Instructify

BY KEVIN HODGSON

We all have them — words that baffle us, even when we use them all the time. I, for one, still have trouble with “lay” and “lie” and even remember getting an angry letter from a reader about my use of lay instead of lie (or was it the other way around?) when I was a newspaper reporter. The aptly named Confusing Words is a website that might come in handy for those times of confusion. It contains more than 3,000 words that people tend to have trouble with, and it accepts suggestions for more. The site was developed by the husband of a teacher, who had asked if there was some way to develop a system to help her students deal with common grammatical word errors.

Confusing Words is simple enough to use. Just type in a word that you find confusing, spelling it as best as you can (the site’s programming has some special tricks to finding words spelled close to the original). The site then gives you a list of words that might be confusing due to similar spelling or meanings, provides definitions, and then shows examples of how each word is used in proper context.

If nothing else, you should print the read-outs for the their/there/they’re and to/two/too helpers and pass them out to your students. Strunk and White will surely thank you.

Confusing Words

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

You may have heard about text-to-speech programs, but how about text-to-song? Let Them Sing It for You is a site that turns user text into a song montage. Sure, it’s odd and entertaining, but this site may provide another way to get students excited about poetry and writing. Just copy or write a poem or short story into the box and let the site do its work. Then, play your words as a song (and see if you can guess the artists you hear singing your words).

I can’t say exactly how the site works, but it appears to match up words with lyrics in popular songs, pulling out snippets of pop songs (In my sample, I think I heard Lady GaGa, Chris Brown and even Chris Isaak). The result is an amusing musical mash-up. The site allows you to listen and then send a link via email, but there does not seem to be an option for downloading or embedding (perhaps that runs afoul of copyright law).

Let Them Sing It for You

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

To proclaim that you have 1,000 things to write about, as Barry Lane does at this new writing prompt site, is pretty ambitious. But if anyone can pull it off, Lane can. Known in many writing circles for his way with words and for working with teachers, Lane is slowly offering up various starting points for writing at this site, entitled (appropriately enough) 1,000 Things to Write About.

Lane explains:

If one picture is worth 1000 words then, 1000 pictures are worth 1 million words. In the next 3 years I will be posting a picture a day from my personal photos, a writing idea and some of my own writing.

What is nice about this project is that Lane accompanies his writing ideas with his own writing, which teachers can use for inspiration for themselves, as well as for their students. You could do worse than using a few of Lane’s ideas here in your own classroom. So far, topics have ranged from playing a musical instrument, to writing a 3-5-3 poem, to remembering a family ancestor. Three years and 1,000 prompts is enough reason to follow Lane on his journey, and he invites you and I to add our own writing to his mix, too. Go ahead. Write.

1,000 Things to Write About

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

At the end of our school year, one of my colleagues teaching sixth grade has all of her students write a letter to themselves in the future. She dutifully puts the letters away until the students’ senior year of high school, when she puts a stamp on each of them and mails them to her all-grown-up former students. I always loved that idea of a student writing to themselves in the future. FutureMe gives that idea a 21st century twist by setting up a system for sending an email to yourself at a specified time in the future. You provide the email address, add a subject line, write a note to your future self, and then choose when it should get delivered. You may designate your emails private or public, and there is a gallery of interesting public emails (I did not find anything inappropriate, but you would be wise to check the gallery out before bringing students to the site).

A great time to use FutureMe would be at the start of the school year, as students begin to lay out their plans for the coming year. What if they sent themselves an email about their goals and then received that email at the end of the year? It might spark some interesting reflections.

As a classroom tool, FutureMe works through verified email addresses, so a teacher might need to set up a classroom email account for the site, and then let students use that account to send an email either to a home email address or back to the classroom account.

What would you say to your future self?

Futureme

BY KEVIN HODGSON

A rule of thumb for learning idioms is that you can’t count your chickens before they’re hatched. Just when you think a student has mastered the strange elements of idiomatic language, along comes a phrase that has your student barking up the wrong tree. Is it time to have them think outside the box? The IdiomDictionary is an online source for learning about idioms. With a simple interface, the site gives you not only the definitions, but also some historical background on the phrases and examples in a sentence.

The site claims to have more than 5,000 idiom phrases on hand for search. Certainly for second language learners, the understanding of idioms can be a struggle. But with the IdiomDictionary and a little help from the teacher, students should be able to hit the nail on the head and get a better sense of our language and its all of its quirks.

Idiom Dictionary

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BY BILL FERRIS

ZooBurst lets you build virtual pop-up books online. Through a simple WYSIWYG interface, you can upload images and enter text you want for your story, and ZooBurst handles the pop-ups and page turns virtually. Be sure to check out the Gallery to see some pretty nice-looking examples.

The controls let you manipulate the color of the pages, the angle of the pop-up images, how fast images pop, how many pages the book has, and more. ZooBurst’s 3-D virtual environment lets you see each book from every possible angle.

My only complaint with ZooBurst is that I would’ve liked to see some clip art available, as not every kid will have a lot of digital images on their computer to choose from. Yeah, I know, clip art looks cheesy. However, in an exercise like this, I think it’s more important to give kids some tools, even rudimentary ones, in order to get them busy creating something rather than combing the internet for pictures, which can be a dicey proposition in a school environment.

Overall, though, ZooBurst is a fun storytelling application with a minimal learning curve. You can put together a story and tell it to your kids during story time. Or have kids work on stories in groups or individually to exercise their creativity, and maybe produce the next classic children’s book.

ZooBurst

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

Script writing can be challenging for many students, as the formatting is as much a learning process as the actual story writing. Raw Scripts is a browser-based platform that allows aspiring playwrights and screenwriters to to write a perfectly formatted script via a simple interface. For example, choose the “character” option, and when you write, your character’s name will be centered and in capital letters, and the next line will be automatically set up for dialogue. The site also provides you with character name options, saving names you have used and suggesting them as you type, so that with a simple click of the “enter” key on your keyboard, you can reuse names. It also lets you make notes in the margins.

You can try out Raw Scripts without registering, although you can’t save or re-title the plays in this mode. You can, however, write the play at the site and then cut and paste it to a Word document at the end. If you do create an account (which can be done with either a Google or Yahoo login), you have more options, such as saving, emailing the script, or exporting it as a PDF file. Also, with a login, you can invite collaborators for group play writing, which is an interesting possibility. In fact, many of the options in Raw Scripts resemble other collaborative word processing sites, except that here, the formatting issues are put into place with a click of the mouse.

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

As more and more states push their curriculum development towards the Common Core standards, educators will be searching for resources for developing expository writing, which is one of the main elements of the nationalized standards. The act of explaining how to do something has been a staple writing assignment for a long time. Podcasting those instructions promotes not only technology, but also requires students to focus on voice and writing for an audience.

The site One Minute How-To is a great example of how this kind of focused explanation can happen via podcasts. The guests on the show have exactly 60 seconds to explain how to do something, and the topics are pretty wide-ranging. Recent podcasts included how to publish a book using an online site called Blurb, how to throw a curve with a Wiffle ball, how to order a sandwich in Boston, and how to use podcasts in education.

There’s a real spry energy to the podcasts, which are certainly informative. The site could easily be a model for students developing their own podcasts on how to do something, which not only taps into 21st Century skills, but also gives them a chance to be the class expert on something.

One Minute How-To

BY KEVIN HODGSON

We’ve reviewed GoAnimate here at Instructify before, but the site recently launched a school version of its animation software that is worth writing about because, well, it’s free. With GoAnimate for Schools, teachers can sign up for a free classroom account that provides up to 100 student accounts. While there are some limitations on characters and movie run times (2 minutes), GoAnimate still provides ample possibilities for students to make interesting movies. And in my experience with GoAnimate, young people just love to use the site for all sorts of creative projects.

GoAnimate is a web-based animation system that allows users to add speech bubbles, audio, movement, and more to simple movies. The videos are hosted at the GoAnimate site. On the resource page, there are sample movies, lesson ideas, and more at the school section that run the curricular range of technology, literature, and even community action projects.

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

This is a slightly odd site, to be sure, but Boy the Bear’s Age Gauge is also an interesting way to place yourself in the span of historic events. The premise is that you enter the day you were born, and the site calculates how old you were at certain moments in time. Looking at the output for my birthday, I was suddenly transported in memory and time to the day of the 9/11 attacks (I had friends in New York City), the Y2K scare (I was working the late late shift that New Year’s night as a newspaper reporter because we all thought havoc would take place; it didn’t) and even the O.J. Simpson fiasco (I was actually in Los Angeles, visiting a friend, and we saw the police chase scene and the white van go by us as we stood on a bridge overpass).

I can imagine the Age Gauge possibly being used for personal narrative history projects for students, although the site’s list of historic events does not appear to be regularly updated (no Iraq War, for example). An interesting tangent from the main site is that you can also track similar items around entertainment (popular songs at certain ages, pivotal moments, movie releases, etc.).

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

You have work past the crackle, static, and white noise of the recordings, but RadioLovers is a website that has archived old radio shows from the pre-television days. Bob Hope, Groucho Marx, and Laurel and Hardy are just a few among the classic voices kept alive at this site, which features free downloads of the files in MP3 format. RadioLovers features comedies, mysteries, science fiction, and even music programs.

If you are doing a unit around media literacy, this site might even be helpful in showing how entertainment has often been commercialized. Listen to the openings of some of these programs and you realize that the first few minutes are often used to showcase the show’s sponsors. You could easily draw some parallels to the use of product placement in various movies and television shows these days.

For students interested in podcasting, these old radio shows are valuable for learning about pacing of story, voice inflection, and the use of sound effects (which is not often a topic covered in a traditional writing class, is it?)

On the issue of copyrights, the site discloses that it believes the radio shows are now in the public domain and no longer protected. Whether that would hold up in a court of law remains to be seen (or not). Even so, these files give a glimpse of entertainment from times when writing, sound effects, and voice were the prevailing means for delivering a stories to a large audience.

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You may not find comic books in every kid’s backpack anymore, but the medium of comics still attracts young audiences as sure as trouble waits for Batman around each corner. These comic-creating sites are easy to use, require no registration, and will have students crafting visual stories in no time. Choose the background and characters, insert speech bubbles, and POW!! Your very own comic.

Write Comics: This site features amusingly drawn characters and common backgrounds like houses, schools, and city streets. It could work well for scenes of everyday life.

Strip Generator (pictured): This one has no backgrounds and simple black & white characters, but offers props to insert like furniture, toys, and food. Still, the basic artwork here puts your focus on the text.

Witty Comics: The stuffy characters on this site are offset by the backgrounds featuring famous landmarks from around the world. What would two people talk about as they stood among ancient Greek ruins?

Hero Machine: Here you create a single superhero instead of a comic strip. You can customize almost every aspect of his/her features and costume. Adverb Man? Geometry Girl?

Designing comics helps students learn to communicate with both words and pictures. This can be tied to any subject by giving students a clear objective for the comic, such as a topic for the characters to discuss or a certain message for the strip to convey.

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

There are plenty of resources to turn to if you want to learn how to do something with technology. But there are just not enough places to learn more about the rationale behind the use of technology for learning, and what it means to bring new media and new tools into the classroom. By delving beyond the nuts and bolts of using a tool, we teachers can really start to envision the learning and teaching possibilities in this changing technological environment. The National Writing Project has launched Digital Is, a project that showcases teacher reflections on how technology is changing teaching practice.

The Digital Is site is divided up into areas that include Art/Craft, Teach/Learn, Provocations and Community, and within each of these areas, a designated “curator” pulls together various strands of resources around a single theme. For example, the curated collection entitled “Digital Tools for Change” highlights not only curator Cliff Lee’s insights on how technology can be used for social action by students, but Lee also points us to a handful of projects that demonstrate his point. The various resources at Digital Is were developed by teachers in the National Writing Project network and the Digital Is site is funded by the MacArthur Foundation.

You can browse through the resources on the site in a variety of ways: through curated collections, through search queries, or even through tag clouds. Topics run the gamut from digital storytelling to digital portfolios to movie making in the classroom. (Full disclosure: I am a member of the National Writing Project and a contributor to the Digital Is site.)

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

Jennifer Wagner’s Projects by Jen is a valuable resource for preschool through 6th grade teachers to engage in inquiry projects with other classrooms.  These projects are conducted through the use of high- and low-tech tools for sharing information among classrooms and teachers.

Wagner notes on her site that she has hosted about 60 different collaborative projects over the years and the topics run from counting Oreo cookies (a math project) to a community service venture. Her projects often cross over into several disciplines, but most involve sharing of data and then analysis of that data. A few years ago, my classroom was part of a greeting-card project, in which we sent out greeting cards to a handful of other classrooms and then received cards in return. We then tracked the cards we received on a classroom map.

Wagner also has a newsletter that features collaborative ideas (this costs a small fee), highlights classroom websites and teachers, and more. There is no cost for participation in Wagner’s various collaborative projects, so it provides a nice, easy way to expand learning beyond classroom walls. She also has a very neat ongoing venture called Guess the Wordle, which is a daily brain game using a word cloud and a question. Guess the Wordle is an interesting morning activity to get the day started. Some days, the answer might be a book. Other days, it might be a math problem. Or, as in the case of this one, it is the ingredients of a recipe — but for what?

Projects by Jen

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

I like to encourage writing every single day in my classroom, but sometimes, I struggle to find a good writing prompt that will engage the creative and critical thinking skills of my students. The CanTeach writing prompt website is an online list of possible writing prompts. Though they’re simple, I like that the prompts are open-ended and built around inquiry . And the simplicity of the site means that I don’t have to take time to learn how to find what I need. I can just scroll down, grab a prompt, and we’re ready to get writing. Once the writing is done, these prompts really open up the classroom for deep discussions, too.

Here are a few prompts from the site that I tucked away for a rainy day:

• If you could only take three people with you on a trip around the world, who would you take and why?
• What do you think makes a good friend?
• What four things are most important in your life?
• How would you describe your house to someone who has never visited there before?
• Who or what has had a strong influence in your life?
• What is your most indispensable possession and why?

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