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 CHRISTOPHER PANNA

I often use stories and analogies to help my students understand what another place or another time would be like. This has the most impact when I can present facts to back up my story. If It Were My Home provides just that by generating statistical comparisons between two places.

The site was first created to show the scale of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill by superimposing the contaminated area over a location of your choice. If It Were My Home has since expanded to include a fabulous country comparison tool. Choose a country and you get, “If ___ were your home instead of the United States…” followed by social and economic comparisons based on data from the CIA World Factbook. By default it uses the United States, but you can compare any two countries. The page also includes a short description of the country and an Amazon-generated list of suggested books. Just glancing at the titles gives an idea of the country’s identity; for Russia it displayed books about Stalin, the Cold War, and the transition from communism. The comment section on each country’s page adds an interesting social element, but beware inappropriate posts.

For English or social studies teachers, this is a compelling way to show students the facts of life in other parts of the world. The country comparisons also offer opportunities for math classes working with fractions and proportions. And you can still check out the original page about the Gulf oil spill. If you and your students were so lucky, you’ll be thankful that it was not your home.

If It Were My Home

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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 DAN FROELICH

March 2 is Read Across America day, as well as Dr. Seuss’ birthday. While that doesn’t necessarily evoke a day filled with technology-enriched activities, it has become so thanks to the availability of web conferencing, social media, and even blogs.

Readacrossamerica.org is the central location for all events and activities related to Read Across America day. Those of you willing to make a pledge to read with your students can do so online using this year’s pledge form. Using a Google Maps interface, you can see how many pledges have been made in each state across the nation.

Schools fortunate enough to embrace social media can “Like” Read Across America on their Facebook page. There’s a Twitter conversation already in the works, a Flickr stream ready to accept photos, and a SchoolTube channel chock full of videos. It’s exciting to see an event like this evolve into so many interesting projects.

In the last couple of years, schools have even taken to Skype calls to have authors call in to a class and read to students. This is something that only a few fortunate schools in the country could afford to do in a traditional face-to-face scenario. Teachers have even buddied up with other classes to read to each other from around the country and across the globe. The Skype In Schools community recently decided to post a Read Across America page. This was something decided upon by the members of the group, and not a direction taken by the administrators of the site.

Random House has created an online gallery of resources to help direct ideas for Read Across America with the support of the National Education Association.

So what are you doing this year? Do your plans include a more technology enriched collaborative effort? If so, please share your ideas in the comments below. Happy reading!

Read Across America

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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 KEVIN HODGSON

Knoword is a site that is sure to keep the vocabulary part of your brain nimble and quick. Players are given the first letter of a word, then a short definition. From there, they have one minute to type in as many correct words as they can.Correct words provide you with some bonus time. (Registered users have access to features such as archiving their scores and more). While I found the regular mode challenging enough, there is a “hard” mode for those Scrabble/Crossword experts whose way with words can amaze just about anyone (you know who you are). On a recent play, the words ranged from Cat to Harness to Labyrinth, which gives you a good idea of the range of words and challenges drawn randomly from an online dictionary database.

This site might be a nice activity for middle and high school students who need a little more practice with vocabulary and fluency. The challenge of the clock might give some students a bit of intrinsic motivation, although others might get turned off by the time limits. One nice feature is that you can skip words that you find are too hard, so you won’t get caught in some endless loop of difficulty.

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BY BILL FERRIS

What’s your bookprint? Scholastic wants readers to connect with each other based on their favorite books at their site, You Are What You Read.

At YAWYR, readers share the five books that most influenced their lives (their bookprint). After they create their bookprints, they can find other users who like the same books, and interact with them (or, in social networking parlance, “friend” them). You can also browse various celebrities’ bookprints — getting a recommendation for, say, Charlotte’s Web from Taylor Swift might carry more weight than a recommendation from you (no offense).

For more ideas on how to use YAWYR in class, there’s a teachers guide with activities like Pass it On, in which students pair up, ask questions about what books they like, and find books for each other at the library. There’s also a sample letter to parents designed to get Mom and Dad on board and support reading activities at home.

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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.

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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 CHRISTOPHER PANNA

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 JASON DON FORSYTHE

It’s not till I tried (pretty unsuccessfully) to learn a foreign language that I learned how little I understood about the nuts and bolts of linguistics. In particular, conjugating German verbs still gives me a painful flashback to a dark, distant time. But the fact of the matter is that in order to really understand how a language works, conjugation in all of its “present perfect continuous” glory is just something you have to know. As a native speaker you don’t really even think about it — you simply know that “I have been walking” is the way it’s said, not that it’s the present perfect continuous conjugation of the verb “to walk”.

But for English language learners this can be a daunting task, and something that needs to be mastered if their goal is fluent, conversational English. At Conjugation.com, a free English verb conjugation tool, simply type in a verb and the site will give you every possible conjugation under the sun. Conjugation.com couldn’t be simpler to use and is a great resource for anyone who is an ELL or ESL student working on their verbs.

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I have one of those humongous Oxford Unabridged Dictionaries at home, but I really couldn’t tell you where it is right now. I don’t ever open it anymore thanks to Wordnik, and my back is probably better off for it not lifting that 20-pound tome.

Wordnik gets me the information I need much faster, as well as providing an experience that a paper dictionary can’t match. When you look up a word on Wordnik, it doesn’t merely give you a definition with an audio playback. You get all the word’s possible definitions, examples of the word in publication, current usage of the word on twitter, synonyms, etymology, and even its Scrabble score. It may seem like information overload, but Wordnik puts all this data on one page so I don’t have to click far or travel to other sites to get any tangential information I might want.

One thing I feel Wordnik needs to be address is that, under the section “Elsewhere on the Web” where you can see the definitions the other sites use, Urban Dictionary is one of the links. Urban Dictionary is not appropriate for students (to say the least), and as such, Wordnik might be a good tool for a teacher to use, but probably not a good choice to give to students and let them run with it.

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