Instructify

Teaching English abroad: What to know
“When I was not sure which path my career would go, I very seriously considered teaching English in Japan…I scoured the Web and found plenty of resources available to answer my questions about where to begin planning my travels abroad to share my English skills.”

Special ed [heart] Jott
“I wanted to highlight a couple of uses that are especially suited for Special Education. When you see them, you may get some other ideas about how to use this tool.”

Keep your synonyms simple with Thsrs
“…the brains behind the Ironic Sans blog (creators of the addictive 50 States in 10 Minutes game) have come up with Thsrs, an online thesaurus that only suggests synonyms which are shorter than the word you look up. Enter ‘flabbergasted’ and it suggests ’surprised,’ look up ‘inconsequential’ and you get ‘unimportant.’”

Get 1GB of storage for free with OpenDrive
“OpenDrive is like an online hard disk for backing up data or sharing files with others. Collaborate in real time using OpenDrive’s Collaboration Pro feature. You can also sync with uploaded files, so if you update your novel-in-progress, OpenDrive will save your changes both on your computer and in the copy you’ve squirreled away online.”

How to use your cell phone for education: Mobile podcasting
Instructify has compiled a list of educational uses for your cell phone. This article looks at how to turn your phone into a mobile podcasting studio.

Web English Teacher’s Travel Lit Lesson Plans
Web English Teacher presents this list of travel-based books and their accompanying lesson plans. Most of it is perfect (and required) summer reading and includes Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Heart of Darkness, among others.

Animated explanations abound at Biology in Motion
Whenever I have trouble wrapping my head around a difficult concept, I turn to cartoons to explain them (note: that said, I would not recommend turning to Wile E. Coyote for demonstrations on the laws of gravity). Being an English major, I need all the help I can get when it comes to biology. That’s why I couldn’t pass up Biology in Motion.

Free scientific calculator: Calculator Tab
Why shell out big bucks for a scientific calculator when your computer can run circles around it? Powerful free calculators abound on the Internet. F’rinstance, take Calculator Tab, a sleek, stylish online calculator loaded with features and bereft of a price tag.

Check out these contests for young filmmakers
Are you ready for your close-up shot? Are your students? If so, there are a couple of video contests out there to show off your filmmaking skills.

Hit the road this summer with these fuel-saving tips
In these days of pricey petrol, you’ve got to get a little creative to save money on gas. That’s why you should head over to SmartPlanet and read their post, Top 10 eco driving tips to beat fuel rises.

Its not what you say, but “how” you say it: The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks
While this site is intended to show the humor of misinterpreting other peoples’ bad punctuation, you can use it as an effective tool to demonstrate to your students what not to do. You might even want to mention that anyone can submit a photo to this blog. It could give your students a strange motivation to pay attention to punctuation as they walk around in their day-to-day lives.

Spin the color wheel to make art projects look great
If you have art students as inept as I at choosing colors, LaurenMarie at Creative Curio reminds us that picking good color combinations is as easy as looking at your trusty color wheel.

Relive Sesame Street’s 50 Best Moments
If you’re a sucker for nostalgia like me, you’ll probably enjoy viewing these again yourself. Just try not to cry when you watch “Mr. Hooper Isn’t Coming Back.”

Five Tools to Liven Up Art Class
You want me to draw a picture for you? Well, I’ve got the programs to do it. Who doesn’t want more self-expression? Who has longed for something more interesting than MS Paint? Here, dear readers, are alternatives!

Say it Right the First Time with Pronounce Firefox Extension
With this extension, just highlight the word that’s giving your kids trouble, right click and choose “Pronounce” from the menu. Firefox will then speak the word out loud with correct English pronunciation.

How to Easily Create a Claymation Movie Class Project
Thanks to the low cost and high availability of digital technology, you can create your own claymation movie with only a computer, digital camera, tripod, and clay.

Keep Students in the Loop on their Grades with GradeMate
GradeMate’s features include managing your classes and setting up reminders, but the most useful by far is keeping track of student grades. That revelation shouldn’t make your mind explode - the site is called GradeMate, after all. You can add multiple assignments, exams, and projects, then set weight amounts and enter scores.

Who Knows What Evil Lurks in the Briny Deep? Monsters of the Deep Sea
True to the site’s name, Monsters of the Deep Sea is swimming with ocean life that looks like it belongs on the Saturday night creature feature.

Cook up Plastic out of Milk in Your Very Own Kitchen
Okay, have you ever wanted to make something out of plastic, but didn’t know how? Instructables has a nifty video for making plastic with milk and vinegar.

Sandra Day O’Connor Presents Our Courts
Former US Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor wants to do for civics what John Madden did for video game football. That’s why she’s speaking on behalf of Our Courts, an still-in-development video game that will let students learn about government by tackling true-to-life legal issues online.

PWN Your Social Network with GoCrossCampus
Like Risk, the goal in GCC is to recruit and position your armies to take over your opponents’ territory. Unlike Risk, the territory consists of college campuses, or U.S. cities and states, and your armies consist of you and your friends.

Sandra Day O’Connor Presents Our Courts
Former US Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor wants to do for civics what John Madden did for video game football. That’s why she’s speaking on behalf of Our Courts, an still-in-development video game that will let students learn about government by tackling true-to-life legal issues online.

Discover the Undersea World with Ocean Explorer
There’s a whole world down there, and you can bring it to your student engagingly and easily with Ocean Explorer from NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration).

Cook up Plastic out of Milk in Your Very Own Kitchen
Okay, have you ever wanted to make something out of plastic, but didn’t know how? Instructables has a nifty video for making plastic with milk and vinegar.

Beware of the 20 Deadliest Plants on the Planet
You’ll find the usual suspects like hemlock and deadly nightshade, some wolves in sheep’s clothing like the angel’s trumpet, plus a couple surprises - I knew poison ivy makes you itchy, but I had no idea if you burned it, the smoke can kill you if you breathe it in.

Who Knows What Evil Lurks in the Briny Deep? Monsters of the Deep Sea
True to the site’s name, Monsters of the Deep Sea is swimming with ocean life that looks like it belongs on the Saturday night creature feature.

Produce an Educational Video in Your Classroom
If you think kids like watching videos, wait until they start making them. Creating stuff is at a higher level of Bloom’s Taxonomy than bubbling in a test sheet. But where to begin? This handy and easy-to-understand guide from Education.com on producing an educational video is a great place to start.

Read at Work: Act Productive and Get Educated
Read at Work is deceptive, underhanded and sneaky. Fortunately, its also very educational and fun. Designed to look and act like a Windows desktop, this application goes widescreen and mimics everything on a normal desktop, and presents folders containing various short stories, poems, and classic works.

Get Blogging with WordPress
Have you always wanted to have a classroom blog that allows blogging between parents and you, or you and your students? If so, WordPress has everything you are looking for and a lot more

How to Easily Create a Claymation Movie Class Project
Thanks to the low cost and high availability of digital technology, you can create your own claymation movie with only a computer, digital camera, tripod, and clay.

Keep Students in the Loop on their Grades with GradeMate
GradeMate’s features include managing your classes and setting up reminders, but the most useful by far is keeping track of student grades. That revelation shouldn’t make your mind explode - the site is called GradeMate, after all. You can add multiple assignments, exams, and projects, then set weight amounts and enter scores.

Free Interactive Math Manipulatives
The National Library of Virtual Manipulatives is a free website that allows you access to a multitude of interactive virtual manipulatives. They range from pre-kindergarten up to twelfth grade.

Blog at Conferences Like a Pro
You’ve finally gotten a laptop to work with, and maybe you’ve started to use it in the classroom. Now you’re going to conferences, and you’ve heard about people “blogging” and using laptops at conferencing, but you’re wondering how to do this, and why? Follow these tips to find out.

Get Your Web On With Webon
Webon is a free online hosting site that integrates tools for creating, building and maintaining a completely free (and ad-free) Web site. The site offers different “kits” depending on the purpose of your site, including basic, photo album, travelogue and personal kits, which let you set up blogs and other pages for photos, links, maps, anything you want really.

PWN Your Social Network with GoCrossCampus
Like Risk, the goal in GCC is to recruit and position your armies to take over your opponents’ territory. Unlike Risk, the territory consists of college campuses, or U.S. cities and states, and your armies consist of you and your friends.

Say it Right the First Time with Pronounce Firefox Extension
With this extension, just highlight the word that’s giving your kids trouble, right click and choose “Pronounce” from the menu. Firefox will then speak the word out loud with correct English pronunciation.

Looking for Kid-Friendly Art? Try Haring Kids
Haring Kids is wonderful not only because of the art (which is kid friendly), but the writing is also suitable for early readers.

Five Tools to Liven Up Art Class
You want me to draw a picture for you? Well, I’ve got the programs to do it. Who doesn’t want more self-expression? Who has longed for something more interesting than MS Paint? Here, dear readers, are alternatives!

Summer has arrived! Well, technically, summer arrives June 20, but for our purposes, summer has arrived! Just because you’re on a break doesn’t mean you should stop thinking about education, though. Now is the perfect time to catch up on Instructify articles you didn’t have time to read the first time around.

Johnny Lee: Interactive Whiteboard From a $40 Wii Remote
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.”

Viral Vinnie Really Has Guts: Game Combines Learning, Indigestion
Who can resist a quiz game with digestive sound effects? I know I (and millions of others) can’t. If this sounds like something you, or perhaps a select number of your students would enjoy, check out Viral Vinnie’s Gut Instinct from the BBC.

Avoid Killing Students’ Interest and Attention with Power Point
Stop killing your audience’s attention and start making killer presentations with these helpful tips.

Make Flat Stanley Your Pen Pal
Students make their own Flat Stanleys and take him around with them, keeping a journal of their activities (went for ice cream, cleaned their room, etc.). The kids mail Flat Stanley and a copy of the journal to another school. These students take Stanley out on the town, too, jotting down what they do, before sending him back home again, often with souvenirs and pictures.

Better Late than Never - Instructify Finally Gets Around to Reviewing Audacity
Whether you’re creating a podcast or adding a voice over for a slide show, the list of free audio recorders begins and ends with Audacity. Audacity is an open source program that lets you record and edit audio quickly and easily.

Explore the Final Frontier with SETI@home and WorldWide Telescope
Want to get kids interested in space? Here are two sites that should be helpful.

Convergence of the Real and the Virtual: The First Scientific Conference in World of Warcraft
You may have heard your students talking about questing or getting their epic mounts or selling bars of gold on the auction house. If you have, you’re probably dealing with a World of Warcraft player. If you are interested in learning more about the potential for learning in games, this article is a must-read.

Add Flash, Widgets, All that Stuff to Your Website with Sprout
Adding living content to your website or class blog is a pretty cool feature. Click, drag and drop just about any rich media (video, audio, images, interactive services) into the Sprout Builder to create your content, then you’re given a Flash file to embed onto whatever website you please. Now you have a mini-site full of flashy content contained all on one page.

Give Your Shaky, Low-Res Videos a Makeover
Fix My Movie is a free video enhancement site that makes videos from your cell phone, digital camera, or Webcam look great by increasing resolution by up to 4 times, automatically brightening, and getting rid of any excess noise or side effects of compression. And you don’t have to do anything but upload it!

Tell Your Story with VoiceThread
VoiceThread, an online slide show builder, has an intuitive interface to upload, or link to images, and simple-to-use commands to add voice narration (you can do it by telephone if you don’t have a mic), and even upload video and sound files. If that’s not enough, you can add typed text, and doodle.

Relive Sesame Street’s 50 Best Moments
If you’re a sucker for nostalgia like me, you’ll probably enjoy viewing these again yourself. Just try not to cry when you watch “Mr. Hooper Isn’t Coming Back.”

Organize Your Notes and Projects with Springnote
Springnote works similarly to Google Docs, but it’s hyper-organized and super easy to use. All of your documents are organized into a drop-down tree menu with categories and tags, so you can see and access all of your content quickly.

Harness Students’ Love of Creating Stuff with Invent Now
First, there is the InventNow.org - World which is an interactive online cartoon environment where kids can learn about inventors, and invention and get a creative spark to get the brain cells going. Then go to InventNow.org - Invent, and have kids start to put their ideas together.

Make Your Own Book With Blurb
If you’ve ever wanted to write a book, but you never thought about how it could possibly come to fruition, then you should know it’s easier than you think. With Blurb, you can create a book of just about any size or shape, with any number of pages, and a fully customized look and feel.

Dress Up Your Data with These Visualization Methods
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? For answers to these and other vexing questions with graphics, check out these resources.

Help Your Struggling Spellers with These Great Tips
Do your students struggle on spelling tests? Education.com has a few spelling tips designed for teachers and parents in their article, The Fast Track to Spelling Success.

Avoid Killing Students’ Interest and Attention with Power Point
Stop killing your audience’s attention and start making killer presentations with these helpful tips.

Explore the Final Frontier with SETI@home and WorldWide Telescope
Want to get kids interested in space? Here are two sites that should be helpful.

National Geographic’s Explore a Pyramid: Archaeology with No Risk of Snakes or Nazis!
With this fun and educational game, your students can coast through an ancient pyramid using a robot to search for hieroglyphic clues. It’s a great way to start a lesson on Egyptian history and to discuss the significance of pyramids and hieroglyphics.

Give Your Shaky, Low-Res Videos a Makeover
Fix My Movie is a free video enhancement site that makes videos from your cell phone, digital camera, or Webcam look great by increasing resolution by up to 4 times, automatically brightening, and getting rid of any excess noise or side effects of compression.

Mathematics from the Right Side of Your Brain
Give the right side of your kids’ brains a workout during math with these fun and easy-to-use sites.

Johnny Lee: Interactive Whiteboard From a $40 Wii Remote
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.”

Add Flash, Widgets, All that Stuff to Your Website with Sprout
Click, drag and drop just about any rich media (video, audio, images, interactive services) into the Sprout Builder to create your content, then you’re given a Flash file to embed onto whatever website you please. Now you have a mini-site full of flashy content contained all on one page.

Convergence of the Real and the Virtual: The First Scientific Conference in World of Warcraft
For three days in May, participants in the Convergence of the Real and the Virtual conference created characters and joined players from around the world to participate in scholarly discussions about the game while hanging out in a virtual world.

20 World Geography Facts That Might Surprise You - If the world were flat, we would all be spinning out of control right now, because 90% of the world’s population lives in the northern hemisphere. See, there are facts like that about our world’s geography that you did not know, but you soon will thanks to Boots-n-All. Also, did you know that France is about 30% larger than the state of California? No, you did not.

43 Amazing Resources for Writers - I know, I know, I write about writing a lot, but I think it is important. Also, as it turns out, there are a lot of resources out there for writers. In fact, here are 43 of them from Cath Lawson and they are all very amazing.

100 Free Podcasts from the Best Colleges in the World - Stanford, MIT, Berkley, and other colleges are embracing the wonders of podcasting and making them available to you. Who needs to break the bank on expensive tuition when you can just plug in your eardoos and listen your way to knowing Engineering Ethics. Cultivate Greatness has compiled this list that has some great colleges to choose podcasts from… even (shudder) Duke.

The Top 101 Websites for Teachers - Thank me later– or now, if you want– for these 101 websites just for you. This blog is not terribly unlike our own, but you know, not as snarky. Presented by AssortedStuff.com, a site that is just as valuable as this list, but not quite as compartmentalized. There are some great resources here, but if you really want the tools and sites that will help you teach at your best, there is only one source you need. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Viral Vinnie Really Has Guts: Game Combines Learning, Indigestion
Who can resist a quiz game with digestive sound effects? I know I (and millions of others) can’t. If this sounds like something you, or perhaps a select number of your students would enjoy, check out Viral Vinnie’s Gut Instinct from the BBC.

Open Education - Open Source Teaching Information
Open Education, a blog from the folks at GoCollege.com, has some great content to share with educators like yourself. The work is licensed under Creative Commons, so the information you find is meant to be shared further. The entry topics range from advances in education to interviews with notable educators and innovators.

Get Linkin’ with Britannica WebShare
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!

Tell Your Story with VoiceThread
VoiceThread has an intuitive interface to upload, or link to images, and simple-to-use commands to add voice narration (you can do it by telephone if you don’t have a mic), and even upload video and sound files. If that’s not enough, you can add typed text, and doodle.

Hunkin’s Experiments - Cool Cartoon Experiments for Your Classroom
Hunkin’s Experiments are a collection of simple cartoons that explain how to do simple experiments. Their drawings are rudimentary and playful, but luckily, so are the experiments themselves.

Get Smarter: 12 Hacks That Will Amp Up Your Brainpower
Exercise your mind with these 12 strategies from Wired designed to max out your brainpower. Tips include exercising wisely, putting the right kinds of information in your brain, and even finding out the optimum dosages of caffeine.

40 Ways to Spice Up Your Spelling Words
Who doesn’t love memorizing spelling words? Your students, probably. Plenty of adults have trouble with spelling, meaning it’s probably even tougher for kids. Help them out by making your spelling words more interesting with these ideas.

50 Handy Tricks
File this under “Grab Bag.” Instructables presents this list of 50 Handy Tricks encompassing nothing in particular. You’ll learn how to do everything from taking blink-free photos to making a bow-and-arrow out of skis. Not necessarily teaching-related, but a creative soul like you can certainly figure out a way to build a lesson plan around reupholstering your couch with duct tape, can’t you?

10 virtually instant ways to improve your life
Want to add some quality to your quality of life? The folks at Stepcase Lifehack have some ideas, most of which can be summarized by the word, “relax.” Avoiding drama, not being a perfectionist, and not taking things personally will all help you make a fitter, happier and more productive life for yourself. -BILL FERRIS

Photo credit: Kaptain Kobold on flickr