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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BY KEVIN HODGSON

If all we ever had as teachers was in-house professional development, our ability to keep learning and pushing ourselves would be limited by the choices made by our school administrators, who sometimes have different priorities than we do. The benefit of online communities created for and by teachers is that we can share our knowledge with others and get exposed to others’ ideas, too. The Schoolwide Network has the potential to be a very valuable example of such a tool, conceived around the use of video tutorials created by teachers around professional development.

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

If you can spare five minutes, you can learn all about technology and the classroom. This is the idea behind Mark Barnes’ Learn It In 5 website, and I have to say the site does what it says. I watched a short video tutorial about using Twitter in the classroom (others focus on using YouTube, podcasting, wikis and more) and found it to be useful, simple in its explanation. and a perfect entry point for curious teachers.

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BY NICK YINGLING

Computer science and programming language can both be pretty intimidating. In fact, they can be a little forbidding if you try to jump in feet first. The thing about computers, though, is that they aren’t going anywhere, and they’re just going to keep talking their crazy language. That’s why it’s great to have a little help to chip away at that mystique.

Google Code University is a great resource that computer science students and educators can use to stay current with tools and computing technology. Everything is Creative Commons, too, so it should be easy to work it into your classroom.

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U-2 Spy Plane in Google Earth
Nothing says Cold War quite like the U-2 spy plane incident. Free Technology for Teachers provides a link to a Google Earth file in which your students can find out fascinating facts about this seminal event in American history.

How To Learn Photoshop In 24 Hrs
As long as you’ve ponied up a few hundred bucks for Photoshop, you may as well learn how to use it. DesignReviver has a series of tutorials on how to use this venerable graphics program.

18 Most Scenic Places For Teaching English Overseas
Who among us hasn’t pondered teaching English abroad? See exotic places, learn a new language, and see how people live in another part of the world. MatadorAbroad sweetens the deal by listing 18 of the most beautiful places you could go for your overseas teaching experience. Locales like Rio, Prague and Zanzibar look awfully tempting, especially when winter rolls around again.

Nine Reasons to Twitter in Schools
Get the most out of 140 characters. Tech & Learning has 9 reasons Twitter is a powerful educational tool. FYI, this entry: 138 characters. -BILL FERRIS

Photo credit: (nz)dave on Flickr.

Welcome to May’s random roundup. This month’s theme: Little Johnny, one-man stand-in for school-aged children the world over. After a year-and-a-half of hard work, we figured this overused cliche deserved a post of his own before he gets back to studying.

Time-savers for teachers
For other notes and resources the students need, consider giving this stuff to them as a whole, at the beginning of a session or semester. That way you only have to keep a master copy for Little Johnny who struggles to keep himself organized.

Learning exercise: Promote healthy living this school year
If you’re concerned about your students’ health, you can do something about it by extolling the virtues of healthy exercise. Ask Little Johnny how his little league team did over the summer. Do you have any joggers or climbers in your midst? Take an interest, and maybe they’ll get more active.

Search Visually, Safely with RedZee
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.

Swap your Stuff at Zwaggle
But Zwaggle might be a good resource to pass along to parents. If you can make their lives easier by showing them where to find Christmas presents on the cheap, they might make your lives easier by encouraging Little Johnny to buckle down and try a little harder for his nice teacher.

Keep Your Grade Book Online with Engrade
If students (and their parents) can track their grades at any time, it may motivate them to stay on task throughout the class. Come parent-teacher conference time, you won’t have to deal with parents who are angry about Little Johnny’s surprise “D.”

Instructifeature: How to Stimulate Class Discussion Using Discussion Forums
In the classroom, you’re limited by clock. There’s only so much time you can devote to class discussion. Students feel the time crunch even more keenly—they’ve got to compose a thoughtful response in mere seconds. And while thinking on one’s feet is a valuable skill, how much better would Little Johnny’s answer be if he had more time to compose his ideas? Using discussion boards, students have the time they need to think of the best answer they can.

Photo credit: khalid almasoud on Flickr.

Welcome to the first Random Roundup, in which we spotlight otherwise-unrelated articles that all happen to share some arbitrary criterion — in this case, Jurassic Park, which we apparently reference pretty often. In addition to realizing that my pop culture knowledge apparently stopped in 2001, I felt these articles deserve a second look from readers. If you enjoy these, try poking around the archives and see what other ancient articles you might unearth. -BILL FERRIS

Teen Tech Week begins March 8
“Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” This warning by Jeff Goldblum in the cinematic classic Jurassic Park is as true for discussing the hazards of reckless information consumption as it is for warning of the dangers cloning giant prehistoric monsters. Kinda.

Dragon DNA and other genetics fun: Genetics Web Lab Directory
However, you will certainly find something you can use in your classroom to help your students understand the difference between factual genetics exploration and wishful thinking.

Be part of a Tyrannosaurus dig at Unearthing T.rex
While we can’t see these elite predators in action now that Jurassic Park 4 has been canceled, we can take a look at the excavation of a dead one.

Watch Genetics in Action: DNA from the Beginning
Being an English major, it’s hard for me to wrap my head around some of the sciences. Most of my knowledge of genetics and DNA comes from Jurassic Park. Lucky for me I found a slick site called DNA from the Beginning, which uses flash animation to spell out DNA basics.

Extract DNA from Bananas
Thanks to this experiment, genetic research has never seemed so simple. Remember the lessons of Jurassic Park, though, and be careful while messing around with the building blocks of life. You don’t want to have a bananasaurus on your hands. On second thought, yes you do.

Awesomeosaurus: New Carnivorous Dinosaur Discovered
That’s right, paleontologists have found a new dinosaur. This new species is one of the largest carnivorous dinos ever, which is way cooler than if it they’d found an herbivore. These critters apparently roamed Africa 95 million years ago, along with Jurassic Park III star, Spinosaurus, which surely led to some thrilling territorial struggles.

Photo credit: niznoz on Flickr.

Mathway is a fantastic resource for solving math problems. Since I teach in elementary, my focus was on the Basic section, which did a great job of solving problems you would find in U.S. grades 4-6 (9 to 12 year olds).

You have two options — you can enter a problem, or look up how to solve a problem by topic. For entering problems, there is an input box, and plenty of math symbols (such as square roots, fractions, and exponents), and geometric shapes in two and three-dimensions. This section is great for homework help.

On the right, there is a section with example problems that you can select by topic. So, if you need steps for long division, you select that topic, and are given a problem and the steps for solving it. Highlighting makes all the steps clear.

Don’t get stumped by math. Bring your problems to Mathway to get not just answers, but easy to understand, step-by-step directions. ALICE MERCER

Mathway

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Punch it Up! – Mnemonic Contest Winner

Let’s say that one day you reserve the clunky and complicated audiovisual cart with the laptop and projector and wheel it painfully to your non-electronic classroom so that you can give a live demonstration to your students of how to do something absolutely crucial that can only be done on a computer: how to use a particular library research database, how to make a PowerPoint presentation for their final class project, exactly where to go in the learning management system to check their grades. One wheel of the cart was apparently possessed, heading north when its brethren were heading east, just like a wheel on any given shopping cart. You hate that A/V cart. You’d be willing to deal with anything, anything, never to have to use it again. Even video codecs. Yes. Even those.

CamStudio is for you, then. It’s open source, Windows-only software that will allow you to make a video recording of whatever’s happening on your computer screen; it outputs video in .avi or .swf formats. CamStudio lets you add captions to your screencast, but if you’d like to add a voice-over, you can get a little PC microphone such as the Logitech USB Desktop Microphone for under $20, and there are some mic models that sell for under $10. Record your lesson, post it online, tell your students to watch it, and there you go. No more cart.

CamStudio is a fairly easy program to use, as long as you don’t count the settings. Video recording settings can be very confusing, which certainly isn’t CamStudio’s fault, but the default settings in CamStudio aren’t going to give you the high-quality, small-size, easily shareable files that you want. I therefore recommend watching this helpful CamStudio tutorial on YouTube — and yes, the YouTube tutorial was itself made with CamStudio. It’s been viewed over 150,000 times as of this date, so hey, that tells you something. — AMANDA FRENCH

CamStudio

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Make awesome screencasts with Jing

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How often have you had the urge to make a salad from office plants? How long have you secretly wanted to play the Theremin? How much better would your life be if you could describe the weather in Japanese?

WonderHowTo.com will help you satisfy hypothetical urges, fulfill unidentified wishes, and perhaps even improve your life. The site advertises itself as the largest collection of free how-to videos anywhere. From the main page, you can search for a specific how-to, browse by category, or check out recommended videos. Each clip comes with a short description and a letter grade assigned by other viewers. The collection runs the whole gamut of instructional video, covering everything from an explanation of the U.S. Presidential election process to how to draw and color a cartoon.

Of course, some of WonderHowTo.com’s content may not be suitable for children. A glance at categories ranging from Alcohol to Weapons may raise a few educators’ eyebrows. However, the site does at least make an effort to separate potentially objectionable videos by designating them 18+ and requiring an account to view them. The bottom line is that adult supervision may be a good idea, depending on the age and relative maturity of the student. The rest of us will only wonder how to describe the amazing instructional video we watched last night on WonderHowTo.com. –JIMI RADABAUGH

WonderHowTo.com

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All Educational, All the Time–TeacherTube

Thank goodness YouTube is no longer the end-all-be-all of video uploading. There are tons of video sites out there now, and the options for educational and tutorial video hosting sites are so abundant, you might just be missing out by not exploring them.

 A new player in the “tube” game is Yobler, which refers to itself as “Your Learning Tube,” which allows users to share educational videos, audios and articles with their friends. Yobler is a hub for instructional and education videos, including everything from accordion lessons to Adobe Flash tutorials. The interface is simple and similar to YouTube, with channels and the ability to search by keywords, but Yobler also provides sections for audio lessons and article sharing in addition to video. Not only can you view or listen to the educational tutorials on Yobler, you can even submit and share your own with the Yobler community.

Need to know how to do something? Want to share your knowledge? Maybe you want to create an educational video in your classroom and share it with the world?? Check out Yobler! -LAUREN FROHNE

Yobler

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All Educational, All the Time–TeacherTube

You may have had the opportunity to read this earlier piece on Scott Elias and how to improve Power Point presentations. Dean Shareski adds his two-cents to the discussion in YouTube – PowerPoint Extreme Makeover, which gives concrete before-and-after examples with a few helpful tips.

The highlights:

1. More high-quality visuals: use a picture to not just illustrate but to tell the story;
2. Don’t try to make your PowerPoint stand alone, your delivery counts;
3. Don’t show the text you are reading in your narration;
4. Make the text you use stand out using contrast and fonts;
5. Get a remote clicker.

Stop killing your audience’s attention and start making killer presentations with these helpful tips. -ALICE MERCER

YouTube – PowerPoint Extreme Makeover
Do I Dare Disturb the Universe? – Presenting… Me!

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Johnny Lee, a YouTube personality and “human-computer interaction researcher” is changing the way we use existing technology through simple modifications, and he’s sharing it with everyone. This amazing demo proves that using something as inexpensive and highly obtainable as the Wii Remote, he can create an interactive whiteboard. Lee explains that while the whiteboard isn’t exactly the quality of it’s $3000 likeness, you’ll still get “80% there for about 1% of the cost.” He notes that teachers are able to access this technology for use in their classrooms, and many already are.

Lee makes no qualms about making this sort of technology available for anyone who wants it. He’s put the software on his website, and at the time of this demo, it had been downloaded half a million times. View the demo for the full extent of what other uses Lee is finding for the technology, and visit his website if you want to learn more. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Johnny Lee’s $40 Interactive Whiteboard

Johnny Lee Computer-Human Interaction Researcher

Do you struggle to explain Web 2.0 to interested but clueless administrators? Social networking, blogging and podcasting can be tough to describe to the uninitiated. If you need succinct explanations of social media to convince your principal to open the school’s firewall for you, show him or her a video by Common Craft.

Common Craft videos are free mini-tutorials on everything from wikis to RSS, and even what to do in case of a Zombie attack (that was a Halloween video, but zombies probably don’t know what day it is, so it’s good advice to heed year-round). Each video discusses a topic in plain English using a white board and simple paper drawings for visual aids. The simplicity of the production is Common Craft’s greatest asset – nebulous concepts like social bookmarking don’t look so daunting in a paper doll context.

Watching Common Craft videos may give you a few ideas for some class projects. Your class can make this type of video without much more than a white board and a Web cam. Making your videos as engaging and pithy as Common Craft, however, may take some practice. -BILL FERRIS

Common Craft

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Spring is conference season. That means getting out of class, baked chicken hotel luncheons, and another free tote bag to stuff into your closet. If it turns out the conference was overbooked and the chicken overdone, take solace that the event won’t be a total wash if you convert your tote into a messenger bag.

Flickr user duganj has created a step-by-step photo tutorial on how to transform those ubiquitous canvas bags from swag into swank. You’ll need a tote bag (you’ve probably got hundreds from various conferences) and sewing skills and supplies, or at least access to the home ec room. It’s a great way to carry around homework or your laptop, and you’ll know you at least got something useful out of your latest conference. -BILL FERRIS

HOW TO – Tote Bag to Messenger bag via Make
Convert a tote to a messenger bag via Lifehacker