Many people are happily using Google Docs as a free alternative to costlier productivity suites, but did you know that there are templates for Google Docs, too? While not huge, the Google Docs Templates directory has some valuable tools to help you get the most out of Docs with very little effort.

Students can grab templates for writing reports and research papers, as well as for creating bibliographies or study schedules. For teachers, you can keep your grade book and attendance using a spreadsheet template, or use the lesson plan or one of many calendar formats to organize your time and teaching. There are budget tools, calculators, letterheads, and even a nifty math quiz generator found in the templates directory.

In what might be a sign of the times, the most popular templates being used right now are for creating resumes. To view them all, check out the directory by going to the link below, or, when creating a new document in Google Docs, choosing “From template…” will get you there too. -GRETCHEN SCHAEFER

Google Docs Templates

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With so much information available to them on the world wide web, students sometimes need a little guidance when doing research. The million dollar question for educators is how to guide students’ research easily and effectively. A teacher could create a wiki containing links, images, and videos, but this requires a bit of time, which most teachers would argue, is limited. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to easily gather all of these resources and “box” them up to effectively guide student research? With SimplyBox, you can do just that.

SimplyBox touts itself as “a free service to capture, share, and organize anything you find on the web.” Registration for the service is a breeze. The required toolbar works on IE7 or higher and Firefox 2.0 or higher (sorry Chrome and Safari users). The toolbar is only required on the machine of the person creating the boxes, so if students will not be creating their own SimplyBox accounts, they won’t need to install the toolbar on their computers.

After you’ve created your account and logged in, you’ll be able to create your boxes and your containers to hold those boxes (don’t worry, that’ll make more sense once you start playing with it). Here’s an example — I want my US History class to begin research on the Revolutionary War but I want to guide their research at the beginning so they know which direction I’d like them to go. With SimplyBox, I can easily “box and save” images, text and videos for some of the resources I’d like them to use. Once I’ve saved all of the items into my box, I can easily share this box to receive a URL that I would then give to my students to access the resources I’ve saved for them. You can view the Revolutionary War example I’ve created by going here (hint: play with the different Views in the upper right hand corner.)

Research is a great way for students to learn more about the subjects they’re learning. As educators, we can help them out a bit by thinking “outside the box” by going “inside the box” with SimplyBox.-JERRY SWIATEK

SimplyBox

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There are lots of desktop calendar programs out there, and they all boast similar, if not the same, features. You know, your basic shared calendar, maybe an e-mail client built in, a place for notes or a to-do list, a saved contact list. But there’s more to your day than just your appointments and to-do lists, right?

ReminderCube is a desktop calendar that’s much more than a calendar. With an RSS reader, an application launcher, a client for your GMail, a password manager and much more, ReminderCube is like your own personal assistant. And like a personal assistant, you can set it up to remind you of certain appointments or tasks. Unlike a personal assistant, though, you can change the look and feel of the application to with different colors and skins.

ReminderCube is a pretty slick little program that is easy and intuitive to use and can help you get organized quickly. Plus, unlike some other calendar programs, it’s totally free! Beware, however — it seems to only run on Windows-based operating systems. Sorry Mac users! -LAUREN FROHNE

ReminderCube

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What’s your classroom layout? Do you have the desks in classic row setup? U-shaped? Circle? Whichever setup you’re currently rocking, maybe you should think of switching things up a little. A change of scenery is a great way to recharge your brain and your students’ brains. Maybe even add some plants for atmosphere.

What you shouldn’t do, however, is start changing up things without planning ahead. You don’t want to end up moving all those desks and chairs only to find out that you made a poor estimate. Make a floor plan using Gliffy.

Gliffy is more than just a floor planning app; Gliffy offers up many more charts and plans to help you organize and share your thoughts. Everything I’ve written above was just to bait and hook you. It also made it relevant to the classroom and allowed me to incorporate that funny link.

While its similar to a lot of mind mapping apps out there, Gliffy outshines them by lending more attention to providing better design details to the shapes and images used in diagrams, plans and charts. Don’t believe me? Check out this example of a network diagram. It is much more engaging for the viewer, and it makes you look even more professional.  -NICK YINGLING

Gliffy

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I’ve got to be honest: one thing that bugs me (perhaps too much) about Soshiku, a brand-new web site that helps students keep track of their homework, is that it’s ad-supported. Must students constantly be marketed to while they’re trying to learn? It’s bad enough that some schools make deals with fast food franchises. But to be fair, the “Ads by Google” that appear at the bottom of the assignment list are discreet, and so far they point to sites that seem relatively legitimate (learninghub.com, tutor.com) instead of to paper mills. And there are many pluses to Soshiku.

For one thing, the interface is big, bright, clean, and simple, with both a calendar and a list of assignments that show when assignments are due. Although Soshiku’s site says that the tool is for “high school or college assignments,” even first- and second-graders could probably use Soshiku, and that might help them develop good organizational habits early. For another thing, Soshiku allows students to have partners for homework assignments, and it can send assignment reminders by e-mail or text message. Assignments can be either “public,” “private,” or “partners only,” which is a good range of options.

Also, whoever develops Soshiku seems to be responsive to user requests, as is apparent from the very active Soshiku blog. There are only about a thousand people using Soshiku right now, which on the one hand means that it’s a relatively untested product, but on the other hand means that you can easily make your voice heard.

One potential obstacle to using Soshiku is that all courses and assignments have to be entered manually, which will probably get old very quickly. But otherwise the site might be a very good option for web-savvy but organizationally challenged students. And who knows? Maybe they’ll appreciate the opportunity to spend some money to “Get Help Now From an Online Tutor.” -AMANDA FRENCH

Soshiku

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It’s getting cold out there, but that doesn’t mean Instructify is freezing over. Here are some educational lists to keep you nice and warm.

21 Online Student Tools to Help With Research, Communication, and Organization – EduChoices brings us this list of some essential tools to aide in researching and staying on top of things. Your students probably need all the help they can get at this point in the year, as the thought of holiday breaks are distracting them left and right. Check out Grademate for your own grade organization as well as Studeous for online course management.

75 Questions to Ask Yourself – Did I leave the iron on?  might be at the top of your list, but for some more insightful self-queries, check out this list from Lyved. Your students might not consider themselves masters of their own egos yet, but some of the questions on this list might help them get some direction in getting there. Questions like What are my talents? might seem easy enough, but provide some inner understanding nonetheless.

Help Your Children Set Goals for Success – Top Ten Tips – These tips, designed for parents, are applicable for teacher use, too, but if you want to share some with parents, then by all means, I say go for it. One of the more important tips here is to set achievable goals, because Goals need to be set at a level that is more advanced than the level the child is currently working at, but not so advanced that it is unachievable or beyond reach. Well said, via Oxford Learning.

Teach Creative Writing With These 5 Steps – Since I’ve been bitten by the NaNoWriMo bug, I’ve really managed to rediscover my love of writing in a purely creative and uninhibited atmosphere. Though it was my major in college, creative writing was something I never got enough of in school. Do your students a favor and prod them a little using these 5 steps from Bloggeron.

10 Things to Do When You only Have Five Minutes Left in Class - Ack! You’ve come to a stopping point, the kids are restless, and yet there’s no time to start something new! Or is there? The Apple provides these 10 things you can do to keep your students engaged and learning without starting something you can’t finish. Included on the list are great activities like Journal Writing and something called the Toilet Paper Game, which isn’t as weird or gross as it sounds.

- JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Photo credit: HeavyWeightGeek on Flickr)

I am the queen of list making. I tend to make a list to remind me of things I need to put on another list. I live for Post-it notes. My clander boxes are are so full I have a hard time reading what I’ve written. If there is something I really have to remember I just call my house and leave myself a message on the answering machine. It’s not uncommon for me to have three or four messages to myself each day. I am sure this drives my dog crazy as she listens to me talking to myself on the answering machine. However, my salvation is here with Joe’s Goals. I can have all of my lists in one place, easily accessible from anywhere I can find an internet connection.

Joe’s Goals is a site that allows you to create as many logbooks as you would like to help organize your life in the areas of spending goals, food diaries, diary entries, exercises goals, and anything else you need to organize. This tool provides many opportunities to make my life a little easier in the classroom and my personal life. Joe’s Goals allows me to keep track of ongoing student behavior plans, anecdotal records, and check-off sheets. Older students can use this site to help keep track of assignments and projects.

So now whether you’re an over-organized individual with Post-it notes stuck everywhere, or someone who is disorganized and struggling to keep track of important things, using Joe’s Goals can rescue you. -MONIQUE ST.LOUIS

Joe’s Goals

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Confession: sometimes I leave papers ungraded and e-mails unanswered for just a smidge too long. Corollary confession: I spend (waste?) a fair percentage of my time on books, sites, and blogs that promise to help me manage my time better, get more organized, stop procrastinating, and be more productive. Usually each one has its own proprietary system, trademark and all, and yet there are so many of these systems around that sometimes it’s hard to tell them apart.

To my (overly) experienced eye, “Get Everything Done,” Mark Forster’s time-management site and blog, is on the bland side: as a productivity guru, Mark Forster doesn’t seem to have the bold entrepreneurial personality of a Stephen Covey or a David Allen or a Julie Morgenstern, let alone a Gina Trapani or a Merlin Mann. (Watch this space for more about tech-savvy productivity systems in upcoming weeks.) That could be because Forster is British, and thus naturally more restrained, or it could be because Forster’s system emphasizes, well, just chilling out.

Forster writes that “Thinking should be your number one top priority action,” for instance. Moreover, he’s opposed to to-do lists as well as to prioritizing by importance or urgency, which is almost unheard of. Read more on his site if you’re into that kind of thing, like I am, or consider passing on his tips to your disorganized students. Of particular interest to me, and possibly to you, are these articles: “It’s Like Walking Across a Muddy Field: How to Get Rid of Backlogs“; “Top 10 Tips for Keeping Your Life Moving“; and “Chaining: A Way to Keep Going.”

See you at the annual conference of ninjas, gurus, and maestros. –AMANDA FRENCH

Get Everything Done

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I often find my desk completely wallpapered with reminders, phone numbers, messages, and all kinds of forget-me-nots in the form of sticky notes. This outdated, analog system does little to contribute to my overall productivity, to say the least. If you also find yourself frequently drowning in yellow sticky paper, you may want to give Stikkit a try.

Stikkit‘s so-called “little yellow notes that think” provide a platform for all of your daily tasks, notes, phone numbers, calendar, bookmarks, and everything you need to stay productive, and organizes it for you. That’s right, you write your note with whatever random details are necessary, and Stikkit organizes it based on date, person, or any other crucial piece of information.

The interface is as easy-to-use as scribbling a note, and you can share it with friends, family and coworkers, even if they don’t have a Stikkit account. When you share a stikkit with someone, they can make edits or add comments, and Stikkit keeps track of who added what. You can also forward or BCC notes from your e-mail to Stikkit and your message will be posted and organized as a stikkit note.

Now you can stop littering your workspace and wallpapering your desk with those pesky sticky notes by digitalizing them! How 21st century! — LAUREN FROHNE

Stikkit

UPDATE: As of December 19, 2008, Stikkit was no more.

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Now they’ve done it. They’ve ruined my ability to forget stuff. That trusty companion—from so many Friday and Saturday nights (and Saturday and Sunday mornings, too), from so many ex-girlfriends’ birthdays/anniversaries/other clichéd relationship obligations, from so many work/school obligations—is gone for good. Now, thanks to Evernote, I have to say goodbye to my ability to forget stuff.

Its going to be a tough loss for me to handle, but I’ll just have to cope by filling the void with my new FRIGGIN’ AWESOME ABILITY TO REMEMBER EVERYTHING! Evernote lets you grab whatever you want on a website for easy reference later. While Evernote still lets you grab whole pages, why bookmark the entire page when you just want that one chunk of info? See an image, video, link, snippet of text, or whatever that you like? Highlight it and with the click of a button you’ve sent it to your Evernote.

I think it was LifeHacker where I picked up the tip to use my camera phone to take quick snapshots of business hours, ads, etc. so that I had them for easy reference, plus I’d save valuable seconds by not actually having to write things down. And I saved paper, so there’s a green spin for my personal PR, too. It’s a nice tip, but it gets annoying when I start to max out the memory on my phone. So eventually I have to waste time deciding which pics get zapped, so then I might just have to actually jot down the info somewhere after all. Someone on the Internet must have been paying attention to my plight because now I can use Evernote mobile.

With a mobile version of Evernote, I can send in those all the snapshots on my phone to have them sync up with the rest of my notes. They’ll even be searchable, as Evernote’s recognition technology can recognize the words in images. That’s some pretty next level Internetwebs technology right there.

The mobile version of Evernote is only available for your iPhone and other phones with internet capabilities, but don’t worry—in a few short years all phones will be internet ready…and shortly thereafter the machines will probably rise up against humanity. But everything will be alright. You’ll be able to easily look back and remember the full life you’ve led, all thanks to this new tool! -NICK YINGLING

Evernote

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35 Scholarships Anyone Can Get - CollegeDegree.com has put this list of scholarships together that just about anyone is eligible for. The list includes scholarships in various amounts, as well as essay writing contests and some unorthodox contests like the Duct Tape Stuck at Prom Scholarship.

50 Things from Ben Jones – Ben Jones blogs for the M.I. T. admissions department. This letter, addressed to the incoming freshman, is a quick and dirty “here are the things I wish I’d known” list, with such advice as: All nighters are highly overrated. You said it, Ben.

101 Tips to Help You Make Money Doing What You Love – If you love teaching, don’t ever stop. But if your students have no idea what to do with their lives, then point them towards continuing to do the things they love. These tips from InspiredMoneyMaker.com should do the trick.

No Takebacks! Five Playground Rules to Live By – When the kids are at recess, you might do yourself some good by paying attention to what they’re yelling at one another. As it turns out, those tried and true rules like: No cutting and No do-overs might be more applicable to your adult life than you thought. From Dumb Little Man. – JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

(photo by: HeavyWeightGeek on Flickr)

Teachers have a lot to do on any given day, and it can be difficult to find time to sit down and create nice, simple worksheets that perfectly complement your lesson plans or design calendars to help organize both you and your students. Butthanks to the Internet, there are tons of resources you can take advantage of to make your tough job a little bit easier.

The Worksheet Library is an online resource full of worksheets, calendars, planners, newsletter templates, bookmarks and tons of other useful materials on subjects like math, science, and language arts to use in your kindergarten through sixth grade classroom. You can check out more than 500 materials available on the site for free (all the free worksheets are designated with the little “free” icon next to them), and you can sign up for their free weekly worksheet which is conveniently sent directly to your e-mail.

As an added bonus, the site also offers free teaching tip articles for grades K through 6 on topics like report card comments, time-saving advice, and icebreaker exercises, which are useful to both novice and experienced teachers alike.

To reap all the benefits of the site, you do need a membership, though you should be able to find enough free stuff to be worth your while. And they add new materials each week, so there’s always something new to check out!

We know you’re busy, so let the Internet do a little bit of the work now and again. Really, it doesn’t mind! – LAUREN FROHNE

Worksheet Library

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8 Tips to Help You Think Like a Genius – I don’t need these tips, personally, because me am already genius. You might find them useful, though. ZME Lifetips recommends visualization, being productive, and thinking metaphorically amongst others. Start using these tips and you’ll be a geinus in no time.

5 Questions That Will Save You Time and Money – Lifehack presents this list of questions you should ask yourself to tell if you are being productive or actually wasting time. There are a lot of do-it-yourself-ers out there who think they can do-it-themselves but they end up not-doing-it-right so they end-up-paying-for-it-later. The first of these five questions sums it up nicely: Do I have the skills necessary for the task?

6 Best Ways to Learn Physics… For Free – I don’t know much about physics, but I do know it is easier to understand if you see it in action. Blog Learn Out Loud has compiled this list of a few good video demonstrations you can find on the web. Included on the list is a great video we mentioned before about the 10th dimension.

List of Educational Web 2.0 Apps to Jumpstart Your Productivity – There are a lot of Web 2.0 applications out there, but only a few are catered toward becoming a better learner. DiplomaGuide has found some of the better ones available. These 25 applications are divided into categories like ‘organization’ and ‘note taking’. There seems like a good mix here, so sort your way through to find what you can recommend to your students. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Photo credit: Szagi on flickr

How to Save Money on Gas – 29 Tips – I now own a car for the first time in ages. In fact, the last time I had to fill up a tank it barely cost me a nickel. And back then there were only 14 cars, period. Okay, so that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but gas is seriously expensive right now. Here’s a great list from OpenTravelInfo.com, where they explore some easy and great ways to cut down on the amount of nickels you pour down your tank.

18 Five-Minute Decluttering Tips to Start Conquering Your Mess – Let me guess, you “know where everything is,” right? Even so, it doesn’t make your work any easier. Who wants to come home from a cluttered desk to a cluttered desk? Zen Habits presents these 18 tips on where to begin.

8 Ways to be Ruthless With Your Time – Who knew that actually planning your day would save you time? Not me, I guess. Thanks to Lifehack, now I know that scheduling things before I do them can help me save some minutes. Read more about it and seven other tips here.

29 Healthiest Foods on the Planet – If Superman was a real dude, I imagine his menu might look a little something like this. This list via BellyBites.com boasts such delicious and nutritious foods such as Apricots, Bok Choy and Crab. (Not a suggested combination of ingredients, however.) –JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Photo credit: incurable_hippie on flickr.

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.)