apostrophe.me takes the confusion out of using apostrophes
Do your students struggle with apostrophes? Or is that apostrophe’s? Aaugh! Lucky for them, there’s a handy chart available on the web that shows how those flying commas work. Go to apostrophe.me and check out “How To Use An Apostrophe,” which is exactly what it sounds like.

Google offers scholarships for minority and special-needs students
Google, apparently fed-up with the stereotype of programmers being a bunch of pasty white dudes, is trying to open up the computer science field to women, minorities, and special-needs students with a series of scholarships. These $10,000 scholarships will go to qualifying students who intend to pursue computer science in college.

Map out your classroom with Classroom Architect
You could use mind-mapping resources such as Gliffy to create your new floor plan digitally, but why not use a purpose-built application to do the work for you? Classroom Architect from 4teachers.org lets you drag and drop your desks, tables, chairs, TVs, and whatever else you have in your classroom without breaking a sweat.

Write, edit, collaborate online for free: Zoho Writer
Longtime Instructify readers know there are a bevy of free and web-based word processors out there. Only a few of them, however, are powerful enough that I wouldn’t miss Word. I dare say that Zoho Writer is one of those few.

A lot of schools and families shell out big money to Microsoft every year for MS Word. It’s my word processor of choice, but I’ve been lucky in that it came pre-installed on my computer. If I had to actually find a word processor on my own, I’d face a real dilemma: on one hand, I’ve gotten really used to Word’s format, as well as the level of formatting I can do on documents. On the other hand, I’m a cheapskate.

Longtime Instructify readers know there are a bevy of free and web-based word processors out there. Only a few of them, however, are powerful enough that I wouldn’t miss Word. I dare say that Zoho Writer is one of those few.

Zoho Writer is a free web-based word processor in the same vein as Google Docs. Longtime readers also know me as something of a Google shill, but Zoho Writer is, without a doubt, a much better word processor than Google Docs in every way.

Nifty Features

The best thing about Zoho Writer is that it works like you expect a word processor to work, rather than like an app you put up with because it’s free. Unlike Google Docs, you can very easily adjust the document layout. You’re finally free to adjust the margins, change the layout from portrait to landscape, switch to legal-sized paper, and make lots of other tweaks that you can’t make in a lot of other free writing tools. My favorite, you can adjust the line spacing, which is for some reason a hard-to-come-by feature in free word processors. Grading or editing student writing is exponentially easier if they double-space the text.

Speaking of grading, if you’re grading assignments in Zoho Writer, you’ll love the contextual comments. Much like the comments in Word 2007, you can select some text and enter a comment on it. Simple, fast, effective.

Zoho Writer also allows you to post documents directly to your blog. If you’re giving a blogging assignment, consider letting students compose their entry in Zoho Writer first to take advantage of the formatting tools and, most importantly, spell check.

Sharing and Collaboration

Like most cloud-based writing programs, Zoho Writer allows document sharing and collaboration. The functionality works much like Google Docs in that you send invitations to the folks you want to share in the fun of your particular writing project.

Import/Export

If there’s one area Zoho Writer doesn’t excel at, it’s how it plays with other word processors (to be fair, most word processors I’ve worked with have a few hiccups when reading files from another program). Zoho Writer can read Word and OpenOffice files, but gives you a few font and spacing headaches for your trouble. You can import files from Google Docs, too. However, Zoho Writer says you must “Import either zip exported from Google Docs or zip containing HTML (and corresponding image) files.” That’s basically a long way of saying, “Just copy and paste it into the document.”

Exporting files works a little better, though. Zoho Writer exports flawlessly to PDF. It can also export to Word’s DOC and DOCX formats, kinda — the resulting file looks a little wonky, but it’s salvageable. Zoho Writer claims it can export to RTF, but with the file I ended up with, you’re better off exporting to another format, or just copying and pasting and saving in RTF afterward.

Mail Merge

Zoho Writer has this feature if you want to use it. I don’t know how useful mail merge would be to teachers (newsletters, I suppose), but it’s there if you want to mess with it. Or if you don’t use mail merge but like knowing it’s available, just in case.

Overall

Yeah, you can’t beat the price, but Zoho Writer is more than just a free application. Zoho Writer is nearly as good as OpenOffice Writer, and the fact that there’s nothing to download or install makes it a viable option for classroom use.

Zoho Writer

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Who doesn’t love moving furniture? The answer, of course, is pretty much everybody. Changing up the floor plan for your classroom involves moving desks, rugs and shelves around until you achieve feng shui (or you just say “good enough” and give up), or killing a few trees as you sketch up then toss out flawed, not-to-scale maps of possible layouts.

You could use mind-mapping resources such as Gliffy to create your new floor plan digitally, but why not use a purpose-built application to do the work for you? Classroom Architect from 4teachers.org lets you drag and drop your desks, tables, chairs, TVs, and whatever else you have in your classroom without breaking a sweat.

First off, Classroom Architect allows you to set your classroom dimensions, so you won’t have any unpleasant surprises, like finding out your map for 13 desks across your room won’t work in real life. You can drag student and teacher desks, kidney tables, projectors, and other pre-made objects into your floor plan with ease. Draw and text tools let you create other objects as necessary, so if you’re stressing out that Classroom Architect doesn’t have an icon for your life-sized human skeletal display, you can craw one yourself if you really want to.

When you’ve got a design you like, you can save your map to your computer, or print it out so you can bring your vision to life. Classroom Architect is a simple application, but the one thing it does it does well. Give it a try and see what sort of classroom layout you can create.

Classroom Architect

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Google, apparently fed-up with the stereotype of programmers being a bunch of pasty white dudes, is trying to open up the computer science field to women, minorities, and special-needs students with a series of scholarships. These $10,000 scholarships will go to qualifying students who intend to pursue computer science in college.

According to Google’s scholarship page:

“As part of Google’s ongoing commitment to advancing computing and technology, we are pleased to provide scholarships to encourage students to excel in their studies and become active role models and leaders. We hope these programs also help in dismantling barriers that keep women and minorities from entering computing and technology fields.”

The criteria are rather specific, but if you have aspiring programmers in your class who qualify, you should definitely steer them toward these scholarships. Going to college on a Google scholarship probably looks pretty good on the ol’ resume, especially since, as it’s been obvious for a while now, Google is slowly taking over the world.

Google Scholarships

Google Scholarships for Students via Free Technology for Teachers

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Do your students struggle with apostrophes? Or is that apostrophe’s? Aaugh! Lucky for them, there’s a handy chart available on the web that shows how those flying commas work. Go to apostrophe.me and check out “How To Use An Apostrophe,” which is exactly what it sounds like.

The chart goes over the basics (don’t use apostrophes on plurals, do use them to indicate possession or for contractions), as well as more confusing rules such as “its” versus “it’s.” All the information you need, plus cool pictures of rocket ships and dinosaurs, make apostrophe.me a handy grammatical reference for any age group — mostly.

I say mostly because apostrophe.me is hosted by another site called The Oatmeal, which isn’t appropriate for students. So if you haven’t already, please don’t email this link to all your students. Instead, consider a screen grab, printing it out, or if you prefer, ordering a poster version.

apostrophe.me

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If there’s one foundation skill kids need for the 21st century, it’s typing. Yeah, it seems basic, but in a computerized society, pretty much everything is done on computer. The keyboard is how we interact with computers and the internet, and therefore, much of the world. It only makes sense that kids develop a good working knowledge of the keyboard beyond the hunt-and-peck method. They can do that without signing up for a typing class at TypingWeb.

TypingWeb has lessons for typists of all skill levels. If a student is just learning to type, the Beginner Course will go over all the basics, including which finger is responsible for what keys. Intermediate and advanced typists will work on words, punctuation, capitalization, all that stuff. A very slick feature of TypingWeb is that it keeps track of statistics like words per minute and problem keys, so kids will know what they need to work on.

TypingWeb tries to make lessons more interesting with their News Headline Exercises, in which students type headlines from a news service of their choice (Google News, Fox Sports, etc.). And if you’re one of the fearless few who types using the Dvorak method, TypingWeb has a tutorial for that, too.

Learning to navigate the keyboard efficiently is becoming as valuable a skill as learning to talk. TypingWeb lets students become masters, for free no less.

TypingWeb

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Download chemistry podcasts at ChemPod
The most recent episode features two Nobel-Prize winners chatting about ribosomes and the reprogramming thereof. Count on developments involving the usual heavy hitters in chemistry, including DNA, RNA, MIT, and the GFP (that’s green fluorescent protein, a discovery that netted Martin Chalfie a Nobel Prize — do you see a trend in the quality of guests this program gets?).

Stop by Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood on the web
When I was a kid, I always wanted to go to Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Like actually go there, meet Speedy Delivery, check out the Trolley, all of it. If I’d only had the good sense to be born twenty years later, I could have paid a visit via the internet to the excellent Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood website.

Build your own typefaces with FontStruct
The most obvious use for FontStruct would be as an art project — students can really exercise their creativity, as well as learn about typography, an important skill for any future graphic designers. World-language teachers can get in on the act, too. FontStruct lets you develop letters for several different alphabets, including Katakana (Japanese), Bopomofo (Mandarin Chinese), Arabic, Hebrew, Bengali, and others.

BY EMILY JACK

In Europe in the early 1600s, witch hunts were common practice and people were burned at the stake. Health care included bloodletting and surgery without anesthesia. And expeditions to the so-called New World were launching a new era of cruelty and genocide. But even during those dark times, a scientific revolution was underway that would change the way humans understood themselves and their place in the world forever.

It was 1609 when Galileo Galilei turned his telescope to the skies and began the observations that ushered in modern astronomy. 400 years later, the International Astronomical Union and UNESCO have declared 2009 the International Year of Astronomy to honor Galileo and to celebrate the advances in astronomy since his time.

The NASA International Year of Astronomy (IYA) website offers a number of ways to observe the IYA, including a page of links to educational and multimedia resources. Highlights include:

1. Epos’ Chronicles, a series of educational web comics about astronomy.
2. How Big is Our Universe? — a site from Harvard that helps students visualize the enormous scope of the solar system and the universe.
3. Observing with NASA, which lets students control robotic telescopes to view a variety of cosmic scenes.
4. Are We Alone?, a series of funny and compelling podcasts about scientific themes. Archived podcasts include discussions of zombies and a skeptical exploration of doomsday Hollywood movies.

The International Year of Astronomy is nearly over, so take some time to honor Galileo. After all, he spent 10 years under house arrest just so you could have some science.

International Year of Astronomy

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BY BILL FERRIS

As the perpetrator of some of the worst handwriting in a fifty mile radius, I’ve grown to love choosing the right font. The right typeface can produce the sort of artful lettering my hands can’t. Or so I thought. FontStruct lets me use my hands (by way of my mouse) to create my own fonts that I can download and use. Oh, okay, so it’s not exactly handwriting, but it’s the most legible thing my hands have ever produced.

FontStruct works via a grid method. Simply fill in the grid with blocks of various shapes to form each letter. Some of the existing fonts on the site allow you to clone them, so you can get a better look at how the magic happens. There are a lot of shapes to try out on the grid, and creating an entire alphabet will take some time, but isn’t it worth it to have your own custom-built typeface?

The most obvious use for FontStruct would be as an art project — students can really exercise their creativity, as well as learn about typography, an important skill for any future graphic designers. World-language teachers can get in on the act, too. FontStruct lets you develop letters for several different alphabets, including Katakana (Japanese), Bopomofo (Mandarin Chinese), Arabic, Hebrew, Bengali, and others. No matter what subject you teach, how much cooler would your classroom bulletin board look with your own homemade font? Maybe spice up your old worksheets and handouts with some new type while you’re at it.

It’ll takea little trial and error before you get a FontStruct alphabet that looks good (my early attempts are admittedly kinda ugly), but with a little perseverance you can create a typeface that’s uniquely your own. And, in my case, one that people other than me can read.

FontStruct

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Spruce Up Your Bulletin Boards: Classroom Displays Blog

Are you one of those forward-thinking teachers who uses smart phones and text messages in class? Do projects like a 21st Century scavenger hunt make you excited? I’m going to go ahead and assume the answer is yes (a bold assumption I know, but please humor me) so I can tell you about textPlus, an app for the iPhone and iPod Touch that lets you send unlimited texts for free.

Using smart phones in class is a hot-button topic for a lot of educators. There are a lot of barriers to widespread in-school use for phones, including classroom disruption and the fact that not every student can afford a phone. Having a means of sending free text messages will reduce the financial burden on some students (and you), making the day when every student is equipped with a powerful communication device just a little bit closer to reality.

textPlus: Free Unlimited Group SMS on Your iPhone or iPod Touch

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When I was a kid, I always wanted to go to Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Like actually go there, meet Speedy Delivery, check out the Trolley, all of it. If I’d only had the good sense to be born twenty years later, I could have paid a visit via the internet to the excellent Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood website.

Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood on the PBS Kids website lets you look at classic clips from the show. Elementary kids can watch video field trips in which Fred Rogers takes in a performance by Yo-Yo Ma, visits a museum, and guides kids on a trip to the doctor’s office for a checkup. Kids can read stories, play games, and build a neighborhood of their own.

Naturally, you can’t visit Mister Rogers Neighborhood without taking the Trolley to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, where kids can make stories with X the Owl or create their own kaleidoscopes with Lady Elaine Fairchilde, plus lots more fun with these puppet pals.

There’s a lot more to do on this site than I can list in the article, so your best strategy is to head there yourself. Kids can have some educational fun, and they can play in the neighborhood I most wanted to when I was a kid (well, I wanted to drive on Sesame Street, too).

Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood on PBS Kids

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A friend of mine recently lamented the decline of citizen science. Whereas guys like Newton would conduct all manner of experiments himself, if today’s non-university-employed Average Joe even tried to order the equipment necessary to conduct a proper experiment he’d likely find himself on some terrorist watch list.

I’ve no idea how much he was exaggerating, but It makes me wonder if, were there a greater scientific interest among regular citizens, do-it-yourself science would make a comeback. That may or may not be realistic, but a good place to start would be the ChemPod podcasts from Nature.

Mark Peplow, your cheerful British host, will guide you through the hottest chemistry topics, whatever they might be (sorry, I’m an English major). The most recent episode features two Nobel-Prize winners chatting about ribosomes and the reprogramming thereof. Count on developments involving the usual heavy hitters in chemistry, including DNA, RNA, MIT, and the GFP (that’s green fluorescent protein, a discovery that netted Martin Chalfie a Nobel Prize — do you see a trend in the quality of guests this program gets?).

Episodes happen at a frequency of once every two months — not exactly frequent, but lucky for you, Nature has been quietly churning these podcasts out for a couple years, so you can keep yourself busy while waiting for new installments. You can also use that time to incorporate what you’ve learned in these podcasts into your teaching. Maybe send the URL to your students and see if they’re inspired to do a little citizen science themselves.

ChemPod podcasts

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Photo credit: inocuo on Flickr.

The $1000 Planet Connect Environmental Grant deadline has been extended until November 15. If you read our post about last year’s grant, you know it’s awarded to the best solutions proposed by students to solve environmental problems.

Deadline extensions often mean the entries so far suck, suck, suck, so your students’ odds of winning might be pretty good. Be sure to let them know about the grant, and please let us know if one of your students win.

Planet Connect Environmental Grant

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Video DownloadHelper helpfully helps you download helpful videos. Helpfully.
The fine folks at Video DownloadHelper have created a plug-in for Firefox that makes video downloading as simple as pressing a button.

60 Second Recap summarizes classic literature
Everyone needs help wrapping their heads around a book from time to time. If you teach literature, that time occurs every day. You can outsource some of the necessary explanation by sending your students to 60 Second Recap, a site that summarizes the plot, characters, and themes of a book in 60-second episodes for each.

Get Library of Congress Videos on iTunes U
You now can access lots of free audio and video from the Library of Congress on iTunes U. There’s a lot of great material suitable for a history class, such as early films made by Edison himself (or his company, at least). There are also fascinating oral histories from actual slaves in the Voices from the Days of Slavery collection.

You now can access lots of free audio and video from the Library of Congress on iTunes U. There’s a lot of great material suitable for a history class, such as early films made by Edison himself (or his company, at least). There are also fascinating oral histories from actual slaves in the Voices from the Days of Slavery collection. For a look at how people entertained themselves before TV, radio and the interweb came to be, you can look at early American animation, and even olde timey Vaudeville performances.

If you teach classes of a more literary persuasion, there are several podcasts and webcasts from the National Book Festival. Or maybe you’re a librarian and would like to bone up on your cataloguing skills. They’ve got that, too. Who better to learn from than the Library of Congress?

Library of Congress on iTunes U

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