Instructify

BY REBECCAH HAINES

I would not consider myself a hardcore tech nerd, but as a “younger” teacher who is not averse to computers, I am frequently called upon to help out other teachers as they implement technology in their classrooms. Some of you who read this blog probably also fill this role at your school. Well, a former colleague of mine, T.J. Wolfe, now an NC State PhD student, found himself in this position a lot, too. That’s why he developed the CATCHsystem, a website and a system to help teachers easily integrate technology so they can “catch” their students and help them prepare for the future.

So, let’s be up front here — like I said, the developer is a former colleague of mine, and he does also offer his services as a technology coach, for a fee. However, his idea is really good, and there are several free resources on his site as well. First of all, the CATCHsystem — it streamlines and categorizes pretty much everything you can use technology for into five categories. The categories are: Messaging, Productivity, Sites, Documents, and Media. Working with five categories of internet technology should be much less daunting to a technology novice than continually attempting to integrate single sites or web tools. As you look through each category, you may say to yourself, none of these are particularly difficult skills — I mean, who doesn’t know how to use and filter email? Then again, I’ve worked with teachers — smart ones, even — who print every email they receive. It’s easy to forget that not every educator is comfortable with technology.

On the website you can find video tutorials for different components of the CATCHSystem, as well as for some basic tasks that you might want your students to be able to do — download, edit, and share photos, for example. Additionally, on the front page, there is a free eBook, Web 2.0 for the LA Classroom.

In sum, I think the CATCHsystem is a really logical and streamlined way to introduce many of the important uses for technology in education. It can help reluctant teachers as well as students more efficiently use all of the tools that are out there.

CATCHsystem

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Check out Jane Hart’s Top 100 Tools for Learning 2010

BY KEVIN HODGSON

Like a lot of beginning teachers, my first year in the classroom was stressful and exciting. Establishing daily classroom routines seemed important, but how does a newbie go about doing that? Luckily, I had Harry Wong and his classic book, The First 100 Days of School. Wong’s book became a sort of bible for me that first year. This past year, I handed it off to a friend who was beginning his first year of teaching. I miss the book but I am glad to know it is going to good use with my friend.

Now, Wong has set up a quiz for teachers at his book’s website. He poses 20 questions about classroom management and regular routines that he says will allow you to reflect on your own teaching effectiveness. A quiz for teachers? Yikes! I took it and got the following results: “You can improve! You’re just surviving, aren’t you?” I hope I am doing more than that.

Here’s what I liked about the quiz: it really forced me to reflect on what I do in the classroom, from seating arrangements to making tests for units to how to begin the day. The site analyzes the answers (against Wong’s expectations) and then offers up some advice for the “wrong” answers. Again, even if I didn’t agree with Wong, I appreciated the (canned) feedback. For example, I answered “false” for this question: “The number of questions on a test is governed by the number of objectives on the assignment.” My feeling is that I gear my teaching around objectives, but nothing is ever one-for-one. I often focus on specific things, making some areas more important than others, and my assessments reflect that. Wong disagreed with me on that one. Sorry, Harry.

Go ahead. Take the quiz. See how you do.

Harry Wong’s Teacher Effectiveness Quiz

BY KEVIN HODGSON

Jane Hart does her best to keep herself and her blog readers up to date on the latest technology tools, particularly as they relate to social media. While her blog is certainly worth following, it is her annual list of 100 Tools for Learning that you should check out first. Culled from a variety of sources, including her own readers, the list of 100 tools runs the gamut from multimedia production to practical tools that may simplify a task. Jane notes that there were more than 500 people sharing ideas with her this year. That’s a great pool of knowledge.

One thing I like is that Jane does more than just share the tools. In her Winners & Losers analysis, she also notes which tools have been dropped from the previous year, and which tools seem to be gaining more ground. (And, I should note, she makes it clear which sites are free and which cost money.) Her Best in Breed list breaks down the list into categories, such as microblogging, e-learning, and productivity tools.

The Top 100 Tools for Learning

Jane’s Slideshow on Slideshare

Winners & Losers

Best in Breed

BY KEVIN HODGSON

A recent New York Times article entitled “Your Brain on Computers” looked into our ability to focus when multitasking (conclusion: you can’t really focus intensely one one thing when you have more than one thing going on, i.e., doing homework while listening to music and texting your friends.). Most interestingly, the article includes two activities that allow you to test your focus and attention.

The first activity is called “Test Your Focus” and you have to determine whether the red rectangles have rotated. Blue rectangles are tossed into the mix as distractions. The second activity is called “Test How Fast You Juggle” and you are presented with a number and a letter and have to determine whether there are vowels or consonants and even or odd numbers. (The juggling is information, not objects). It sounds simple. It isn’t, and it illustrates the fact that our brain tries to focus acutely on a single task.

In the classroom

If you have an interactive whiteboard, both of these activities would be valuable experiences for students, particularly those in high school who will swear they are hardwired to do many things at once. The article itself is a good way to begin the lesson, with the activity driving home the point about needing to keep our focus uncluttered. If your students are of driving age, this lesson should also include discussions about driving and texting.

Your Brain on Computers

Test Your Focus

Test How Fast You Juggle

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Simply Noise drowns out distractions for better productivity

BY DAN FROELICH

Have you ever found yourself telling a fellow educator, “I don’t have that file with me, but I’d be glad to email it to you when I get home tonight”? With the aid of Dropbox, you’ll never have to say that again.

Dropbox is a web service that allows you to store up to two gigabytes of data online for free. Simply get an account with Dropbox, download and install the application, and place the files you want to store on the web into Dropbox, and you’re done. Now any time you save files in your Dropbox, they are automatically synced online and on your computer. Better yet, once you install the Dropbox application on any computer or mobile device you own, you‘ll have instant access to all your files with a simple login.

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BY AARON FOWLES

Have you ever gone deep into a cave and experienced absolute silence? It’s a zen moment, certainly: no light, no noise, just perfect absence.

Now, think about your classroom. Have you ever experienced anything like the vacuous silence and dark within the four walls of a school building? Since you haven’t, and nobody has, the folks over at Simply Noise have given us free access to auditory bliss.

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BY BILL FERRIS

I love mind maps for organizing ideas. You can find a lot of slick online mind-mapping applications. My only complaint with most of them, though, is that you have to spend a little time messing around with establishing a structure and selecting the word balloons and arrows and such. Fortunately, Text 2 Mind Map lets you skip all that rigmarole and get right to the idea stage.

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BY BILL FERRIS

I’ve been a dedicated Firefox user for years because of its wondrous catalog of extensions. I like Google Chrome, too — from its load time to how it accesses pages, everything about it is fast, fast, fast. But I never made the full-time switch because it didn’t have all my geeky extensions.

In their ongoing bid for world domination Google has rectified this deficiency, opening up its sprawling new extensions gallery. To use them you’ll have to install the new beta version of the browser (don’t be afraid of using a beta version in this case, however — “beta” is Googlespeak for “software”).

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BY BILL FERRIS

I’ve been using Thunderbird for my email since 2006. It’s a highly functional, lightweight email option. This week, however, I made the switch to Postbox. Postbox is to Thunderbird as Super Mario is to Mario — bigger, stronger, and occasionally able to shoot fireballs. Well, two of those things, anyway.

Postbox takes the best features of Thunderbird (in fact, Postbox is built on Thunderbird’s open-source code by some ex-Mozilla personnel) and creates a much more robust email program. Frankly, Postbox bears as much resemblance to Gmail as Thunderbird — the conversation view and the big, fat “Archive” button are straight out of the Googleplex.

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BY BILL FERRIS

mySchoollog is an organization and productivity tool created specifically for students. Kids can keep track of their assignments, quizzes, grades, course schedule, and even upload their notes and files. Students can enter tasks into their to-do list, sorted according to subject (labeled as “lesson” in this app). Students can also download their to-do list and notes in Word or PDF formats. It also has a handy extras section, which features the periodic table, converters for length, temperature, and energy units, and tables of trigonometric ratios.

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BY BILL FERRIS

For many teachers, summer vacation is the Super Bowl of job perks. You’ve worked hard at a demanding job, and now get some well-earned time to relax.

This year, though, the economy has become the fingernail in teachers’ bowls of soup. A lot of educators have lost their jobs, and many worry that more cuts are on the way. While you can’t control who gets laid off, you can use your summer months to make yourself as valuable an employee as possible.

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This week’s MBTN features alternative teaching methods, how to use colons & semicolons, a web backpack for students and the best search engines for student research. Details after the jump.

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Venerable note-taking app Evernote has rolled out a few new features that ought to help you and your students. You can now send Twitter messages directly into your Evernote account, use Evernote on your iPhone, or find tips on how you can use Evernote on their tips blog. You can also read the general Evernote blog for updates as they happen. All that is in addition to existing features like saving snippets websites you visit and recognizing text in pictures. -BILL FERRIS

Ron’s Evernote Tips Blog

Evernote Blog

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What can I say about getting students to study that doesn’t sound ultra-mega cheesy? Or hasn’t already been said a thousand times before? Its two classic struggles: on one side, the teacher who tries to motivate the student into hitting the books; on the other, the Instructify poster trying to put a new spin on it.

My heart really goes out to that second guy — he’s in a tough spot. If he ends up writing something cliché, he might have to take a hard look in the mirror and realize what a middling talent he has become. We don’t need to worry so much for the teacher trying to motivate the student, though. At least they can fall back on these study tips from UnderGradZone.com.

Although these study tips are designed for new college students, what’s to stop you from using these tips in your classroom? You’ll just need to make a couple quick switches in some of the terminology they use. We’re aware that giving students 80+ pages worth of study tips to read is kinda like putting out a fire with rocket fuel, so the best practice might be to divide this up and pass it out over time.

Saturday Night Live had a pretty good sketch recently. In it, the guy from the High School Musical movies returns to his alma mater to impart some of his new-found wisdom. His advice is timeless: school isn’t all singing and dancing and jazz hands. Eventually we all have to grow up and start studying seriously. But don’t ever let them take away your jazz hands. Not. Ever. -NICK YINGLING

ACT: Study Tips

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Photo credit: Treehugger on Flickr.

As a graduate student and educator I found it more and more difficult to balance my day-to-day without some organizational assistance. I was constantly checking my calendars, and putting bookmarks on every website I found so I could read it later. I then discovered iGoogle.

iGoogle is a web page designed by Google to allow users to create their own personalized home page. Users can choose to put their calendars, e-mail inbox, bookmark list, RSS readers, and other neat gadgets right in one place. Google supplies thousands of these free gadgets designed to help reduce your need to visit a dozen different pages in one day. Not only does this give your mouse a rest, but it keeps all your important web sites up front and current all the time.

Once I started using this tool on a daily (okay, hourly) basis I realized how useful this could be for all educators, or what’s more, for their students. As many schools are making formidable budget cuts, teachers are finding ways to reduce their paper and copier use by turning to digital software to store and share assignments. Now we have classrooms of students that are using the internet on a daily basis for research and homework assignment. And just like they would need that old pile of paper, students need a virtual locker to store all this virtual information. This is where iGoogle comes to the rescue.

I have slowly been weaning some of my more tech-savvy students onto iGoogle. I find that they are just as excited about it as they are for their social networking web sites. They can personalize their pages with the gadgets and tools that they need to be successful in school, AND they can make it look pretty too. I have shared my Google assignments calendar with them so they can see what is due every day. They get updates each time a teacher updates his or her web page or blog. Students can check on the status of their virtual online projects and find current events all on one web page.

For more suggestion on ways to use iGoogle in your classroom you can visit iGoogle for educators. -MEGAN CURLEY

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