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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

Give your foreign language students some extra ammunition. No, I don’t mean teach them obscure French curse words. I’m talking about powerful lessons and practice that can supplement the great stuff you’re already teaching in class. They can get it with LingQ.

LingQ lets students sign up for free lessons in the language of their choice (language include Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swedish). If you’re teaching ESL, they can also study English (or any other language) in their native tongue. In the assignments, if they see a word they don’t know, they can highlight it and hit the LingQ button. LingQ will define it and create a flashcard for later review.

Students will also get a progress snapshot, which keeps track of benchmarks like how many words they’ve learned, the number of hours spent listening to lessons or speaking, etc. They’ll also get a list of Priority LingQs, which are the 25 most important words they should learn at whatever skill level they’re at. Students can review Priority LingQs by clicking on the the word to view the definition, or display them as flash cards.The free account lets students have five active assignments at any given time.

You can pay extra for more active assignments at once, plus points you can use for personal tutoring, though if they heard about LingQ from you, they’ve already got a live-and-in-person language guru. Still, students can get an awful lot of LingQ for free. The only place with more free knowledge is in your classroom -BILL FERRIS

LingQ

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The Online Education Database has hundreds of free online courses for your perusal– 200 to be exact. The database has compiled a list and description of these courses to help hopefuls such as yourself to be able to learn the things you didn’t know already. Who has the time to visit the learning annex every Wednesday night just to listen to some old stiff coat ramble on about modern poetry? If your work and home life don’t allow you to go out and do such stuff, then sit in front of the computer and use the power of the internet to guide you toward knowledge.

The database is broken up into several categories that might sound vaguely familiar such as Math, Science, Language Arts, and Health. The real gems lie in the categories such as Theology, Business and Finance, and Social Sciences. The courses themselves are from real universities and colleges such as The University of Notre Dame, Utah State University, and Tufts University to name a few. If you’ve got some spare time at home, and you can’t swing going back to school, this might be a great option. Send your students to this site, too, if they don’t have too much homework already, that is. - JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Online Education Database

Finally, you can get hold of some DNA for your mad experiments science lab assignment without having to suck it out of amber-encased flies. The folks at Null Hypothesis show you an easy way to extract DNA from a banana. All you’ll need is common household or labhold stuff like rubbing alcohol, dish soap, coffee filters, and of course, a banana.

Null Hypothesis also provides suggestions like using other DNA sources, like peas or chicken liver (do this at your own olfactory risk, however). You’ll probably want to come up with a few discussion questions of your own, too.

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. -BILL FERRIS

DNA From a Banana via Null Hypothesis

Now you can teach your students the Japanese art of paper folding. Origami Now! provides video demonstrations on how to fold various origami shapes. Beginners can tackle folding a duck or puppy before progressing to intermediate projects like a water lily. If you feel like a formidable folder, try the Happy Good-luck Bat.

Origami looks cool, and is a great way to stretch your supplies budget - all you need is paper. It’s a nifty skill, too. For example, if you’re all out of gold stars but have some spare time, maybe hand back an “A” test folded in the shape of a jumping frog. Or, if the student had been struggling before, a phoenix. -BILL FERRIS

Origami Now!

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How many times have you laid in bed, unable to sleep, thinking, “The wall-sized dry erase board in my classroom is just too big?” Never? Me neither. Wall-sized works just fine for me. But if you’re in the market for something smaller- I mean, a lot smaller- Metacafe’s got a 40-second video called Make a Pocket-Sized Dry Erase Board that will show you how you can create a 3” x 5” dry erase board on the cheap. Now, before you go thinking, “Well, that’s cute, but I can’t use it in my classroom,” the video also offers modest ideas for teachers. Elementary teachers should find the re-usable dry-erase cards particularly useful for all manner of things- hall passes, flash cards, or assigning tasks to students. –ROSS WHITE

Make a Pocket-Sized Dry Erase Board

Are you using screencasts yet? For the uninitiated, screencasts are mini-movies that demonstrate how to perform tasks on the computer. And making your own is super-easy thanks to Screencast-o-Matic. Easy to use and incredibly useful - that’s a combo that we at Instructify always appreciate.

Screencast-o-Matic uses a transparent frame that you place over whatever program you want to demonstrate. Just hit record and do your stuff. Screencast-o-Matic records your every mouse click so students can see, for example, how to create a drop down list in Excel. If you have a microphone, you can even add audio. When you’re done, export it to a Quicktime .mov file and share your teaching prowess with your students and the world.

If little Johnny is out with the flu, just send him a link to an online tutorial you put together in about five minutes. Screencast-o-Matic is perfect for illustrating research methods, musical instrument tutorials, or if you need to demonstrate a particular piece of software. Speaking of software, to make your screencasts you’ll need Java 1.5, which you probably have installed already. You won’t need to download anything else, though - Screencast-o-Matic is completely online. And soon, your lessons can be online, too. -BILL FERRIS

Screencast-o-Matic

How do you use screencasts? Let us know in the comments!

Cassette tapes have gone the way of the dodo, to say the least, but that doesn’t mean you have to let those mix tapes disintegrate into oblivion. With this helpful step-by-step guide, you can now digitize your old tapes for the modern age. Whether it be those now extinct children’s sing-alongs or your favorite book on tape, you can easily transfer the tracks via a walkman (one that works, of course), a patch cable (check Radio Shack), and the free software Audacity. It might take you an afternoon or two, but having those analog memories all over again will be well worth it. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Digitize Your Old Cassette Tapes via Lifehacker

Finally, educational comic books students might actually enjoy. Howtoons are single-page comics that provide an illustrated tutorial of kid-friendly science projects like an ice skateboard, or a zoetrope.

The illustrations are top-notch, with bright colors and panels to give it that authentic comic book flair without sacrificing clarity in the directions. The projects will definitely appeal to kids—marshmallow shooters and soda bottle submarines might not be a match for Dr. Doom, but might enable your nerdier kids to liberate the monkey bars from bullies.—BILL FERRIS

Howtoons
via Instructables

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Welcome to this week’s Instructifeature. Instructifeatures are our new weekly doses of teaching strategy and will appear, as if by magic, every Wednesday.

Tired of blank faces when you ask the class for their thoughts on Tom Sawyer? How about when you ask if there are any questions about the long division lesson, not a single student raises a hand? You can hardly get kids to pipe down when the morning bell rings, but ask the class a direct question and the first thing you hear is an awkward pause.

In-class discussion is an art, and you’ll probably spend most of your teaching career wondering how to keep kids engaged. Fortunately, in this age of the interweb, you can take advantage of online discussion forums to get the dialogue flowing.

(more…)

Watch your class go down the tubes. Wait, that came out wrong.

You love how sites like YouTube have made it easy to upload videos you want to show your class, right? But you’re a little nervous about telling your students to go there because, let’s face it, there’s a lot of crazy crap on there, also. Worse, what with all the alarmism about porn and internet predators, it’s very possible your administration has blocked sites like YouTube. Well, your homemade video demonstration of adiabatic heating and cooling isn’t going to broadcast itself, so you’ve got to find an alternative.

Submitted for your administrators’ approval: TeacherTube, an all-education video site that lets you upload your movies for free. You can also tune in to the various “Channels” featuring content like languages, math, phys. ed., writing, and professional development. Naturally, TeacherTube makes use of tags to further categorize videos. Whatever you need, you can probably find it, minus all the self-indulgent nincompoops giving their video response to the season premiere of The Office. -BILL FERRIS

TeacherTube

With all due respect to Guitar Hero aficionados, it’s not like you need any musical talent to play it. This should be simple–kids like music and video games. Why can’t there be a game that actually teaches kids to play?

After reading that kind of intro paragraph, you’ve probably figured out that there is such a game - Synthesia, available for free, even. Notes fall from the sky over a keyboard at the bottom of the screen. Press the correct keys at the correct time to boost your score. Pretty simple. Tetris was simple, too, and that game was pretty successful.

Speaking of Tetris, one of Synthesia’s most fun features is that it comes bundled with MIDI files for classic video games like Super Mario Bros., Bubble Bobble, and the aforementioned Russian puzzle game. But you can play along with any MIDI file you can find. The game itself is pretty difficult if you’re not a pianist, but playing the left-hand part for the Tetris theme at low speed is a good choice for beginners. If you’ve got some piano training, you may want to tackle Dragon Warrior.

For best results, you’ll need a USB or MIDI musical keyboard. You can play Synthesia with a standard computer keyboard, but it’s pretty useless if your goal is to actually learn something. I know I learned something–piano is hard. But Synthesia makes it just a little bit easier, and more fun. -BILL FERRIS

Synthesia