Instructify

BY KEVIN HODGSON

This Day, a website by Nikon, is a beautifully rendered look into historical events that happened in the past on the day you visit the site. With a lush background soundtrack (that can be turned off), and an automatic timeline that shifts backwards, the site transports you back in time to key events in history.

What I like here Is the simplicity of the design — the black background, the historical images and a short bit of text about that day in history. The site also offers an option of a screensaver and a desktop gadget. This Day might be useful as something for the whiteboard at the start of the day, as students mill into the room to get ready for learning. Or during units around time lines. On the day I watched, I learned about the Wright Brothers, the Tokyo Train Station in Japan, the first transatlantic radio transmission by Marconi, the rise of Nero, and more.

This Day

Related stuff

Go Back in Time with Kakorama

Help students relate to history with the Age Gauge

BY KEVIN HODGSON

HistoryPin combines maps, images, and historical inquiry to explain the changes in neighborhoods through stories and archival images. While still in beta, the site (which is a partnership between Google and an organization called We Are What We Do) has interesting potential for research in the classroom and could be used as a model for a community-action project for students.

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BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

Images — so useful in education, yet so convoluted in copyright explanations that many people fear using them. But if you wade into the waters of Creative Commons you can find millions of available images, ready to be used, modified, and shared. One of the more common image sites is Flickr, which we have highlighted a few times. Here at Instructify, we’ve talked about creative commons laws, and we’ve given you several ways to search Flickr using third party search engines like FlickrCC and Flickrstorm, but there is another way that deserves mention for their combination of the two.

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BY BILL FERRIS

It’s that time of year again when lazy bloggers rehash old material under the guise of “Best of” lists rather than come up with new stuff. Instructify is no exception.

Below are the top 10 Instructify posts of 2009. The rankings were determined via a combination of Google Analytics, retweets, and the capricious and arbitrary whims of the editor.

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BY BILL FERRIS

You can use portfolios for everything from exhibiting student projects to creating a teaching portfolio. Back in my day, though, building a portfolio meant shelling out a few bucks for a three-ring binder and those plastic pageholders — and then I had to spend way more time than I budgeted for stuffing and organizing my work in the binder. Carbonmade takes the hassle out of the portfolio process by letting you or your students set up free, simple portfolios online.

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BY BILL FERRIS

Just because you don’t know web design doesn’t mean you can’t have a nice-looking website. Wix lets you create a Flash-based website from one of their many templates, or build a site from scratch. Here’s a sample site I made in about five minutes. Wix templates allow you to create sub-pages, upload photos, and incorporate animations into your design.

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BY BILL FERRIS

As school budgets dwindle and schools focus on high-stakes testing in core subjects, some schools see art programs as the go-to budgets to slash. Fortunately, there are a lot of tools and projects out there for art teachers that don’t cost a dime. The following are five of Instructify’s favorite free tools for art teachers.

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BY BILL FERRIS

Pics4Learning is another handy resource for teachers who need images to use in class that: 1) look cool, and 2) won’t get them in trouble for copyright violations. According to the Pics4Learning site, “Unlike many Internet sites, permission has been granted for teachers and students to use all of the images donated to the Pics4Learning collection.” No fuss, no muss, and most importantly, no cease-and-desist letters from angry copyright holders.

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BY BILL FERRIS

For this month’s random roundup, we’ve selected the Library of Congress, our nation’s storehouse of pretty much everything worth knowing. As you’d expect, a lot of great resources for teachers have been derived from the Library. See your tax dollars at work by reading the articles linked after the jump.

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BY BILL FERRIS

It’s hard to believe that Google figured out how to search for my house from space before getting around to searching for photos licensed under Creative Commons¹. According to the Google Operating System blog (not affiliated with Google), Google Image Search now lets you narrow your results to pics that carry the Creative Commons license. Hey, better late than never.

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As a reminder that things can always get worse, the Library of Congress has released several photos from the Great Depression on the photo-sharing site Flickr. The LOC has posted some of the most frequently requested photos from their collection as free digital images in their FSA/OWI Favorites set. Like other LOC photo collections on Flickr, you and your class can tag and comment to your heart’s content.

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Check out these upcoming educational grants, as listed on Grant Wrangler.

Samsung Focus on Learning Grant Program — Deadline: June 15
Need a Samsung 850DX document camera? Samsung is giving away 50 of them to educators who can demonstrate a need for them.

Universe Adventure Student Video Contest — Deadline: June 15
The Berkley Center for Cosmological Physics and the Honeywell Corporation will give $1,500 in money and new equipment to the students who can create a YouTube video that “demonstrates one of the key fundamental scientific principles or physical laws that governs cosmology or astrophysics in the universe.”

Thomson Gale TEAMS Award –Deadline: June 15
Thomson Gale and the Library Media Connection will award $2,500 cash to three K-12 public or private school teachers who have collaborated with media specialists in the past school year.

New Science Teacher Academy — Deadline: June 30
Second- and third-year science teachers can become a fellow at the New Science Teacher Academy for one year by winning this grant from the National Science Teacher Association.

Coca-Cola Foundation Education Grants –Deadline: Rolling
Coke will support all kinds of educational causes, including dropout prevention, maintaining water quality, recycling and maintaining access to education programs. Plus there’s no deadline. Take a look at their application guidelines and see what you can propose. -BILL FERRIS

Hello and greetings once again from my undisclosed, fortified location. As will happen from time to time, I started to feel the authorities closing in all around me. Men sporting both mustaches and sunglasses would stare at me for much longer than usual, ATMs would reject my cards, small electronic devices kept showing up in my apartment — I was getting the fear. Once again, I was in the grips of paranoia and panic because of copyright worries.

Phony intrigue aside, that weird déjà vu feeling is bound to creep up on you when you’re selecting an image for use. Have I seen this McDonalds Golden Arches®™© symbol somewhere before?  TinEye reverse image search engine is a great tool to help you trace images back to their original source (and, in some cases, a higher resolution version that’s better than the one you started out with).

TinEye has plugins available for both Firefox and IE, as well as bookmarklets for other browsers, so you won’t need to keep returning to the main page to copy in a URL. That should save you a lot of time when you stumble across an image on the web.

Because TinEye is the first search engine to let you see how an image is being used by different users, you can really show students how images can evolve. This can effectively demonstrate the ideas of image accountability and integrity. Have your students search a somewhat notorious company’s logo, such as Enron, and see how it has been modified. That opens the door for  you to field questions about trademarked logos being used for satire and parody. Aren’t you glad that I’m providing you with more work now? — NICK YINGLING

TinEye

Related stuff:

What’s fair in fair use?

Grab photos for free at Compfight

It’s time again for our random roundup. This month’s theme: NASA, pioneers of space and subjects of an awful lot of posts.

Do-it-yourself is in, even with podcasting at NASA!
It seems that every time you turn around these days someone’s encouraging you to complete a DIY project.  Why pay for someone else to do it when you can do it yourself?  Apparently, NASA has the same attitude on its website on Do-It-Yourself Podcasts.

Set the controls for the closest planet to the sun: NASA Mission to Mercury
This site includes up-to-the-minute clocks that record the elapsed time of the mission as well as the Orbit Insertion time. Watch the actual August 3, 2004 launch of Messenger from mission control. You can take your class through a tour of images already taken by Messenger as it zooms toward Mercury.

Blast Off with the NASA Kids’ Club
NASA Kids’ Club is a great way to learn more about space exploration. It’s got great pictures, games and activities that will pique the interest of space-minded kids. As a no-cost way to learn about the space program, the NASA Kids’ Club is the Right Stuff.

Observe NASA’s Earth Observatory
What if we were able to turn our telescopes around and get a closer look at what is happening right below our feet? The folks at NASA have done just that with their Earth Observatory site. Teachers, head right for the Experiments tab and give your students interactive ways to study global warming and plant biomes around the world. If you love reading blogs (and I know you do!), check out the Expedition to Siberia blog that offers almost daily updates and pictures of this fascinating trip.

Cool satellite image from the inauguration
Check out this great picture from the presidential inauguration. As the GeoEye-1 satellite hurtled through the cosmos,  it took this snapshot to commemorate the historic occasion. That’s a lot of people! Not only that, I now know the roof of the Capitol is tarheel blue.

Observe Mars in 3D
Still have some of those promotional 3D glasses kicking around from after the Superbowl? Fire up one of NASA’s 3D image galleries to take your students on a tour of Mars.

Do you need some images to use for class, but don’t want to upset the copyright police? Compfight (that’s “comp” as in “complimentary”) lets you search thousands of photos on the photo-sharing site Flickr that are licensed under Creative Commons for non-commercial use — basically, as long as you credit the photographer and you don’t use the photo to make a profit, you’ll be fine.

Compfight works much the same as flickrCC and FlickrStorm. The interface is simple and shows a huge amount of photos at once, which is one advantage over flickrCC. You can also adjust your search terms, so if you need some images for your startup software company, you can find a few pics for that as well. There’s also a safe search mode, which filters out offensive images, kinda. I don’t recommend searching for photos live in front of your students. However, it’s perfect for when you need a few photos for tomorrow’s lesson. -BILL FERRIS

Compfight

Related stuff:

Find a Smorgasbord of Free Photos at flickrCC

Take Flickr by storm with FlickrStorm

The Educator’s Guide to the Creative Commons