Instructify

Being educators, we are often conservative, especially when it involves the law, as copyright does. This has led to a growing concern about missed learning opportunities due to caution because teachers are avoiding doing anything with copyrighted materials, or not allowing their students to produce content using copyrighted material.

American and Temple Universities have been working on this and have a report coming out about the cost of copyright confusion in education. I recently attended a session at NECC given by Kristen Hokanson on this topic. This discussion brought up a concept that is really central to educational use of copyrighted material, and that is transformation. A big part of what makes it fair use is that you’re not just “copying” the work of others, but remaking it into something of your own. One of the best examples is the Fair(y) Use Tale video produced by Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society. This video takes snippets from Disney cartoons to teach about fair use. Because it’s both education AND satire, it’s covered by fair use.

I was first introduced to this concept when I did a case-study discussion (a favorite way for lawyers to discuss and educate about legal points) about a potential fair use I had in a classroom project. Transformation is not often discussed, but it’s an important concept for fair use.  Get to know more about it. -ALICE MERCER

Transformative use resources

Stanford University guide to Fair Use in Education check out the section on the “transformative factor”

Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society Fair(y) Use Tale

It’s Elementary: Copyright–It’s the Law

Related Stuff:

Copyright in education, part 1: Fair use

Photo credit: PugnoM on flickr

15 Awesome Tutorial Websites You Probably Don’t Know About
A couple weeks ago I decided to take up juggling. Right away I was amazed at the high quality tutorials I found online. If you have a random hobby you’d like to try, or you’re looking for a project during these summer months, check out this list of sites.

100 Unbelievably Useful Reference Sites You’ve Never Heard Of
Here’s a great big list of sites you can use to find everything from literature to library references to health care. You can also find fun stuff like the Dialectizer, which can translate your text to sound like Elmer Fudd. Who doesn’t need that?

10 Brain Training Tips To Teach and Learn
Keep your brain fit for optimum learning potential. The folks at SharpBrains have these ten tips to turn you and your students into efficient thinking and learning machines.

Video Toolbox: 150+ Online Video Tools and Resources
Need to edit a class video project? Want some advice on how to create a video podcast? Or do you need to convert video to a different file format? Mashable has all that and more in this great post. -BILL FERRIS

Photo credit:  zen on flickr

Can’t get your school district to pony up the cash for an expensive interactive whiteboard with a clicker system? Well, you can take care of the whiteboard part of that set-up here, but how to get the response system? Thanks to the folks at Poll Everywhere, all your students need is a cell phone.

• You can set up a poll with different responses.
• Then, have your participants send a text message to “41411″ with their vote (Cast ####) as a text message.
• You’ll then get results that you can share (on your Wii-remote interactive whiteboard).

Another online tool for polling using cellphones is Wiffiti, which shows results as a as a really neat visualization (shown above). Here’s how:

• Set up a screen at Wiffiti, then have participants call in
• Send a text messages to 25622 (this also spells 2LOCA).
• Start your message with the at sign ‘@’ and the screen code, for example txt: @myscrn2 Hello everybody!
• Sign your messages, txt name John Doe any time, and it will remember your name.

Wiffiti is better for open ended responses situations.

So stop confiscating your student’s cell phones, and start putting them to use in the classroom. -ALICE MERCER

Take note, history teachers. The National History Education Clearinghouse is about to make your lives a lot easier. There you can find reviews of history websites, strategies and best practices, lesson plans, plus professional development resources.

Like a lot of history sites, The Clearninghouse is big on using primary sources rather than just textbooks and lectures. One article,”The Power of Primary Sources: How Teaching American History Grants Changed My Classroom” talks about how primary sources…well, changed that teacher’s classroom and got students engaged. The site’s creators realize exploration and discovery are what makes history seem fun. Indiana Jones probably gave a lot of lectures as a teacher, but it’s the action sequences that the movies focus on. Learning by doing can get students to care and, dare I say, actually get excited about history class. -BILL FERRIS

National History Education Clearinghouse

Related Stuff:

Crack the Case with HSI: Historical Scene Investigation

Access Primary Sources Online with the Perseus Digital Library

Get Up Close and Personal with the Past at EyeWitness to History

Remember that scene in The Shining when the elevator doors open up and all that blood comes flooding out? In your case, imagine the sliding doors of a Staples or OfficeMax and instead of blood imagine paper and post-it notes pouring out. And your desk was sitting directly in the path of the avalanche.

I shouldn’t have laughed when you called your desk “organized chaos.” I was just trying to be polite. It wasn’t that funny and I’ve heard people say it before, but it’s pretty uncomfortable for both parties when jokes sink like lead balloons. But the worst part about my laughing at your description is that I fear I may have enabled you to continue spending so much of your workday in such a cluttered mess. Let’s face it: your work area is a mess and all of your colleagues are starting to talk.

For your sake, for everyone’s sake, pay a visit to MyStickies.com. You can finally get rid of some of those post-its you have all over your monitor. MyStickies lets you post a sticky note directly on the web page you visit, which really helps you pinpoint what’s important to you on the page. Do you have a million pages bookmarked in your browser? And, like me, sometimes you can’t remember why you bookmarked it to begin with? This will help remedy that mess too.

So, please, clean up your workspace. You don’t want to look like some caricature from a Dilbert comic. And maybe you’ll be free to personalize your space once everything is Clean and Relaxed. –NICK YINGLING

MyStickies

10 Virtually Instant Ways to Improve Your Life - I’m all for improving my life, but why does it have to take soooo long? Here are ten easy ways to pull yourself up by your boot straps courtesy of Stepcase Lifehack. If you find yourself wanting to change something about your life, then why not start out with the simple stuff like Don’t over-generalize and Don’t take things too personally.

12 Ways to Use Project Censored in Your Classroom - Project Censored is an intiative designed to help aggregate news stories that often go under reported. This guide offers ways teachers can educate their students in fair journalism methods and help them understand the practice and importance of research. There are in-class activities and projects on the list, so if your students are studying media and journalism, this is a good place to start them on the right path.

 101 Scholarships Just For Teachers - From TeachingTips.com comes this amazing list of scholarships available for teachers working their way through college. It might be too late for most of us, but if you have some students who are interested in becoming teachers themselves, give them this list to ease college’s financial burdens. Some are region specific, so all 101 might not be completely pertinent. By the way, be sure and check out some of the other amazing lists on TeachingTips, they’ve got some great stuff there.

101 Things to Do When You’re Bored - I don’t know how anybody could possibly get bored when there are hundreds of Instructify posts to read, but if you find yourself with some idle time, then try out a few of these activities to rescue yourself from ennui. Lists Galore recommends flying a kite, starting a blog, or you know, making a list. - JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Photo credit: Wetsun on Flickr

Encyclopedias are a great place to start researching a topic, as they provide broad, top-level information on just about anything. But encyclopedias can be so… static. It’s the 21st century, people! Our encyclopedias should have videos and audio, and we should be able to interact with and possibly even contribute to them!

Well, Encyclopedia Britannica is jumping on the Web 2.0 bandwagon and just launched a new version of its web site that is both interactive and full of new media resources. With the redesign, Britannica now offers broader and more relevant information — including more photos, videos and multimedia — and incorporates an online community for scholars, experts, and non-expert contributors to connect, interact, and share information.

In the community, scholars and experts are given an online home that lets them promote their work and services, publish and share the work they’ve created outside of the encyclopedia, and interact with other scholars around the world in an academic setting. Readers and users are also invited into the community to suggest changes and additions to the content and to actually publish content on Britannica’s site. Interested users will have the opportunity to prepare articles, essays, and multimedia presentations on subjects they’re interested in and Britannica will help with research by allowing them to easily use text and non-text material from the encyclopedia. The final products will then be published on the site, credited to the people who created them.

And, Britannica is offering a “reward system” to encourage and motivate both experts and readers to contribute and suggest text changes, photos, videos, citations, links and other  improvements to Britannica itself. They don’t specify what the “rewards” are, but if you end up publishing content with them, let us know! — LAUREN FROHNE

Encyclopedia Britannica

Related Stuff:

Get Linkin’ with Britannica WebShare

Instructifeature: Using Online Tools for Student Research

Sure, your phone plays music, surfs the Web, sends email, and has GPS capability (and you can, you know, talk to people with it, too). That stuff is cool, don’t get me wrong, but we’ve only scratched the surface of what these handheld powerhouses can do. Now, with one simple download, you can give your phone some extra power you can use in the classroom thanks to gWhiz.

gWhiz is a suite of mobile learning tools that includes a powerful graphing calculator, a personalized reference library, and a flash card application. If Little Johnny wants to email his friends the graph of a tricky equation, he can do it straight from his phone. Create custom reference guides for an upcoming test on state capitals. Students will be able to get a lot of mileage from these apps, and they’ll always be within easy reach.

Now, the bad news. Right now, gWhiz is only available for BlackBerry phones. They’re working on adding more phone compatibility, though, including Google’s upcoming Android mobile phone platform. Maybe by the time summer vacation is over I can add gWhiz to my Motorola Razr (or maybe not). If you don’t have a BlackBerry, you may want to check back in a few months to see when gWhiz will be compatible with your phone.

Schools can really benefit from enhanced phone technology, since these devices are small, increasingly powerful, and within the price range of many students’ families. Applications like gWhiz can leverage this technology to create a powerful learning tool within the palm of every student’s hand. -BILL FERRIS

gWhiz

A picture is worth a thousand words, and several minutes, too. When it comes to Web searching, we’re stuck trying to figure out if a site is worthwhile by reading a few lines of text on Google’s results pages. Usually, you can tell at first glance whether the page you’ve landed on is what you’re looking for. So why do we waste our time reading text-based descriptions of a site and not just cut to a picture of the site itself?

That’s why RedZee designed its search engine to give you visual results instead of words, letting you find what you need in a hurry without having to read through what you don’t. Type in your search terms and RedZee gives you snapshots of the results. The pics are arranged on a “wheel” that you can quickly scroll through, letting you identify what you want by sight, rather than the traditional process of read, click, hope.

RedZee is also kid-friendly, and not just by virtue of its adorable red zebra mascot. RedZee filters out porn and other inappropriate content, so you don’t need to worry that Little Johnny will “accidentally” stumble across something he shouldn’t be looking at on a school computer.

I like Google just fine, especially their super-handy apps like Google Docs, Google Maps…I could go on all day. But it’s nice to see a new idea in the Web search game, and searching by sight is both fun and fast. You can cover a lot more ground in your searches, so to speak, with visual results. At RedZee, a picture is worth a thousand words you don’t have to scan to find what you’re searching for.-BILL FERRIS

RedZee

Related Stuff:
Be a Smooth (Boolean) Operator with Boolify
Find Some Answers at Ask for Kids
Quintura for Kids Simplifies Searching… If You Can Spell “Quintura” to Get There

Here at Instructify, we know that about half of you tune out when you see an article about Wikipedia; the site has become a lightning rod for discussion about everything that’s good about Web 2.0 and everything that’s wrong with it. But as Wikipedia pages come up first in more and more Google searches, its inevitability as a source of student information grows. So, when we discovered Wikipedia user Jbmurray’s essay “Was Introducing Wikipedia to the Classroom an Act of Madness Leading Only to Mayhem if not Murder?“, we knew we had to share. The essay details the process through which a professor at the University of British Columbia integrated Wikipedia in his classroom, revealing both its strengths and its warts to his students, by setting the goal of creating featured articles, which meet Wikipedia’s highest standards.

According to Jbmurray:

The premise of the project was that students had been using wikipedia as a source without properly considering its drawbacks. So it should have come as no surprise then that when seeking sources for the articles they were writing, again all too often they should make the same mistakes. They would add information that was unsourced, poorly referenced (and too frequently even plagiarized), or cited from what were often enough merely other webpages and online encyclopedias.

Yet here lay also one of the great benefits of the assignment. Precisely because of wikipedia’s injunction … that every item in their article had to be referenced, students were forced to reveal their sources. These poor sources came to light in a way that they might well not have were they writing a term paper. Moreover, precisely because writing on wikipedia is a process of continual revision, they could be asked to go back and re-evaluate their sources, find better ones, and try again. Even with plagiarism, there was no longer the need to make a song and dance about it, because at no time were they handing in what purported to be a final product.

As a result of the project, Jbmurray has been made an administrator on Wikipedia, and has contributed a second essay entitled “Advice on Using Wikipedia in Colleges and Universities.” While your K-12 classroom might not yet be ready to create featured articles, you may be able to apply some of the lessons learned about research and sources. You may find that asking students to engage in the Wikipedia community actually discourages them from using Wikipedia as a source in the future. Wouldn’t that make reports and research papers more pleasant? -ROSS WHITE

Wikipedia: “Was Introducing Wikipedia to the Classroom an Act of Madness Leading Only to Mayhem if not Murder?”
Wikipedia: “Advice on Using Wikipedia in Colleges and Universities“

Are you looking for a new look for your data? Are you tired of the same old boring bar graph? Do you wonder if you have the right visual for the occasion? Will a line graph tell the story, or would a Venn diagram do a better job?

For answers to these and other vexing questions with graphics, check out A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods. This site lists the major (and minor) visualizations and separates them by category: data, information, concept, strategy, metaphor, and the combo special of the visualization world, the compound visualization. With so many choices, you’re bound to find the right one. Another version of this type of site is also available at Information Design Patterns.

After that, you’ll need some ways to make your visualizations come true, and plain old Excel by itself, may not make that happen. Fortunately, there are some options. One is Chart Chooser, which has ready-to-go templates for Excel and PowerPoint, organized by type. For the adventurous, check out Many Eyes, an online data visualization site from IBM, where you can view visualizations by others, or upload data of your own to play with. To broaden your palette to the possibilities, check out a site like information aesthetics which highlights new and innovative data design. Really, you’ll never use that default pie chart in PowerPoint again. -ALICE MERCER

A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods
Information Design Patterns
information aesthetics - data visualization & visual design
Chart Chooser
Many Eyes

Related Stuff:
300 Million Americans or “Wait, Someone Moved, Now We Have to Start Over”
PowerPoint Yourself in the Right Direction

12 Superfoods You Need to be Eating - If there’s anyone who loves to eat, it’s me. Unfortunately, I don’t always pay too much attention to what I am putting in my body. Lucky for me, and everyone else out there who trying to get beach ready, StartCooking.com offers this list of some of the foods you might already be eating, and some that you should start. Thankfully on the list: peanut butter. Nom.

60 Selected Best Famous Quotes - “You miss 100 percent of the shots you never take.”—Wayne Gretzky. For this and other gems of wisdom, point your browser over to Litemind to discover some highly thought provoking quotes just in time for dinner party season. Or, I guess you can dole some out in your classroom to help you students realize how well-read you are. I’m thinking this is where I’ll go when I need something to open my first novel.

100 Must-Read Books: The Essential Man’s Library - I never thought I would include a blog called The Art of Manliness on a education blog, but here I am. This list isn’t exclusively for men, of course, but it does offer some great reads for those of us who don’t fancy Little Women. Maybe this list can inspire some of your guy students to want to read this summer. Not surprisingly included on the list, A Catcher in the Rye.

15 Ways to Teach Kids About Money - Most of us are pinching pennies right now, but that doesn’t mean our youngsters know what the words “recession,” “inflation,” or “insufficient funds” mean. Right now might be the best time to teach them though, according to this list from Family Education:

Help children learn the differences between needs, wants, and wishes. This will prepare them for making good spending decisions in the future.

Those are words we can probably all benefit from. - JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

You’ve heard a lot about this “social networking” stuff kids are talking about. Whether you’re a complete networking newbie or you’ve got a MySpace, Facebook and Twitter account, make sure to check out iCue, a site from NBC News that combines peer connection with learning and multimedia.

iCue is an online learning environment that will let your students collaborate online while learning. While it does have fun stuff like games, iCue’s coolest features are the Cue Cards, which play video clips, as well as view images, documents, and video transcripts, related to the subject you’re looking up. Like an online baseball card, “flip” the Cue Card over to read useful info about the person speaking, his or her political views, the source of the video clip, earned run average, and lots more. Each card is tagged with notes and keywords, and if NBC’s notes don’t cut it, you can write in your own. Also like baseball cards, you can save and share them, so you can finally get hold of the Barack Obama rookie card.

Once they’re in iCue, students can build their friends network, interact with peers through discussion forums, and comment on others’ Cue Cards or ideas. iCue forums also have a “Thought Starter” which you can use to spark student discussion about an event in the news.

For its debut, iCue features content focused on politics, since there’s apparently a presidential election coming up. Over the summer they’ll add resources for courses including US History and English language and composition. Who knows? Once your students get started on iCue, discussing political candidates and collaborating on history research may just take precedence over updating their MySpace pages. -BILL FERRIS

iCue

Related Stuff:
Make Sure Your Students are Ready to Vote This Election
Instructifeature: An Educator’s Field Guide for Facebook

So you’ve gotten your blog off the ground and you’re diligently posting with some regularity. But how can you make your articles more substantive for your readers without resorting to the useful, yet sometimes inaccurate, Wikipedia link?

Well, Britannica has launched Britannica WebShare: a new program in which you, a professional or amateur Web publisher or blogger, can register your site with the encyclopedia and gain complimentary access to relevant articles in Britannica Online for you and your readers. It’s a reliable way to provide accurate background on the topics you’re writing about - no subscription necessary!

Once registered and approved, just link from your blog to the URL of the Britannica article you want to share, just as you would with any other Web page, and your readers will be able to view the entire article for free.

So how do you qualify for the service? First, you have to have a blog or Web site that you update with some regularity. Then, just fill out Britannica’s online application form, and they will review it to see if it would be a legitimate use of the service. From their site:

“This includes but isn’t limited to sites about news, education, sports, business, culture, academic disciplines, and general commentary. It includes most blogs. It does not include Web sites mainly dedicated to e-commerce or those whose postings are short and aphoristic by design.”

The way they see it:

“We have a great site with a lot of useful, reliable, and high-quality information, and we’d like more people to see it, use it, and talk about it. We’d like to see Britannica used more widely in discussions and conversations about important issues. Today Web publishers are among the foremost people driving public discussions, so we’d like to have our products in their hands.”

Also, it doesn’t take long - maybe 5 minutes - and they’ll get back to you in about a week or less. So go sign up and take advantage of Britannica’s offer to use their information to beef up your blog for absolutely free!-LAUREN FROHNE

Britannica WebShare

Related Stuff:
A Few Good Reasons You Should Start Blogging

Photo credit: Stewart on flickr

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

Related Stuff:
Add Muscle to Your Searches with SortFix