More Free, Printable Graph Paper

Based on an emailed suggestion from my good friend John Lemley (who apparently can’t figure out the comment system. You heard me, Lemley.), today’s installment brings you more free graph paper, this time from Incompetech.com.

Like Printfreegraphpaper.com, mentioned previously, Incompetech’s site has a huge variety of grids, lines, and angles to choose from. Each style has its own set up of options, to give you just the paper you need. Overall, the interface is a bit more complicated than Pfgp.com, but the complexity yields much more choice.

The collection also goes beyond mere graph-paper, into all manner of lined sheets. The site offers several variants on the Cornell note-taking system, three-lined handwriting paper, and practice sheets for Chinese and Japanese writing. Musicians can snare (sorry.) staff paper and tab sheets. They even have dotted graph paper, for you next game of “Dots & Boxes.”

Sadly, electrical engineers will still have to go to Printfreegraphpaper.com for their Smith charts, but you can’t have it all.

English as She Is Spoke: The International Dialect Archive

Putting together a lesson plan the other day, I stumbled across the International Dialects of English Archive (IDEA). The site, run out of University of Kansas, has collected and catalogued hundreds of audio samples representing English dialects from around the world.

I know that this isn’t the most universally useful tool that I’ve listed here, but consider my position: this week, I started teaching Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God to a twelfth-grade group comprising mainly native Japanese speakers.

Now, all my students are perfectly fluent in English, but the dialect of African Americans in Florida around the turn of the 20th century is not something that I could expect any of them to know off-hand. Confronted with pages of dialogue written in an unfamiliar dialect, my students assume Hurston is, at best, a terrible speller, or, at worst, intent on causing them personal misery.

IDEA helps bridge the language gap by presenting pages of downloadable mp3 files, organized by region. The archive includes native speakers from around the world, as well as representative dialects from second-language English speakers. All of the samples come from a couple of short extracts, available as a text download from the site. The audio files also include a brief biographical statement by the speaker, providing more context for the dialect (as well as some interesting stories).

Outside literature in dialect, the site has obvious applications in courses covering linguistics and for theater classes.

Edit: Now with working links! Thanks, commentors!

Big Files

Taking a folder of work home to grade is so 1999. Stacks of papers, loose worksheets, five-page essays the student lazily “crimped” together since they couldn’t find the stapler that’s been in the same place all year.

Drop.io says goodbye to all that.

Drop.io is one of a host of options for on-line file storage and sharing. Like most, Drop offers a range of choices from free to paid storage, but their most impressive feature is ease of use: no log in, no password, no waiting. Just name your “drop” (an online folder for your stuff), choose your files, and click the counter-intuitively named “Drop It!” button, and you’re done.

Anyone who might want the files you’ve saved can get at them through drop.io/yourchosenname. And if you’ve rather that anyone can’t get to your files, you can password protect your drop when you create it.

This week, when I needed a way for students to save audio recordings of an oral commentary, Drop.io saved the day. The 100MB ceiling for each drop was a bit low, so I just created three separate drop boxes for the kids to use.

A quick email with instructions and links to the drops I created, and my students can upload their bloated audio files from wherever they are. My weekend listening plans are set!

Originally found on Lifehacker.com

Office Online: Clip-Art’s Worst-Kept Secret

A request to all seven of my readers (Hi, Mom!):

Stop using the clip art that comes loaded with MS Office when you make your presentations and newsletters. Three reasons:

1. The default Office clip art is uniformly hideous.
2. Everyone has already seen it. A lot.
3. You will feel inexplicably compelled to include a screenbean in your layout. This must be avoided.

So, if you shouldn’t use the Clip Art in the Clip Art menu, what are you supposed to do? I’m glad I asked you that rhetorical question:

Microsoft Office Online’s Clip Art Section

It seems that between rounds of monopolizing the computer market, terrorizing users of open source software, and burning down orphanages, Microsoft found time to do something nice. Really nice.

Searching or browsing takes you into the collection. Office Online has a really intuitive interface that lets you scroll through pictures of thumbnails, and mark the ones you want to eventually download (these go into a “shopping cart” style list over in the left-hand sidebar). When you’re ready, click download, follow the instructions, and the clip art will be loaded automatically into your local gallery.

Office Online: Clip Art offers tens of thousands of free images for use in documents, presentations, and web pages. The index is searchable, browseable by category, and regularly updated to put themed collections on the front page (check out the harvest motif, just in time for American Thanksgiving).

One of my favorite features is style grouping. Click on a clip-art thumbnail to see a larger image, and if the item is part of a larger series, it will have a “style number.” Click that number, and the system shows you all the clip art in the series. This is a huge help for keeping a consistent theme through presentations.

And clip art is really just the tip of the Office Online iceberg. The site is packed with useful stuff for Office users. I’m not going to go into any of it now, though. I need material for next week, and I plan to milk this site for a dozen or so blog posts.

A note to Mac users: when you download the clipart file, you will probably have to add “.cil” to the end of the filename. Otherwise, the file won’t open in Office. Now, I don’t want to suggest that this is some Microsoft conspiracy to make Mac users’ lives slightly more difficult, but that is unquestionably the case.

And a note to all those fancy-pants Office 2007 users: Maybe I’m out of date, and the default clip art has been updated. You can tell me in the comments. I’m on a Mac though, so until we get Office 2007 sometime in 2013, I won’t be able to see for myself.

Kill your ink cartridge with thousands of free language worksheets

Wow! Two days old and we have our first submission.

Long-time reader, Jason McCary pointed me toward ESL Printables. In addition to getting the “straight-forward title” seal of approval, Printables offers nearly 8,000 documents ready for class use. Though the site is geared toward ESL teaching, most of the offerings would be useful to anyone working on the finer points of English.

With so much material on the site, the biggest problem is finding what you want. The straightforward search menu (pictured above) lets you quickly sift through the huge number of worksheets, lesson plans, and flash cards, to find what you are looking for. Additionally, you can browse the collection by a number of different categories, such as vocabulary, grammar, and so on.

Be warned, though, when it comes time to download your choice, you must be prepared to give as well as receive. A download costs you a credit. The only way to earn credits is to share a document of your own. The site operates on a fairly generous 10 download / 1 upload ratio (with bonuses for highly rated submissions), so it should be pretty easy to fill up your document folder with worksheets and quizzes.

Thanks, Jason.

Welcome, CA People!

If you’re reading this, then I must have emailed the correct link.  Thanks for coming!  Please have a look around, leave some feedback, ask a question.

And check back soon, for more exciting tech geekery.

Printfreegraphpaper.com lets you… print free graph paper… dot com.

I am sick of twee, uniformative names for educational sites like Noodle, Moodle, or Brainpop. Sometimes, you just want to type the name of what your looking for, bookend it with www and com, hit enter, and go.

Enter Printfreegraphpaper.com. This site lets you do just what it says. On the main (and only) page, just select the style of graph, the size, and units of measure, hit the embedded “print” button, and the site will spit out a PDF file corresponding to your request.

Naturally, PFGP offers plain-old, vanilla cartesian graphs, but goes further with templates for probability, electrical engineering, and so on. I don’t know what tesselations are, but next time I do some, I’m going to print out some of that exciting hexagonal graph paper.

The PDF files that the site produces makes it even more valuable. You can print them out and photocopy them, of course. But you could also print them to transparencies for your overhead, post them to your course web page for students to download and print, or even copy them into Photoshop Elements and plot your graph directly on-screen. Using an LCD projector, you could plot your graphs for a class, save the work, and give students access to the file as example material.

And you can’t beat the price.

Exploratree: Graphic Organizers for All Occasions

Exploratree is actually two sites in one (maybe two and a half!).

1.

It is a repository of templates for graphic organizers (or “thinking guides,” as they have it). They already include charts for backward planning, a future wheel, compare/contrast clouds, the provocatively named “lotus blossom,” and many others. Look around, and you will find something you can use to organize a lesson, or your students can use to plan research.

2.

And if they don’t have the chart you need? The second part of the site is a diagram construction tool–think of it as a souped-up Inspiration (or a souped down Visio). You can modify any of the included templates to suit the needs of a specific assignment, or, with a few clicks and drags, you can create pretty much any organizer, flowchart, or worksheet you would need.

The constructor tool, also allows collaboration with other users. Once you’ve gotten going with a chart, you can hit the “share” button, to allow other people in your department (or anywhere, really) access to copy, modify, and print their own.

2.5

The last neat little feature allows you to fill in charts directly in the web page. Then you can print off completed copies. For multi-part forms, the program even hides future steps, so you can focus on the current task. In Backward Planning for instance, when you first begin filling in the form, you only see a box for “The Goal.” Once you have filled that in, Exploratree unveils the next step, and so on.

So, definitely a neat site. You can try it out just by following the link at the top, but if you want to save your work, you’ll need to make a (free) account.

Lost in the dictionary? Get a map.

Do you find standard dictionary definition entries too confining? Do you yearn for wide-open spaces? Do you like to drag pretty, floating bubbles around on a screen?

Then Visuwords is for you.

Visuwords is an innovative blend of dictionary, thesaurus, and spaghetti. Type a word into the search bar, and Visuwords will drop it into the center of the display window. Before long, related words and phrases (color-coded by part of speech) start popping in all around it–all of them connected by different lines denoting relationships: synonyms, antonyms, hyponyms, etc. Hover the mouse over any of the words to read the definition.

So, unlike a standard dictionary, Visuwords visually establishes a context for the word. It even goes a step further, by providing some encyclopedic information as well–”napoleonic,” for instance, links to “Napoleon,” providing a capsule of biographical information. “Ziggurat” appears as the category encompassing the “Tower of Babel.”
Found on Lifehacker

Todd’s on-line memory.

So, why start a new blog, when my wife is already mad about me not updating our old one?

When you waste as much time as I do scouring sites like lifehacker.com and Google Operating System, you like to think of that time as “research,” rather than “sloth.” So, in order to provide a sense of purpose to my web-surfing, I offer up the fruits of my leisures here in this blog.

As I stumble across that rare, useful piece of information–something that might come in handy for teachers–I’m posting it here. For my colleagues, this will serve as a kind of repository for tools and lesson ideas.

Happy educating.