Instructify

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.)

Top Ten Things Parents Can Do to Help Their Children Succeed in School (and in Life) - Lisa is a teacher. She is also a blogger. She seems to know what she is talking about. Check out this list on her page: Letters from Lisa. After you’re done perusing this list, check out some of her other entries. Lisa is one smart cookie.

9 Things to Stop Worrying About Right Now - Put down that glass of water, people! As it turns out, you don’t really NEED 8 glasses a day, so there is no sense in wasting precious space in the stomach for Mountain Dew. MSNBC’s Today Show puts some rumors and myths to bed so you too can sleep easy.

Picasso’s Top 7 Tips for Creating an Exciting Life - If you think “unabashed creativity” and “exciting” go hand in hand, then who better to take advice from than Pablo Picasso? The Positivity Blog brings us this interesting and fun list.

10 Practical Uses For Psychological Research in Everyday Life - Do you know when someone is lying to you? If you answered “yes,” then good, you’ve recognized that a lot of people are probably liars. If you said “no,” then you are also right. In fact, you are the most right. Yep… no one lies. Not ever. Check out PsyBlog’s list of ways you can use the findings of psychological research in your daily life. You might even figure out how to use reverse psychology to outwit your students, but then again… you probably won’t. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

(photo credit: misocrazy on Flickr.)

8 Firefox Extensions Towards Safer Browsing - Personally, I HATE pop-up ads, (and most banner ads) so I do whatever I can to avoid them. Firefox already does a nice job of keeping pop-ups from occurring, but there is a lot of things that slip by Firefox by itself. Luckily, ts/sci Security (a nice, clean, ad-free blog) presents this list of some helpful add-ons that can help give you some peace-of-mind when it comes to web browsing.

30 Tips to Rejuvenate Your Creativity - Lifehack does it again with this list of 30 ways to chop your creative block right in twain. As it turns out “start somewhere” isn’t really as hard as you might think. Also one of my favorites, “Don’t judge your ideas until you have plenty to judge.”

10 Extraordinarily Different Uses for Potatoes - Sorry folks, those delicious tubers aren’t just for mashing and au gratin-ing anymore. Gomestic offers this list of some unorthodox ways of using potatoes other than just eating them. I don’t know if any of the tips could be qualified as being “extraordinarily different” per-se, but they sure are neat. Surprisingly not on the list: make a battery.

100 Most Often Mispronounced Words and Phrases in English - I’m expecially critical when it comes to people misusing grammar. Whether I’m enjoying an expresso or just reading in the libary, there is always an abundance of people mispronouncing words, mispellling them, excetera. Here’s a list from YourDictionary.com of words people all-too-often mispronounce. I’d love to see a list of phrases people misuse in context, but that would be a whole nother post.

When Wikipedia Won’t Cut It: 25 Online Sources for Reliable, Researched Facts - I blogged about some other alternative-to-Wikipedia resources not too long ago, but here are some more. Students are going to use the internet to do their research, so they might as well have an abundance of reliable places to find information, right? Check out this list of 25 from CollegeDegree.com. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

(photo credit: jaycoxfilm on Flickr.)