Instructify

When I was a kid, search engines like we know them today were nonexistent, and I would sift through Yahoo!’s web directory just like the rest of the mid-90’s nerds out there. These days, kids have vast quantities of information on every topic you can think of right at their fingertips — well, as long as they know how to effectively search for it.

The Boolify Project is a piece of software that takes the concept of Boolean Operators — add “and” to narrow, “or” to broaden, etc. — and boils it down into a visual search engine that’s easy for kids (elementary to middle school level) to understand. By illustrating the logic of their search through puzzle pieces, your students can piece together their searches and see how each change to their search terms changes their results.

And the best part? The search results are presented through Google’s “Safe Search Strict” technology, so your students will get great search results and you don’t have to worry about them stumbling upon something that’s not so safe for the classroom.

Boolify also offers some basic lesson plans to help you understand Boolean Operators and effectively teach them to your students, as well as how to evaluate the credibility of a website. With these tools, you can not only help your students find information on the web, but also determine if it is actually valuable — a skill that proves more and more useful as the web expands.

Check out their instructional video on YouTube. Right now, it’s in beta and only offered in English, but their website indicates that they’re working to make it a multilingual tool.

Come to think of it, I think I know some grown-ups that could really benefit from Boolify… — LAUREN FROHNE

Boolify

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Counting your Blessings: 5 Ways to Increase Happiness - I know that this probably doesn’t apply to you, but if you are the least bit unhappy, there might be some info here that will turn your frown upside down. Via Goodlife Zen (I know, what a wretch-worthy great title for a blog), this list will help you realize how important gratitude is in both giving and receiving.

The Top 10 Qualities Of A Good Teacher - Here’s something wonderfully relevant and perfect for you. Sure, there are probably hundreds off qualities that make a good teacher, but the blog Ripples of Improvement has boiled it down to the top 10. How many do you exhibit? (Also, surprisingly not on the list: a sense of humor. Hmm.)

100 Best First Lines from Novels - Not that I’ve read 100 novels, but someone surely has. Check out American Book Review’s list of the best of the initiations in fiction. If nothing else, these might inspire you to think of some of your own, and they might prove to be great prompts for students. Anything’s better than “It was a dark and stormy night…” (My personal fav: “All this happened, more or less.” -KV)

Top 100 Tools for Learning Spring 2008 - Again, a very topical and appropriate list for you teachers and learners. There might not be much new on here that you aren’t already using or have at least heard of, but maybe now is the time you start to use them to your advantage. Courtesy of Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies.

Alas, this might be my last MBTN for a little while, but I’m confident in my co-authors to bring you the best of the web in numbered list form at the beginning of each week. If they don’t you let me know, friends. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

(photo via: solar ikon on flickr.)

Are your students aware of the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide? Every year it’s directly responsible for hundreds of deaths, yet it’s perfectly legal. It’s colorless. It’s odorless. It’s tasteless.

It’s water.

As a teacher, it’s up to you to teach students how to discern joke sites like DHMO.org from real online resources. Fortunately, you don’t have to go it alone. Renowned educational guru Alan November has a series of Information Literacy Resources that will help your students evaluate the information they consume.

November introduces strategies like using www.easywhois.com to find out the publisher of a website, and to remember that any nutcase with WiFi can register a site with a .com, .net or .org in its URL. You’ll also find quizzes, and suggestions of practice sites for your students to evaluate.

Teaching information literacy is every teacher’s job. Hopefully these resources will make that job easier. Because you never know when a kid will start circulating a petition to ban water. -BILL FERRIS

Information Literacy Resources via November Learning

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Photo credit: courtneyp on flickr

If you’re a history teacher, you probably already know you can’t beat primary sources. This is especially true given the fact that many textbooks are a load of hooey. But like any piece of evidence, students must learn how to evaluate and apply primary sources. And since you’re just one person and can’t screen all the evidence ahead of time, it’s up to you to teach students to assess materials for themselves.

Making Sense of Evidence, a resource from George Mason University’s “History Matters” course, gives students the tools they need to make sense of primary sources in history. Historians will help students examine everything from the meanings of words to historical context. They list questions to ask, and discuss the unique aspects of all manner of sources such as oral histories, letters and diaries, photos and newspapers.

This site is a great way to look at history without leaning on textbooks. If we empower students to learn about history straight from the source, they just might think it’s more interesting than they thought. -BILL FERRIS

Making Sense of Evidence

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Photo Credit: Stuck in Customs on flickr.com.

Too many schools fear the Internet like your four-year-old nephew fears his bedroom closet. Forget resources like OpenCongress.org or FreeRice - these Luddites think every online kilobyte is infested with scammers, predators, and pornography that magically appears on screen the minute the teacher turns her back. So, after spending thousands of dollars equipping classrooms with computers, some schools try to wall up the Internet where kids won’t find it, like in a story by Edgar Allen Poe.

You and I, of course, know this is useless - kids can access whatever they want at home, and students have been figuring out how to break firewalls since they were invented. But how do you convince your school administrators that removing the barriers will open students to a veritable gold mine of educational tools?

It’s up to good Web citizens like you to be an advocate for educational technology. Don’t worry, you don’t have to fight this battle unarmed. Instructify presents these three rules to help you.

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So your students need to do research for your latest assignment. You’ve probably shown them a few Web-based tools to make their lives easier, too, like Footnote or SlideShare.

Nowadays kids can find out almost everything they want to know online. But as the Luddites love to point out, the Web’s full of half-truths and stuff that’s just plain incorrect. Anybody with an ISP can communicate anything they want to the entire world. So how do you separate the PhD who wants to share his knowledge about Physics from the guy who thinks he’s a scientist because he watched a few episodes of Nova?

If you want your students to grow into intelligent, productive members of society (hint: you do), the best lesson you can teach kids is how to separate the nuts from the nougat for themselves.

With that in mind, here are 5 strategies students (and you) can use to figure out what information is worth citing, and what is worthless.

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