Instructify

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.

I’ve always preferred the bumbling around method to learning, whether I’m using a new piece of software or I’ve just bought a new gadget. However, sometimes you’re faced with the choice of reading the manual or causing irreparable harm to yourself or your new toy. By this point, though, you’ve relegated the manual to a shoebox at the bottom of your closet underneath the boxes containing your camping gear and your winter wardrobe. You could try to track down the manual on the company website, or you could simply go to The Manuals, a website containing more than 5 million free owners manuals for everything you own.

Want to try out the advanced features of your SMART Board? Download the instructions and get going. Struggling to hook up your fancy new digital projector for class? No problem.  Whatever you need to know, there’s a manual for that. Well, probably. There’s 5 million of them, and I haven’t had time to look through them all. But with that many, your odds of finding what you need are pretty good. -BILL FERRIS

The Manuals

Related stuff:

Discover how to open mystery file extensions at OpenWith.org

Learn How at VideoJug

Photo credit: Telstar Logistics on Flickr.

Keep your students on task with E.gg Timer, a simple and stylish timer application. E.gg Timer works much like Class Timer in that you can easily set a countdown timer that plays an obnoxious noise when it hits zero. However, E.gg Timer’s interface is much more slick. For starters, you can program the time right into the URL — http://e.ggtimer.com/2minutes will give you a countdown of two minutes. If you just put a number in the URL (http://e.ggtimer.com/10, for example), it will assume you want that number of seconds. Once the timer starts, you get a clean black-and-white numeral display, as well as a status bar for a graphical representation of how much time is left.

You can use E.gg Timer to let students know how much time they have left to finish a test, or you can give them a set amount of time to get organized for the next activity. Or, I suppose, to boil an egg. -BILL FERRIS

E.gg Timer

Related stuff:

Manage Your Time Wisely with Class Timer

Instructify recently backed out of talks with a certain upcoming summer blockbuster. I can’t name the movie in question, nor can I reveal why negotiations ran aground, nor can I confirm or deny that my own personal “unreasonably greedy disposition” made things go sour. Let’s just leave it at this: their movie about mechanical things that trans — er, change — into other mechanical things would have had some terrific synergy with this posting about Constructor.

The description on the Sodaplay website sums up Constructor so well that I won’t even try rephrasing it with my own words: “Sodaconstructor is a construction kit for interactive creations using masses and springs. By altering physical properties like gravity, friction, and speed, curiously anthropomorphic models can be made to walk, climb, wriggle, jiggle, or collapse into a writhing heap.”

Constructor runs in a separate Java app, so you’ll need to make sure you’re updated. You might do best using it to lead a lesson first and then turn it loose on your students. I searched around in both the application and the homepage, but I couldn’t find any instructions. That means you’re going to have to do some goofing around and exploring on your own, but that’s the fun part anyhow. -NICK YINGLING

Constructor

Related stuff:

Let’s Have Some Phun: Physics Gets Creative for Young Learners

I was once told by a band director friend of mine that 108 is the magical musical tempo at which all middle school band music is played. But how do you know how fast 108 is if you’re not a band director? Luckily for you, the internet does it again with Best Metronome.

This site offers, well, an online metronome, in three different versions. The highly accessible metronome is quite simple, allowing you to type in a tempo (such as the magical tempo of 108), and hear the beat. Additionally, it lets you know what tempos go with musical tempo markings – for instance, 108 would be andante. Slightly more advanced is the simple best metronome. On screen, this one looks like an old-timey metronome with the stick that moves back and forth (you even have to wind it!). Finally, you have the advanced metronome. Some of the settings on this one were too complicated even for me, an old band nerd. However, you can set the speed of this one all the way up to 900 beats per minute! Why you would want to do this, I’m not sure, but you can. Additionally, you can have it play you standard preset rhythm, such as the waltz or tango.

If you are a band director, have musical students, or are musical yourself, you will find this website useful. Even if you’re not musical, you can find out what the standard beat for the polonaise is, and who doesn’t want to know that? -REBECCAH HAINES

Best Metronome

Related stuff:

We Got the Beat: Metronome Online

Learn Music Theory Solo or in an Ensemble at MusicTheory.net

Play it by ear: Trainear.com

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

Five Best Note-Taking Tools
Back when I was a student, we had to take notes with a pen and paper. Today’s learners have a lot more options that take advantage of online technology. Lifehacker presents this list of the top five ways to take notes (don’t worry, my trust old pen and paper made the cut).

25 Tools every Learning Professional should have in their Toolbox
Another list of free tools teachers should use. Firefox, Skype, WordPress, all that stuff. You’re probably using a lot of these already. If not…well, this may not be the blog for you.

7 Things You Should Know About Digital Storytelling
Anybody with a video camera and a computer can broadcast a movie to anyone thanks to YouTube. Not surprisingly, smart teachers want to harness this technology for educational purposes. This article from Educause Learning Initiative will give you a good introduction to various forms of digital storytelling and how to use them for teaching and learning.

5 Things We Learned About Teens at TOC
The Publishing Trends Blog presents a fascinating glimpse at how teens use technology, gleaned during the Tools of Change for Publishing conference. Among them, kids don’t care about mastering a piece of software — they won’t sign up for a training seminar on Excel or Photoshop, they just want to know how to use it for the project they’re working on. To quote the article, “they’re concentrated on the outcome, not the tool.” These five discoveries may help you better understand your students’ learning process. -BILL FERRIS

I came across this post on TechRadar.com a couple of months back. After thoroughly pillaging this list for ideas to write about for Instructify, I decided to just share with you this list of 50 sites. Plagiarism police, calm yourselves — some of the things on this list had already been on Instructify first. This list is divided up into sites concerned with software and tools, storage and files, graphics, research and e-learning, and mobile workers. Check them out, I’m sure you’ll come across something good. Now instead of writing about each one, I can focus on writing my script for CSI: Portland.

PROTIP #1: The comments section on a blog post can sometimes generate even more useful content.

Occasionally the comments section can offer up some more user-generated links and tips. After going through, I found about 14-15 extra links in the comments section. Which is a good thing, because, as one reader points out, five of the items in the main article have gone missing.

On the other hand, some of them are from companies doing some quasi-trolling to gain their website some exposure. Really, TickleMePlant.com? Really? Maybe you’ll still be able to live without some of the comment section’s additional sites, but would you really describe such a poor quality of life as LIVING? If you aren’t tickling plants everyday you’re just as well off being dead.

PROTIP #2: Try not to preface sentences by announcing:  PROTIP!  I’ve chased away a lot of my own credibility and a great deal of respect from other people thanks to that.

Sometimes you might find a couple of potentially good prospects in the comments. I came up with two more valid leads that I’ll need to check out. Sadly, though, like all things on the internet, the conversation in the comments section pretty much devolves into free MP3 websites. It was good while it lasted, I guess.-NICK YINGLING

50 Websites You’ll Wonder How you Lived Without

Photo credit: Steffe on Flickr.

Are you trying to access a YouTube video to show in class, but can’t break through the firewall between you and it? KickYouTube lets you download whatever YouTube video you want to your home computer so you can load it on a thumb drive and bring it to school.

The operation is really easy.  Let’s say you wanted to download a video from Doctor Doctor. Find the video on YouTube, then go to the URL in your address bar:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2k40Hw3GI0&feature=PlayList&p=67D3397845507638&index=1

Next, simply type the word “kick” immediately before “youtube.com” in the URL, like so:

http://www.kickyoutube.com/watch/?v=j2k40Hw3GI0&feature=PlayList&p=67D3397845507638&index=1

KickYouTube will bring up a toolbar that will let you download the video in a variety of formats. Save it to your hard drive or thumb drive, and it’s yours to use as you see fit. With KickYouTube and a little planning in advance, you’ll never have to worry about not being able to view a video for class again. -BILL FERRIS

KickYouTube Lets You Download Videos Without Extra Software or Hassle via Lifehacker

Related Stuff:

Grab Online Video with myMovo

Access Firewalled Videos with KeepVid

Watch Thrilling Science Experiments with Doctor Doctor

What would you do if Instructify crashed? Cancel classes? Cry in the corner? Those would certainly be understandable reactions. Fortunately, Instructify is built of only the finest electrons, consonants and vowels, so such a crash is unlikely. But other sites on the interweb aren’t so sturdy. How should you handle those situations?

You can handle them with calm and relaxation thanks to Ding It’s Up!, a website that lets you know if your favorite sites go down, as well as when they return from the void. Enter the sites you love, and whether you’d like to be notified by email, Twitter or text message. Ding It’s Up! is a one-trick pony, but it’s worth using if you depend on certain sites for teaching ideas, lesson plans, or video content. Knowing the status of important sites can help your planning, plus give you peace of mind that you won’t miss anything if the site comes back online before you check it again. So don’t fret, Ding It’s Up! will keep you posted. -BILL FERRIS

Ding It’s Up!

Oh, what was that you say? Your third laptop was stolen from you for the third time in a row!? How terribly unfortunate for you… Maybe someone is trying to gaslight you, make you go insane and swindle you out of your rightful inheritance! This whole affair reminds me of a similar crime I once solved. I was summoned to the grim moor outside of the manor of Sit Charles Baskerville…no, wait, that was The Hound of the Baskervilles. No, the mystery I’m thinking of was when I was visiting Hong Kong…no, wait, that one was Rush Hour 2. Okay the point I’m trying to make is that next time your laptop is missing or stolen we can solve the mystery quickly and easily.

Adeona, named for the Roman goddess of safe returns, is an open source system for tracking the location of your missing laptop. Created from research at The University of Washington, Adeona FREE to use. By storing location updates and continually monitoring the location, Adeona amounts to a LoJack for your laptop.

It was also built with keeping users’ privacy in mind: there is no commercial entity involved, the location data is encrypted & anonymous and the location information is available only to the owner. So you don’t have to worry that any secret shadow organizations are covertly tracking your movements. (You should still be concerned about MOLEMEN, however).

As if this weren’t cool and useful enough, Mac users get the bonus of utilizing their Mac’s iSight camera along with some freeware tools provided on the Adeona website. A picture is taken if the dastardly villain uses the laptop! Now you have all the evidence for what criminal prosecutors call a “slam dunk,” or, what NBA players call “the legal system’s equivalent to a particularly powerful, crowd-pleasing method of scoring points.”

This is helpful for students on their own laptops, personal or school-issued. But it might be even more valuable for an instructor—my keen detective instincts suspect that a teacher might keep valuable lesson plans and grades stored on that laptop.

So here we are at last, it is time to solve our mystery and unmask the culprit of who stole your laptops: IT WAS YOU! You stole your own laptop and you’ve been giving me misleading testimony this whole time! No, wait, that was The Ususal Suspects. Ugh, alright, I quit. You should’ve just been using Adeona the whole time. –NICK YINGLING

Adeona

Related Stuff:

Get 1GB of storage for free with OpenDrive

Back up Your Data with Mozy

Back that Thing Up: Backup to Email

Get your kids involved in learning about science and experimentation via robotics, project-based learning, and of course, Web 2.0. On Thursday, October 23, USDLC hosts Hands-On, Minds-On Learning and Teaching: Project-Based Learning Meets Digital Tools.

Middle school science teacher Joselyn Todd will make a presentation in Second Life at the Bookhenge on Star Island. If you’re not a Second Life user and don’t know what that last sentence means, don’t fret. You can interact in an online chatroom, or listen to the full presentation through an internet radio stream (beware, though — if you click on the stream before the seminar is in session, you may be subjected to new age music).

This presentation is a great chance to learn about getting kids engaged by digital using tools available to most teachers. Don’t miss out! -BILL FERRIS

Hands-On, Minds-On Learning and Teaching: Project-Based Learning Meets Digital Tools

Related Stuff:

Find cool tools for teachers: interactive professional development in Second Life

Take a Stand Against Censorship: BANNED in the Bookhenge

Have you ever needed to show a YouTube video at an inservice where there is no Internet service, or there’s a firewall that makes the Great Wall of China look like a picket fence? Have you ever needed to convert a word document to PDF? Have you ever needed to convert JPG image files to TGA format to show them on the Jumbotron at a local ball park? Have you have ever had a WAV audio file you recorded to MP3?

At one point, I’ve need to do all of these tasks, and although you can pay money for some really spiffy conversion programs, there is a free, online alternative, Zamzar. Zamzar converts most image, audio, and video format within a day (I have been getting my files done within a couple hours recently).

This service is particularly useful for getting YouTube videos for use in the classroom, or professional development. YouTube and most other video services store those files in flash (FLV) format. Since Zamar is not blocked, I can even do this from my school site behind the fire wall. Here are the steps I took recently to locate a video for our staff meeting:

1. The principal asks me if I can get the video of Dalton Sherman addressing the Dallas ISD from YouTube for staff meeting after school;
2. I Google “Do You Believe AND Dalton Sherman AND YouTube“. The first link is for the YouTube page. I copy the URL at the end of the entry. You don’t even have to go to the YouTube page.
3. I go to Zamzar – Free online file conversion by URL, which lets you put in a URL for a YouTube video (or BlipTV, TeachersTube, Revver, etc.) and convert it.
4. I paste in the URL I copied in step 2, specify which format I want (.wmv or .avi works for Windows Media Player), enter my email address, and click on convert.
5. I get an email within an hour. I click on the link in the email, then click on download converted file. Voila! -ALICE MERCER

Zamzar – Free online file conversion by URL

Zamzar – Free online file conversion

Videos I’ve recently gotten for staff meetings:

Dalton Sherman, “Do You Believe in Me?”

Taylor Mali, “What Do Teachers Make?”

Nokia Ad Spoof “Walkthroughs and Learning Objectives”

Related Stuff:

Grab Online Video with myMovo

Access Firewalled Videos with KeepVid

I love Firefox. Not only has it proved more stable as a browser than IE (Internet Explorer), and has some great built-in features (like spell check), it has a bunch of great add-ons (or plug-ins, or extensions). Many can be found on the Mozilla site (publisher of Firefox).

I’m going to focus today on the variety of search tools you can add to your browser. What’s really slick, is that this will give you one search box, with a pull-down menu listing all the possible sites to search. You can see some “top” choices for search engines by adding the search box, then clicking on the pull-down menu, and select “Manage Search Engines.” Here are my top five for educators:

1. CC is a Creative Commons search tool that is one of the “defaults” available when you click on “Manage Search Engines”
2. Google and Yahoo! are great, but you can also add Ask.
3. Need some reference sources? Let’s start with Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary.
4. Wikipedia anyone?
5. Search Flickr tags for that perfect photo.

I’m adding one more for elementary, that Yahooligans! (now Yahoo!Kids).

Happy Searching! -ALICE MERCER

Firefox Add-ons

Related Stuff:

Download a shiny new web browser: Google Chrome

Make Math Easier with the Math and Algebra Expression Simplifier

Say it Right the First Time with Pronounce Firefox Extension

Keep Important Documents Only a Click Away with Google Docs Bar

I remember in 1996 when someone told me that I didn’t just have to use AOL’s web browser to surf “the ‘Net” (that’s what everyone called it back then). Apparently, you could also use Internet Explorer to check out web pages! Surely, such mind-exploding information probably gave me an instant nose bleed.

Jump to early 2004 when someone tells me that there exists a way to put an end to all the rampant pop-ups and regular browser crashes I was experiencing with Internet Explorer. The answer: Mozilla Firefox. A love affair with Firefox blossomed, IE was banished from my computer and I turned into a total snob towards IE users.

Now Google is getting poised to toss their hat into the web browser ring with Google Chrome. Right now its only being released as Google Chrome Beta so they can gather user feedback, but you can see what direction they’re heading in and some of it definitely looks good. You can find out more about Google Chrome by just, well, Googling it, I suppose. But how about I give you a quick rundown while I’ve got your attention?

Pros:

1. Google Chrome is very clean and sleek — that’s probably why they named it Chrome. If the T-1000 from Terminator 2 turned into a web browser, this is how it would look. One thing I initially resisted, but now enjoy is that the status bar at the bottom of the browser is no longer there all the time. Chrome looks a bit like other browsers would in good old Full Screen, F11 viewing mode. At first I felt a little un-anchored on the web page, as though I was about to fall into the screen. Eventually, I started liking it more and more. Even though it’s just a very small part of the window of other browsers, what’s the point in just taking up space at the bottom of the screen and declaring “Done” the whole time? Chrome’s subdued status bar appears in the bottom left only when needed. Seems like I wrote a lot about one small thing, but hey, it’s the little things, right?
2. Stand alone tabs – No longer will a crash on one tab bring down your entire browser.
3. Speed – Chrome definitely seems fast, but without a few weeks’ worth of browser history and add-on browser applications bogging it down, I can’t say I’ve really put it through the paces yet.

Rather than list the following as “cons,” I’ll give Google the benefit of the doubt since this is a beta version.

Wait and see:

1. Safe browsing – I didn’t really buy anything online because this is still a beta version, and payday is next weekend, anyways. Also, I avoided visiting dubious websites because I’m at work and I wouldn’t want to shatter your illusions about me.
2. Web apps aren’t ready – If you’d like to set up Twitbin in Google Chrome so you can follow LEARN NC on Twitter, you’re just going to have to wait until the browser is able to support web applications. -NICK YINGLING

Google Chrome

Related Stuff:

ZAC Browser: The best environment on the Internet for autistic children

Google Knol: a new Wikipedia?

One of These Days…Bang! Zoom! To Google Moon!

Keep Important Documents Only a Click Away with Google Docs Bar