quickly), and some tips that are actually more convenient than conventional wisdom (at high speeds, crank the A/C and keep those windows rolled up to reduce drag).

The list is packed with useful advice and charming Britishisms like motorway, lift, and complaints about how “unleaded’s now 112.6 pence per litre,” whatever that means. So don’t let high fuel prices keep you cooped up this holiday. Read this advice and hit the road! -BILL FERRIS

Top 10 eco driving tips to beat fuel rises via SmartPlanet

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Turn Your Dirty Car into a Canvas: Scott Wade’s Dirty Car Art Gallery

I loved playing with Legos as a kid. Trouble was, I was always a brick or two short of creating the perfect fort for my G.I. Joes, thus leaving them vulnerable to Cobra attack.

If only I’d had Lego Digital Designer back then, I could’ve designed the forts, plus helicopters and tanks for good measure. With Lego Digital Designer, you have access to hundreds of virtual Lego blocks of all shapes, sizes and colors (plus a wide assortment of little Lego people, too).

Lego Digital Designer lets you build from scratch as well as with pre-loaded kits. LDD will also walk you through the more difficult designs. The download is free, but if you’re willing to spend a few dollars, it lets you order a custom set of blocks to make your digital masterpiece a reality.

This is a great re-creation of a classic childhood toy, and is a good way to prime your students’ creative juices. Now that I’m an adult, I won’t be using Lego Digital Designer for childish pursuits like designing G.I. Joe fortresses. I’ll be using it to design my next house instead. -BILL FERRIS

Lego Digital Designer

Not everyone is a wizard of the qwerty keyboard. Your students may be able to thumb their way around a cell phone keypad, but still can’t find the home keys on a computer keyboard. Here are some resources for you (or your students) to work on typing speed and accuracy while having fun. I love doing them even with a solid 50+ wpm speed.

1. Aunt Lee Dot Com is a collection of different typing games (some of which are featured below). My favorite is under Typing words that has Type, Type, Revolution (yep, just like the dancing game, only with typing).
2. Dance Mat Typing is probably the most well-known online interactive typing program, and is brought to us by the BBC. The narrator (a goat) does have a pretty heavy Scots burr, but it just adds to the flavor of the place.
3. TypingTest.com and Online Typing Games - Bubbles Game let you assess yourself, then play a really great game of typing letter bubbles. I’m addicted.
4. Custom Typing Training has a training module, and a fun soccer typing game. You need to sign up to get the full version, but it’s still free.

Add fun - and more words per minute - to your typing repertoire with these online typing games. -ALICE MERCER

Aunt Lee Dot Com
Dance Mat Typing
TypingTest.com
Online Typing Games - Bubbles Game
Custom Typing Training
Best sites to learn typing skills via Larry Ferlazzo

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Go Type Racer, Go

Photo credit: ollily on flickr

I’m terrible at Risk, which probably has something to do with the fact that I’m terrible at geography. My main problem, though, is that I end up with terrible territories:

Opponent: “I’m sending an army into Irkutsk.”

Me: “Meh. You can have it, Nanook.”

Perhaps I’d do better if I got to defend a place I actually cared about, or could at least locate on a map. The New York Times reports a few Ivy Leaguers apparently felt the same way when they created GoCrossCampus.

Like Risk, the goal in GCC is to recruit and position your armies to take over your opponents’ territory. Unlike Risk, the territory consists of college campuses, or U.S. cities and states, and your armies consist of you and your friends. Working as a team with people within your social network, dormitory, whatever, you coordinate your movements to defeat your rival, as well as develop teamwork, collaboration and leadership skills. You can also nominate commanders, and remove nefarious spies from your ranks.

The game’s creators - a small group of Yale students - designed the game to be compatible with existing social networks, both online and face-to-face. They also play up the game’s small time-commitment - only a few minutes every day.

GoCrossCampus isn’t available to the general public just yet, but the founders plan to expand into high schools, as well as corporate team-building exercises. If you can’t wait that long and you’d like to participate at your school ASAP, you can contact them via the GoCrossCampus website. It’s a good way to bolster school spirit, as well as inject a little energy into your next geography lesson. -BILL FERRIS

Storming the Campuses via the New York Times
GoCrossCampus

If you’ve ever wanted to write a book, but you never thought about how it could possibly come to fruition, then you should know it’s easier than you think. With Blurb, you can create a book of just about any size or shape, with any number of pages, and a fully customized look and feel. The content is all up to you, though, so you’ll be responsible for the hard part.

Once you finish your masterpiece, you can download the easy-to-use editor software to arrange and layout the book the way you want it. After that, pricing per individual book starts at $12.95. You can order as few or many as you like, and your work can be featured on the site for purchase by others if you wish. You’ll retain the copyrights, and you can even set your price to determine your own profit level.

Blurb’s self-publishing platform could make for an awesome class project. Your students could be responsible for creating a collaborative project full of their own musings, pictures, stories and drawings. If you’ve got a web-savvy class, you can also take advantage of the blog-to-book feature and have them blog throughout the year, and then collect their works into a group project or individual books. The service and software are so easy to use, who knows, maybe you’ll see an Instructify book sometime soon. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Blurb

Way at the top of Bloom’s taxonomy is the often ignored task of creation. Now the Ad Council along with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and National Inventors Hall of Fame Foundation is working to “inspire invention.” You certainly have a couple kids in need of a project like this, the bored, the kids who are already inventing mayhem in your classroom, albeit in an unfocused way. Give them a chance to use that inventiveness for the forces of creativity and good, instead of dropping stink bombs during class.

First, there is the InventNow.org - World which is an interactive online cartoon environment where kids can learn about inventors, and invention and get a creative spark to get the brain cells going. Then go to InventNow.org - Invent, and have kids start to put their ideas together. The website has had a redesign since I first used it last Fall, so if you haven’t seen it recently, or have never been there, check it out. -ALICE MERCER

InventNow.org
Ad Council : Inspiring Invention

If you watch Lost, you’ll be familiar with some of the references I’m about to throw your way. Who wouldn’t want to explore an island, all the while hanging out with Kate (or Jack, ladies) and solving mysteries? First thing I’d do would be to [Spoiler Alert] and then [Spoiler Alert], because, really, what was up with [Spoiler Alert]? We might never know!

One thing I do know for sure is that its not really a place for kids, as most of them end up getting kidnapped once or twice per season. There has got to be a kid-friendly island out there that they can explore… someplace like, oh I don’t know, BBC’s Adventure Rock. Adventure Rock is an online 3D island that includes games and creative studios where children can get immersed.

According to this article from BBC News, virtual worlds are a stimulating way for kids practice what they might do in real life. For as much escapism as a virtual world like Second Life provides for people who already lead real lives, something like Adventure Rock would exist on the opposite side of things. Kids can practice social skills and figure out their identities in a consequence-free environment all before leading their own lives in the real world. –NICK YINGLING

Adventure Rock

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!

With this fun and educational game, your students can coast through an ancient pyramid using a robot to search for hieroglyphic clues. Once they find the hieroglyphic in each room, they can access the secret room to see mummies and other neat stuff. It’s a great way to start a lesson on Egyptian history and to discuss the significance of pyramids and hieroglyphics.

And after your students get to scope out some mummies, they can move on to find shrunken treasure, explore Mars, or even learn about helping animals with other map games on the National Geographic’s My Wonderful World Web site.

These games are fun, engaging and most of all, educational. And if your aspirations were the same as mine growing up, you can live vicariously through your students! Everyone wins! -LAUREN FROHNE

Explore a Pyramid
My Wonderful World

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You may have heard your students talking about questing or getting their epic mounts or selling bars of gold on the auction house. If you have, you’re probably dealing with a World of Warcraft player.

As a long-standing gamer and a doctoral student interested in virtual worlds and games and their potential use for teaching, I was thrilled to learn that a recent issue of Science magazine called for participation in a unique conference – one that would take place within the massively multiplayer online game, World of Warcraft (WoW). For three days in May, participants in the Convergence of the Real and the Virtual conference created characters and joined players from around the world to participate in scholarly discussions about the game while hanging out in a virtual world.

The conference was comprised of three sessions: one about the possibilities for research within the game, one about the relationship between the game and the “real world,” and one about the future of such virtual worlds.

I was particularly drawn to the second session because it featured both Constance Steinkuehler who researches the potential for learning and literacy in games, and Julian Dibbell, who researches cultural and sociological aspects of games. These scholars are two of my most favorite within this community. This particular session shed some light on the learning potential in games.

Steinkuehler believes there’s serious learning and knowledge creation that occurs as a result of playing WoW. For instance one conference participant related a story about how his son wanted to find a specific pet within the game (yes, players can have virtual pets in the game) and spent several hours researching how to find and obtain such a pet. This example uniquely illustrates the development of critical thinking, research skills, and strategic planning - indispensable skills in high school, college and beyond. Other threads of discussion in this session included the notions of:

1. How real is a friend in WoW?
2. Are the relationships that are formed in-game meaningful?
3. Is the social space of the game completely different from real life, or does it simply mimic real life?
4. Can leadership be learned in WoW?
5. Can skills developed within the game world transfer to the real world?

If you are interested in learning more about the potential for learning in games, I recommend you start with Steinkuehler’s work. After all, 10 million people play WoW; and some of them might be your students! -LAURA CHRISTOPHERSON

Back in February, Jeremy blogged about Doodle 4 Google, a contest where students redesigned the Google logo based around the question, “What if…?”. The entries are in, and you can now vote for your favorites. The winning drawing will replace the usual Google logo on May 22.

If you missed the contest deadline, you can still take advantage of the lesson plans Google has made available for the project. The contest’s central question, “What if…?” can be a springboard for lots of creative ideas beyond just the Google logo. For example, I think the Instructify banner at the top of this page would be a great choice. -BILL FERRIS

Doodle 4 Google - Vote

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Ever have that student that just can’t seem to get a concept (especially in mathematics) without concrete examples? How about the ones that do better when they make something, rather than taking notes and doing calculations? That probably describes 50-85% of some classrooms. Well dear readers, we have some tools for you.

Are you teaching about symmetry and reflections? Kaleidoscopes are a great way to teach students about these concepts. Myoats is a great online tool for this. It lets users create kaleidoscopic images with 1 to 16 lines of symmetry. You can even save your creations as an image file. There is also a library of images created by others that you can use as examples.

Tessellations are great for visually showing patterns, and Math Cats’ Tessellation Town! is easy enough for primary kids to start building. It gives you a choice of different tiles to work, and you can start clicking away.

Do you have tappers and drummers in your class? Spring is their season, so let them go to Phil Tulga’s Playing Fraction Pies to get all those phat beats out of their system, AND learn about fractions.

So give the right side of your kids’ brains a workout during math with these fun and easy-to-use sites. -ALICE MERCER

Myoats
Math Cats’ Tessellation Town!
Phil Tulga’s Playing Fraction Pies

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I always thought that college was the time for experimentation, but as it turns out, there’s a lot of experimenting you can do in elementary school, too. Hunkin’s Experiments are a collection of simple cartoons that explain how to do simple experiments. Their drawings are rudimentary and playful, but luckily, so are the experiments themselves.

Hunkin has divided them into several categories like Food Experiments, Math, Sound, and even Clothes. Here’s an example from the “Food Experiments” category:

How To Write Your Name on an Apple - Cut the shapes of the letters out of strips of plastic insulating tape. Stick these on a growing apple and wait a week. Areas of the apple covered by the tape will have become bleached and the name will be clearly visible when you remove the tape.

None of the experiments get much more difficult than that, and the science behind each is never really explained. If you just want some easy and fun experiments and tricks to have fun in the classroom, then Hunkin has something for you. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Hunkin’s Experiments

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Get Smarter: 12 Hacks That Will Amp Up Your Brainpower
Exercise your mind with these 12 strategies from Wired designed to max out your brainpower. Tips include exercising wisely, putting the right kinds of information in your brain, and even finding out the optimum dosages of caffeine.

40 Ways to Spice Up Your Spelling Words
Who doesn’t love memorizing spelling words? Your students, probably. Plenty of adults have trouble with spelling, meaning it’s probably even tougher for kids. Help them out by making your spelling words more interesting with these ideas.

50 Handy Tricks
File this under “Grab Bag.” Instructables presents this list of 50 Handy Tricks encompassing nothing in particular. You’ll learn how to do everything from taking blink-free photos to making a bow-and-arrow out of skis. Not necessarily teaching-related, but a creative soul like you can certainly figure out a way to build a lesson plan around reupholstering your couch with duct tape, can’t you?

10 virtually instant ways to improve your life
Want to add some quality to your quality of life? The folks at Stepcase Lifehack have some ideas, most of which can be summarized by the word, “relax.” Avoiding drama, not being a perfectionist, and not taking things personally will all help you make a fitter, happier and more productive life for yourself. -BILL FERRIS

Photo credit: Kaptain Kobold on flickr