BY REBECCAH HAINES

“Why do we have to learn this stuff?” It’s a familiar — and frustrating — question for many teachers. And answering “because I said so” satisfies neither you nor your students. No matter their grade level, students are increasingly aware that what they do in school should matter in the real world. It is the teacher’s job to ensure that students can recognize the relevance of their classroom lessons. One way to accomplish this goal is to involve students in a citizen science project.

What exactly is citizen science? No, it doesn’t entail buying a bunch of materials that will put you on a terror watch list. Rather, it is a way to get ordinary people involved in real research with real scientists. If you’re wondering, “How is this beneficial to the scientists?,” it comes down to man power and man hours. Researchers have a static number of hours in the day and a limited number of lab assistants available for data analysis. And in many cases they have a lot of data.

One example is the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Project at UC-Berkeley. Copious amounts of radio telescope data are generated on a daily basis, and the computers and researchers at UC Berkeley simply can’t handle it all. The SETI@Home program solves that problem by allowing volunteers to download a program to their home computers that sorts and analyzes small chunks of this data when the computers are otherwise idle. Other projects involve more active participation, like playing a “game” to discover the most efficient mechanisms of protein folding or viewing images of deep-space galaxies and classifying them as spiral or elliptical. Projects like these take advantage of things that humans can do better than computers — recognize spatial patterns and analyze images.

Citizen science as inquiry

Not all citizen science projects involve sitting in front of a computer. Many projects require participants to get out into the field and collect data. These sorts of projects are especially good for exposing students to the world of scientific inquiry. While the projects mentioned above may seem too advanced for your students, there are several data-collection projects that require little to no special equipment and could be done by students as young as kindergarten.

When students get an early start doing “real” science, they begin to see science simply as a way to examine the world by asking questions. Also, empowering students to contribute to the body of scientific knowledge helps develop a personal, vested interest in science. Ideally, students will develop this interest throughout their academic careers as they continue to approach science with inquiry and critical thinking. Carrying those habits into their adult lives will help them navigate the hot-button scientific issues that will increasingly be a part of policy decisions — climate change, global energy issues, environmental degradation, and new issues that will spring up in their lifetimes.

This article suggests some ideas on how to integrate specific citizen science projects into your classroom while connecting to required curriculum. The projects not only address specific content objectives, but are also ways to infuse inquiry into learning — as opposed to teaching content and inquiry as separate objectives.

While each of the projects discussed can be used at any grade level, they are classified here into to elementary, middle, and high school, according to their topics and ease of participation.

Elementary

These three projects are particularly suitable for elementary students because of their simplicity and the appropriateness of their topics to younger children. Butterflies, tulips, insects, and feeder birds are all familiar to most young students, and would serve as great initiations into the world of participatory science. Additionally, each of these projects addresses content objectives through an inquiry perspective. As such, the projects also provide students with a way to build scientific skills and habits of mind. All of these projects rely heavily on observation, the basic foundation of scientific skills. In each project, students observe and record data, then examine that data to look for trends and ask questions. With appropriate scaffolding, even kindergartners can ask questions about data — another skill critical to building a scientific frame of mind. The projects also offer opportunities for teachers to display class data and guide inquiry-based discussions.

Journey North

According to its creators, Journey North is “a global study of wildlife migration and seasonal change.” Should you register your classroom, you will join a global array of classrooms that are collecting data on a variety of things. Two classic projects are the Tulip Garden project and the Monarch Butterfly Migration project. Both of these species are probably familiar to your students, and both projects are easy to participate in.

In the Tulip Garden project, you and your students plant a specific type of tulip bulb in the fall, then make observations and report when the first plants and flowers appear. Your data is aggregated onto a map with the data from other participating classrooms, which gives you a great visual to track the arrival of spring as measured by blooming tulips. Observing how the map develops also provides great opportunities for class discussion: Why has (or hasn’t) a particular school reported growth? The discussion could easily tap into students’ prior knowledge about seasons, weather, and climate.

In the Monarch Butterfly Migration project, students report sightings of monarch butterflies and their data is plotted on a global map. As students track the migration of the monarchs, they learn about animal behavior and adaptations, as well as the life cycle of the monarch butterfly — all of which are key topics in life science. This project also allows for opportunities to compare different species: Migration is one of many animal adaptations to cold weather. In studying monarchs, students may naturally wonder why some animals don’t migrate, which opens discussions about other animal adaptations to the seasons like hibernation.

While the monarchs are probably the easiest migrating animals to track for most classrooms, students can observe and report on other animal migrations as well — whooping cranes, gray whales, and American robins to name a few.

In addition to its citizen science projects, the Journey North website includes excellent supplemental curriculum materials, including lesson plans, graphic organizers, assessment tools, and instructional activities, to help teachers effectively implement the projects in the classroom.

Project Feeder Watch

While tulips and monarchs may be easily recognizable species to work with, birds are somewhat more charismatic and may better hold the interest of young students. Project Feeder Watch is very simple to participate in: Simply set up a bird feeder, observe the birds feeding at it, and submit your information to the Cornell Ornithology Lab. This project is particularly suited for younger students because the birds that tend to frequent feeders are easily identifiable (cardinals, chickadees, blue jays) and all it involves is counting. Scientists at Cornell use the information provided by participants to answer varied research questions. For example, one researcher recently requested participants to provide her with gender data and examined whether there was a “gender gap” amongst migrating birds.

This project can be used to address several essential content objectives in addition to developing the skills of a scientist. By observing and identifying birds, students will learn about the differences and similarities amongst bird species. They will come to understand some of the needs of living things — primarily food. Additionally, they may observe and understand bird behaviors such as territoriality and courtship, and perhaps even compare those behaviors to certain human behaviors. Students will also learn about how the environment can affect animal behavior as they observe their feeders on days with varying environmental conditions.

Because most feeder birds are easily recognizable and not too varied, it will be fairly simple for students to come up with testable questions related to their feeder watch. For example, students may wonder if different types of seed attract different birds. This would be an easy experiment to do and is an example of the seamless connection of content and inquiry. Students would learn the concept of living things having basic needs, and through the experiment they would discover that living things — birds in this case — have different needs for different types of food.

A $15 participation cost gets you a bird ID poster, a bird feeding kit, and instructional materials.

Bee Hunt

Insects, and specifically pollinating insects, are the focus of Discover Life’s Bee Hunt project. Like many participatory science projects, Bee Hunt has a two-pronged purpose: Scientists gain valuable research data and students learn about pollination. The researchers behind Bee Hunt are investigating whether pollinators are on the decline and whether climate change is causing a temporal mismatch between pollinator visits and bloom times. The scope of this research necessitates many data sets from a wide variety of habitats.

Bee Hunt invites students to collect data in one of four ways: inventory pollinators at a selected site using digital photographs, compare species in two patches, provide nesting sites for mason bees and observe their activities, or use bowls and soapy water to collect insects for a more thorough inventory of species.

For an elementary classroom, a digital photo inventory would likely be easiest. Armed with a camera and a little bit of adult guidance, students simply photograph the insects they see in a selected patch of flowering vegetation. The students submit their photos to a personal online album through the Bee Hunt website, and then use resources to identify the insects and plants they have photographed. From there, the digital data can be analyzed and shared with other participants in the study.

The collaboration and communication involved in Bee Hunt give students valuable experience in a critical aspect of science. As a result, they will realize that scientists do not work in isolation, but that much of science is a cooperative effort. From a content perspective, this project highlights the interdependence of plants and animals, and the key role that insects play in the life cycle of many plants. Students will observe that particular areas of vegetation (i.e. those with flowers) are more prone to hosting pollinating insects, and may even learn that particular insects are found on particular plants. Through their observations, students will learn about many adaptations that enable insects to survive, including camouflage and body structure.

Opportunities also abound for students to ask questions about their data that will help them build scientific skills and content knowledge. Imagine a student wondering how insects avoid being eaten by predators. Through this project, she’d have an opportunity to observe the relationship between an insect’s coloration and the colors of the plants on which it feeds.

Middle school

The following four projects would work particularly well in a middle school classroom: They require slightly more advanced knowledge and skill in order to participate, and the topics are a little more esoteric. Additionally, the scientific habits of mind and inquiry skills fostered by these projects are more advanced. In order to participate in some of these projects, students will have to use more technical equipment than just their eyes and collect more complex data than simple observations.

Project PigeonWatch

If you live and teach in a city, you may think that you don’t have enough “nature” nearby to gather data about the natural world. Never fear, PigeonWatch is here. In this project, participants select an observation site and do three things: Count the total number of pigeons, count the number of each of a small selection of color morphs, and count any courtship colors if applicable. The website offers a free kit to download that includes instructions, data forms, and a poster explaining the color morphs.

Participating in PigeonWatch helps students to learn about heredity and inheritance. Pigeons are unique amongst wild birds in that they have extreme variations in coloring. Using pigeons as the basis, teachers could address many required genetics concepts — monohybrid crosses, incomplete dominance, and genotypic and phenotypic ratios. As the students observe and classify actual pigeons, it will be like seeing their Punnett Squares come to life. Observing phenotypic distributions in a real population and comparing them to their expectations from a Punnett Square is a powerful and memorable lesson. When students notice differences, it offers a chance to discuss experimental design: How big does a sample size need to be to approach theoretical values? How does sample size affect the reliability of the results? Both of those concepts are real issues that scientists deal with on a day-to-day basis — and they’re issues that middle school students are cognitively ready to address.

World Water Monitoring Day

World Water Monitoring Day seeks to test water quality at diverse global locations — although the “day” in this project title may be a misnomer. The official World Water Monitoring Day is September 18, but you can participate as many times as you like between March 22 and December 31. In this project, students use test kits to monitor the health of a local body of water, measuring pH, dissolved oxygen, temperature, and turbidity.

As they collect and analyze water samples, students will learn about how humans can affect an ecosystem. They will also gain experience using equipment accurately, and will learn that many parameters can be measured to determine the health of an ecosystem. Students will enter their data into the online pool via the website, and can look at cross-regional comparisons of water quality. They may wonder why the pH of a river in New England is lower than the pH of their local stream, which could spark a discussion of regional differences in how humans can affect bodies of water, or the effects of those types of changes on the organisms living in the river. Discussions of biodiversity, biological niches, and animal adaptations to their environments could then ensue. These types of discussions, grounded in data collection and observation, can go a long way toward students seeing themselves as scientists.

A word about equipment: If you don’t already have the kits, you’ll need to acquire them. If you live near a university, you may be able to borrow equipment for free. If you teach in North Carolina, you can look into long-term equipment loans from The Science House. Otherwise, you can purchase the kits through the website or on your own.

Galaxy Zoo

Galaxy Zoo is a project in which participants examine images of deep space taken by the Hubble Telescope and classify them according to their shape. Humans are much better at this than computers, which is why the researchers are seeking help from the public. Even if you’ve never looked at a picture of a galaxy before, the website offers a simple training tutorial before beginning. As you classify, a series of multiple-choice questions allow you to come to a better conclusion as to the correct classification. The data contributed helps scientists understand how our galaxy formed.

This project not only exposes students to space research, but it also helps them understand how the Earth fits in to the Universe and what makes it unique. Integrating GalaxyZoo would be a great way to connect students to solar system research. In teaching about how galaxies are classified according to shape, an intrepid teacher could create one class log-in for Galaxy Zoo and project the images on a screen. After viewing the tutorial and practicing, the class could classify images of galaxies, both applying their new knowledge as well as contributing to actual solar system research. Interested students could then go on to make their own accounts and continue to participate on their own time. Years down the road, upon hearing of a new discovery about the origins of our galaxy, one of your students may recall helping to contribute the data leading to that discovery.

S’COOL

Clouds are the stars of this NASA project. In S’COOL, students observe clouds at particular times and report their data online. This citizen science project is tied to NASA’s CERES (Clouds and Earth’s Radiant Energy System) project, which seeks to understand how clouds affect Earth’s climate. The CERES instruments orbit Earth in several satellites and measure the differences in energy that reach it in cloudy versus clear areas. S’COOL seeks to verify from the ground some of the information that CERES collects. Students observe cloud types, height, percentage cloud cover, and cloud thickness at times when the satellites are passing over their locations. This data is submitted and then used to verify the data that the instruments in the satellite are measuring.

This is another great example of a project in which scientific skills and practices are integrated into content instruction. As they gather data, students learn about the cycling of water in the atmosphere and how it relates to weather and climate. These fundamental concepts are critical for students to grasp in order to understand other topics in science. Through S’COOL, students learn how to identify clouds and collect weather data. As befits NASA, extensive teacher resources are available to help you integrate this project into your classroom. There are pre-made PowerPoints to help introduce the project and explain how the students will contribute, lesson plans that build upon the weather and atmosphere concepts under study, and high quality instructional materials like cloud identification posters and bookmarks. I used this project in my classroom when I taught 7th grade, and the students thoroughly enjoyed getting to go outside to make the observations. They felt like they were doing important work in verifying data for an organization as large and important as NASA.

High school

These final two projects are the most advanced and thus most suitable for high school students. As with the other projects, they use an inquiry approach to teach important science content. Students collect and analyze data in order to come to critical conceptual understandings.

FoldIt

Proteins take the center stage in FoldIt, a project that capitalizes on human puzzle-solving skills to figure out how proteins fold. Proteins are the organic molecule for nearly every process in every living organisms. Knowing how they are folded helps researchers understand how they function, which in turn may lead to more effective drug treatments, and maybe even more efficient biofuel production.

The creators of this project turned the process into a downloadable game called FoldIt. In the game, a protein is turned into a puzzle, and players attempt to put it together into its most efficient form. It turns out that humans have much better pattern recognition and puzzle solving skills than computers, so the collaborators on this project decided to tap the human brains on the internet to help them with their research. There have been several instances so far in which the researchers have used the designs created by top FoldIt players to attempt to synthesize an appropriate protein. The complexity of protein structure is what makes this project particularly suitable for older students.

Participating in FoldIt will help students understand the synthesis and breakdown of proteins, as well as how their shapes determine their functions. By playing the game, students begin to understand important features of protein structure — specifically the tertiary structure, which is what makes proteins so specific in their functions. The other skills involved in this project — pattern recognition and puzzle solving — may seem tangential to the real work of science, but they aren’t. Lab scientists examine loads of data on a daily basis looking for patterns and trends. Engineers are constantly looking for unique ways to solve problems. Students will develop both of these critical scientific skills by participating in FoldIt.

USA Phenology Network

Phenology is a pretty hot topic these days. Phenology is the study of nature’s cycles — the timing of things such as bird migration, insect emergence, and fall leaf color change. Many important things are determined by phenology — the application of herbicides and pesticides by farmers and managing natural resources such as water and timber, for example. Global climate change is affecting these natural cycles, and getting data regarding the changes is an important way to see whether and how plants and animals are adapting.

The USA Phenology Network offers two ways to involve students. First, students can be observers. To be an observer, the site guides you to identify plants and animals to observe in your region, to select an appropriate site for observation, and to sign up for an online account in Nature’s Notebook for submission of data. Becoming an observer in this project is appropriate for high school students because they require more specific observations than some of the other projects. Students select a specific individual from a specific species of plant on which to record fairly detailed information.

The second way that students could be involved is by “rescuing” historical data. There is a great amount of data on the phenology of birds dating from the late 19th century through World War II that currently resides on handwritten cards. These cards are being scanned and digitized, but the data on the cards needs to be entered into a database. Volunteers can sign up to do just this. This might be a good “community service” type project for students to get involved in, as they would be saving very valuable historical data.

Both projects help students to examine global issues, their causes, and their consequences. Observing phenological cycles is a way to conduct research about global climate change – which is obviously a hot topic these days. Using the collected data available through the website, students could analyze the effects of global climate change. Contributing to data that will be used by climate scientists can help students feel a sense of empowerment in the face of an issue that can seem overwhelming.

From an instructional standpoint, these projects offer plenty of opportunities to engage with curriculum objectives: Because the study of phenology is heavily reliant on understanding the seasons, it would be easy to tie in the causes of the seasons. In observing the changes of plants and animals as seasons change, the concepts of animal and plant adaptations would be relevant. By looking at data such as when insects emerge and when migrating songbirds arrive, students could also learn about the interdependence of plants and animals, and possibly more importantly, the consequences of when that interdependence is interrupted by human activity.

Citizen science is rigorous science

Clearly, no matter what level you teach, there are multiple ways to get your students involved in real science. If none of the projects listed here suit your fancy, The Network for Citizen Science can help you find a project more to your liking. At the Network for Citizen Science website, you can search for a project by topics as varied as archaeology or chemistry or even science policy.

The point of all of these citizen science projects is to expose students to learning opportunities relevant to the real world, and to get students to contribute to the body of scientific knowledge. These projects offer great opportunities to seamlessly integrate inquiry into the teaching of content. Perhaps more importantly, they help students to understand that science is much more than just memorizing facts. Science is a way of thinking about the world that involves observing, questioning, analyzing, revising, and collaborating. When your students understand how these skills are linked to the concepts they are learning, they’re far more likely to see that the question “why are we doing this?” has a real and relevant answer.

Photo credit: ARTS on Flickr.

After three and a half years, Instructify is closing up shop. The reason? We’ve covered every free educational technology app in existence, and there are simply none left to write about.

Well, that’s not quite true. We’ve missed boatloads of great tools along the way, and some clever people develop new ones every day. Free educational technology is an inexhaustible resource, and there will always be new apps, sites, and ideas you can incorporate into your teaching to make a lesson more engaging, to more clearly illustrate a concept, to encourage classroom collaboration, or to make your workflow more efficient. I’ve always been impressed at the dedication and intellectual curiosity of our readers, and smart cookies like you will be able to find new tools with or without Instructify to tell you about them. If anything, I hope that Instructify has left you with a sense that technology isn’t some fancy add-on that you need to shoe-horn into your current teaching, but rather just another tool at your disposal — just like a chalk board or textbook, it’s merely a means to the goal you’re trying to reach.

I also want to thank the long list of smart educators who have written articles for Instructify over the years, without whom this blog would be a lot less useful (and more dull). Thanks to David Barger, Tua Chaudhuri, Megan Curley, Jason Don Forsythe, Aaron Fowles, Amanda French, Dan Froelich, Lauren Frohne, Jeremy Griffin, Rebeccah Haines, Kevin Hodgson, Emily Jack, Dan Kelo, Abby Martin, Alice Mercer, Patrick O’Boyle, Chris Panna, Cindy Phthisic, Marielle Prince, Jackie Regales, Lesley Richardson, Mark Samberg, Gretchen Schaefer, Monique St. Louis, Jerry Swiatek, Melissa Thibault, Jimi Trout, Kathryn Walbert, David Walbert, Ross White, and Nick Yingling.

Special thanks go out to a few people as well, such as Ross White and Jeremy Griffin. The three of us worked to shape the vision for Instructify back in 2006, and set a foundation for great things to come. Also, thanks to LEARN NC’s former executive director, Melissa Thibault for believing in the site and providing a lot of organizational support. Thanks to LEARN NC managing editor Emily Jack, who has been vital in co-editing our Instructifeature series that appeared on both Instructify and the LEARN NC site. And to Rebeccah Haines and Gretchen Schaefer, who, back in 2009, volunteered to keep writing for Instructify even though I couldn’t pay them for it.

Most importantly, I want to thank Instructify’s readers, whether you’ve been visiting from the beginning, or you just dropped in once to read about how to build a classroom website. We wouldn’t have kept this blog running at all without the dedicated teachers who posted comments, sent in tips, and read what we had to say. Teachers have the hardest job in America, and if Instructify has made that job even the tiniest bit easier or more fun, then I consider it a success.

Though we won’t be adding new content, we’ll leave Instructify online so you can still comb the archives and read about tools you may have missed the first time. I don’t want the site to go out on such a sad note, though, so we will publish one more article — a feature on citizen science from Rebeccah Haines — in the next few days.

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my time serving as Instructify editor, and thanks so much for sticking by us.

Sincerely,

Bill Ferris
Editor

Sometimes, the tools we stumble upon are just a way to add a little fun into the classroom. I’d put Font de Music into that category. Here, the site takes a small piece of writing — a short sentence seems to be about the limit — and adds a musical backing track, then makes the letters do a little dance to the music. You have some limited options, such as font style, and musical theme, and font color. Other than that, though, you can just sit back and watch your words get jiggy with it on the screen. If you’d like to invite others to your literary dance party, the site generates a link you can share. I did not find an embed code, though, which would be even more helpful.

You might use this site to spice up some lessons around vocabulary — what “mood” would you choose for an individual word? Or, if students were to create one of these musical pieces around their name, what decisions would they make around choice of font, color and music? It’s a simple, fun site with some possibilities for examining how multimedia and text influences our thinking around design choices.

Font de Music

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You and your students may have heard all about the IBM computer, Watson, playing as a contestant on Jeopardy. You too can match wits with a computerized opponent in a game of Rock-Paper-Scissors. It’s not quite the same as Jeopardy, but this game from the New York Times pits humans against an artificial intelligence that learns from the style of play of its competitor (that would be you.)

The site notes:

A truly random game of rock-paper-scissors would result in a statistical tie with each player winning, tying and losing one-third of the time. However, people are not truly random and thus can be studied and analyzed. While this computer won’t win all rounds, over time it can exploit a person’s tendencies and patterns to gain an advantage over its opponent.

The game is simply played: choose whether the computer should be a novice or expert, and begin play by choosing if your hand is rock, paper, or scissors. What is interesting is that after a few rounds, the site begins to post messages about why the computer either won or did not win, making visible the computer’s decision-making strategies. For students, this might be a valuable tool for understanding some underlying logic of computerized players.

(For the record, I started out beating the computer, but it quickly bounced back, winning four in a row. After 21 games, it had the lead 8-6, with six tied games.)

Rock-Paper-Scissors: You Vs. The Computer

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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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

If the phrase “Please excuse my dear aunt Sally” means anything to you, then you already know the value of mnemonics. Putting complex ideas into a simple expression can do wonders for our recall ability, and JogLab can help you coin a catchy slogan that your students won’t forget.

At first the page may appear overwhelming with its many windows and scroll bars, but it’s not difficult to use at all, especially after you watch the short video at the bottom of the page. For each letter of your mnemonic, the site suggests words to string together into a phrase. In a few minutes I made the one shown here, and I’m not ashamed to say I think it’s pretty good. My favorite feature is the part-of-speech sorter, which narrows the suggested words to nouns, verbs, adjectives, and so on as you specify. This would be great for younger students learning the basics of sentence structure.

Teachers could use JogLab to create mnemonics, but it might be best applied by setting the entire class to the task. A student competition to produce the finest mnemonic would be a lot of fun and could result in the next great “Roy G Biv.”

JogLab

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Teachers who use a blog as a classroom website, publishing tool, or means of sharing and writing face a yearly conundrum: once the school year ends, how do you archive all that work? BlogBooker, which turns a blog into a PDF-style book, is one option available for teachers. The free site (funded through donations) is available for blogs on the WordPress, Live Journal, and Blogger platforms.

To create your book, you need to first export your XML files (which can be done via your blog dashboard — BlogBooker provides a helpful guide to do this). Once BlogBooker has your information, it converts your site into a PDF document that can be downloaded, shared, or printed.

The site promises to try to capture as much of the information (posts, images, comments) as it can, but does not guarantee 100-percent conversion. Still, a copy of the work done by students allows a teacher to end the year on a positive note and start fresh the following the year.

BlogBooker

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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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More information than you’ll ever need about every country: CIA World Factbook

Google started it, but other sites are running with the idea of creating a search engine built around reading levels. Twurdy (a mash-up of “too wordy”) is one of the easiest and most user-friendly sites that I have come across for searching and finding information on the web based on the concept of “readiblity.” The site, which is built on the back of Google Search, conveniently color-codes the various reading levels, and a quick click of a button allows you to match up approximate age levels with reading levels.

There are three settings that you can choose: Just Twurdy, which searches using Twurdy’s basic algorithm with medium speed and medium results; Simple Twurdy, which searches using Twurdy’s simple algorithm for fast speed but less accurate results; and Twurdy with Pop, which searches using Twurdy’s most complex algorithm which includes looking up the popularity of words within the text. It has a slower speed, but a higher level of accuracy.

For students, this means that a quick search on a topic yields web resources that are at their reading levels — I did one on the Galapagos Islands and the site was very useful. For teachers, it means that gathering resources appropriate to students’ reading levels might get a bit easier. An interesting experiment, too, is to put in the URL of a website and see what reading level is assigned to it. I did this with my own blog and it was fascinating to see the blog posts broken down by reading levels.

One drawback is that I wanted to be able to better narrow my original search field to just specific age levels (such as, all of the websites about the Galapagos Islands for a 10-year-old reading level). But overall, Twurdy was a satisfying experience and one worth considering for the classroom.

Twurdy

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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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Have you worked with that administrator who’s obsessed with collecting data? He wants every decision informed by a test, survey, or committee report (and probably wants you on the committee). That guy certainly goes overboard, but teachers can keep him happy by using Poll Junkie to easily collect surveys.

The first thing you’ll notice is that Poll Junkie is designed to be fast and simple. No registration is required and all the tools you need are right there on the front page. The different types of questions allow you to get exactly the information you want; you can ask responders to rate items on a number scale, rank items in order, or use classic multiple choice. A completed poll generates two links: one with the questions for responders, and one with the results for you. There’s also HTML code for embedding questions on a website.

I’d only change two things about Poll Junkie: I’d give it a more school-appropriate name and I’d add an option for responders to enter their name (currently all responses are anonymous). Otherwise, it works great for surveying just about anyone. You can have students review a lesson, ask parents about their kids’ study habits, or gauge colleagues’ opinion on a school policy.

Poll Junkie

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The video games I grew up with involved dodging bullets, lasers, ninjas, and occasionally Mike Tyson. In Spent, the object is to avoid becoming homeless.

Spent is an outreach project from Urban Ministries of Durham, a charity based in Durham, North Carolina dedicated toward giving basic essentials to the poor and homeless. The game paints a grim picture of life for people who can barely keep a place to live. The object is to make it 30 days without running out of money. At the start of the game, you’re down to your last $1,000, and you need to find a job and an apartment. A bad economy means slim pickings for both. Cheaper rent means living farther away from work, which increases both your fuel costs as well as the wear and tear on your car.

Like a computerized embodiment of Murphy’s Law, Spent confronts you with one misfortune after another. To win, you have to make a series of hard choices that have no apparent right answer. For example, you wake up one morning to find that someone has siphoned all the gas from your car. Do you take three buses (and three hours) to show up for work late? Or just call in sick and miss out on a day’s wages? (Your low-level temp job doesn’t give paid sick days.) What do you do when your kid is about to fail his math course unless he gets help? Paying $50 for a tutor means not being able to fix your car, which is falling to pieces because of your marathon commute to work every day. I played three rounds of Spent and successfully made it to the end of the month twice. After completing a winning round with $98 left to my name, the game reminded me, “And your rent’s due again. What are you going to do next month?”

I feel fortunate that I’ve never been in such dire straits as those presented in Spent. The game does a good job of giving a sense of the desperation felt by people who live on the fringes. Spent would be a good addition to an economics or social studies class to illustrate the effects of a recession, or to show how some of our nation’s homeless got that way.

Spent

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My sixth-graders and I recently had a long in-class discussion about Facebook’s “no one under 13” rule, and about using last names on the site. I’m also a parent of young boys, and my wife and I continue to hold off on Facebook for our oldest son. I can’t imagine I am alone in wondering how to leverage the educational value Facebook while still looking out for the best interests of my students and my own children.

Connect Safely has produced a free resource for parents about Facebook. The Parents’ Guide to Facebook by Anne Collier and Larry Magid provides valuable advice for those who are completely out of touch (“What is Facebook?”), those who use Facebook themselves (how to optimize privacy settings for young people), and those with grave concerns (how to prevent suicide and harm). The guide has numerous screenshots and pieces of practical advice written in clear, concise language. I also found the companion recommended Facebook privacy settings a useful resource that I intend to send to my students’ parents.

In the conclusion of the guide, the authors wisely note:

“… just as in offline life, children need their parents’ help as they navigate both adolescence and the social Web. You can help them understand…

● How important it is for their own online well-being to be mindful of what they say, share, and upload (as well as send on mobile phones)

● How smart it is to present themselves in a positive light online

● How much better their online experiences will be if they stay on good terms with others in their online as well as offline communities.”

This guide has value for teachers as well, including those teachers who are uncertain how to navigate discussions around Facebook. We can’t ignore the phenomenon of social networking anymore. We can use the concept for discussions around learning in a digital age, however. This guide is a good place to start.

The Parents’ Guide to Facebook

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