Instructify

BY KEVIN HODGSON

One would hope that, amid all of the rancor in discussions around education, that there is still room for biting satire. Mr. Teachbad’s Blog of Teacher Disgruntlement is one little corner of the wired world where complaints about the teaching profession loom large, but this time, the slings and arrows come from inside the classroom. The anonymous writer of this site explains to readers that they are a teacher in a city school and that they write to relieve the tension of teaching. He (?) also notes that he hopes his blog “contributes to a broader discussion of why so many teachers find this job so unsatisfying and, thus, quit….about 300,000 of us every year decide that this is a crappy job and leave. And that’s just the ones who can actually get out. How many more are stuck?”

That seems pretty lofty, considering the odd assortment of humor here. There are sections where readers can write in questions to Mr. Teachbad in a sort of Miss Manners-style advice column, a collection of videos that include a skewered take on differentiated instruction, and even a series of “fake education” news items. It’s not quite The Onion, but some of the material here provides a nice balance to the serious coverage of teaching. I, for one, have found the posts around collecting and using data — and what that does to a teacher — amusing and enlightening and a bit close to home.

This is not a site for everyone. Be ready to be offended, perhaps, and be ready to chuckle uncomfortably. Be ready for Mr. Teachbad to get you thinking about your profession from a different angle once in a while.

Mr. Teachbad’s Blog of Teacher Disgruntlement

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 BILL FERRIS

The Mini Page is all grown up. After delighting young readers for more than 40 years in newspapers across the country, this beloved insert has found a new home online. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library has published digital archives of The Mini Page‘s more than 2,000 issues dating from 1969 through 2007.

The collection, donated by The Mini Page founder and first editor, Betty Debnam, contains decades’ worth of lessons, activities, puzzles, pictures, and recipes based on a different topic each week. Biff Hollingsworth, a library staffer who works in the Southern Historical Collection, worked closely with Debnam to achieve her vision for how the archive should appear. “She’s considering this as a way to make sure all the issues she’s worked so hard on are given a new life,” Hollingsworth said.

Educators can put the archive to use in a variety of ways, according to Hollingsworth. If a class wanted to look at how African American history was celebrated over the last 40 years, for example, they can compare early Mini Page issues with today’s. In addition, since The Mini Page is written for early readers, the plain language might be helpful for ESL students learning to read a new language.

Visitors can currently search the collection based on date, title, people, places, and topics. Library staff are working hard to make The Mini Page archive more searchable, adding keywords and other metadata. Hollingsworth went on to say that if educators would like to be able to search via additional criteria, they can submit a request through the library contact page.

The Mini Page Archive 1969-2007

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

These two teachers are on to something. In the age of video parodies, History for Music Lovers on YouTube is a place to learn and to laugh. Listen in as the lyrics to popular songs (current and old) are transformed from karaoke into focused history lessons with a humorous twist. Topics as diverse as The Black Plague (sung to Gwen Stefani), the French Revolution (Lady Gaga), Men of the Renaissance (The Violent Femmes) and The Crusades (Billy Idol) are featured in this collection of homemade videos by teachers Amy Burvall and Herb Mahelona, from a school in Oauhu, Hawaii.

I imagine you could easily get the attention of every high school student in the classroom with a few of these videos, and why not turn the tables by letting students then write and produce their own history music videos.

Just be ready to help with the singing.

History for Music Lovers

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Math and music collide

BY KEVIN HODGSON

There is always something to be said about simplicity, particularly when you are working with technology and younger students. This Is Sand is an ideal art tool for elementary students to create virtual sand sculptures. At first glance, thought, the site appears to be nothing more than a blank screen. But with a left click of the mouse, digital sand starts dropping from the cursor on the screen. Click the “C” button on your keyboard, and now you have a vast array of sand colors to choose from. In no time, This is Sand will have your attention as you slowly layer in colors. (When you are at the site, notice the small unobtrusive gray box in the upper left corner of the screen — this is the instruction manual.)

I was introduced to This Is Sand by my kindergarten-teaching colleague, who uses the site on the first day she introduces her students to our school’s Mac laptops. (See her video documentary of her students’ first day with the Macs.) The site’s artistic nature and user-friendly interface makes This Is Sand a great place to begin classroom instruction for younger students as they learn the mechanics of using a computer mouse to navigate a screen, finding letters on the keyboard, and choosing colors from a palette. The learning has less to do with the building of sand castles than with the computer literacy that comes with using the site.

The site defaults to making a neat little sound as the sand falls (you can turn off the noise, if you want) and users can submit works of art to the gallery. With younger students, a teacher could take screenshots of the work and then print them out or add them to an online class website.

This Is Sand

This Is Sand Gallery

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

Jane Hart does her best to keep herself and her blog readers up to date on the latest technology tools, particularly as they relate to social media. While her blog is certainly worth following, it is her annual list of 100 Tools for Learning that you should check out first. Culled from a variety of sources, including her own readers, the list of 100 tools runs the gamut from multimedia production to practical tools that may simplify a task. Jane notes that there were more than 500 people sharing ideas with her this year. That’s a great pool of knowledge.

One thing I like is that Jane does more than just share the tools. In her Winners & Losers analysis, she also notes which tools have been dropped from the previous year, and which tools seem to be gaining more ground. (And, I should note, she makes it clear which sites are free and which cost money.) Her Best in Breed list breaks down the list into categories, such as microblogging, e-learning, and productivity tools.

The Top 100 Tools for Learning

Jane’s Slideshow on Slideshare

Winners & Losers

Best in Breed

BY KEVIN HODGSON

With Halloween nearing, it might be time to take out your virtual carving knife and create a Jack O’Lantern without the mess of guts and seeds. This carving site (created with Flash but housed at Kevin Jarrett’s blog) is one of the easiest that I have found to use, and the activity is accessible for a wide range of ages. It’s beauty is in its simplicity: just use the mouse to make holes in the pumpkin, click done, and watch your carved creation light up. Save your pumpkin with a screenshot, or just savor its eerie virtual glow.

Carve the Pumpkin

BY KEVIN HODGSON

It’s probably fair to say that “grammar” and “comics” are not often words spoken together in a typical classroom. Comics still get a pretty bum rap these days, even though more and more educators are seeing the value in alternative literacies such as graphic novels and comics. To understand the wealth of thinking that goes into a comic (both as a writer and as a reader), Blambot has created a chart of “Comics Grammar.”

While the site frames the discussion around fonts and design,  there is plenty to learn from here about how to read comics. You learn about balloon tails, double dashes, emanating dialogue, and more. What emerges is the use of the visual in connection with the written word, and the combination of these forms almost a literacy of its own when it comes to comics and graphic novels.

In the Classroom

Do you let your students make comics? How about read comics? This site could be a valuable resource around reading skills that are not traditionally taught, and I bet that your students would have fun with it, too. Keep an eye out for the annual Free Comic Day each May, and head down to the local comic book shop to grab free comics that you can use in the classroom. Analyzing comics as text and visual information can be a way to engage non-traditional readers and learners in a new way, and making literacy visible is always a rewarding experience.

Comic Book Grammar and Tradition via Blambot Comic Fonts and Lettering

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BY JACKIE REGALES

If your students are anything like mine, then they will always salivate (figuratively, I hope) at the chance to make something, whether on poster board or a program like Photostory. In today’s classrooms, though, whipping out scissors and glue sticks can seem a little old-fashioned. Enter Smilebox, which offers slide-show and scrapbook-creation options, as well as the ability to make invitations, collages and greeting cards. Fair warning: on some of these pages, music will begin playing automatically, and it’s exactly the kind of digitized music you think it is.

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BY BILL FERRIS

Here’s a great example of a creative class project that you and your students can do. Some students in Japan used sticky notes to create a stop-motion version of Mario, the shorter, chubbier Mario brother, stomping goombas and collecting coins throughout their school. Watch the video and try to top this with your next group assignment.

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

If we really believe in the axiom of “learning by doing,” then teaching the concept of stopmotion moviemaking should begin with a program like Pivot Stickfigure Animator. Pivot is a freeware program for PCs (an alternative freeware program available for all platforms is called Stykz) that is deceptively simple to use. Users are given a stickfigure to start. By moving the figure and adjusting its various body parts, users create a stopmotion movie, frame by frame.

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BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

Let me start off by saying InterroBang is both ambitious and potentially time-consuming, but it’s also a really cool idea. In a nutshell, InterroBang is a game that sends you on real-life missions of discovery and learning. Now I use the term mission because that’s what they refer to it as, but these really cover a wide range of activities, from basic — go somewhere you’ve never been before and observe who goes there and try and deduce why — to complex — go to both a supermarket and a farmers’ market and compare produce varieties and countries of origin. The more complex the mission, the more points you receive. You prove your team completed the mission by uploading pictures, video, and other documentation of your activities.

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BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

Looking for something to spice up your physics class and let your students have a bit of fun at the same time? If so, check out the very cool OE-CAKE physics simulator, a sandbox-style physics program that allows you to see how different physics elements will interact with each other.

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BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

If you’re like me, you remember with fondness long nights with your friends, your trusty plastic icosahedron, pencils and paper, and junk food. I’m talking about Dungeons and Dragons of course, the game many of us geeks played when we were younger and had a lot more time on our hands. At one point blamed by pundits and media outlets as a bad influence on children, D&D is now making inroads in libraries and touting its value toward teaching children problem solving, teamwork, and mathematics and reading skills.

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