How 2 create a natural soundscape

It's the start of the year and I'm struggling a bit with the annual power struggle over who makes the rules in the classroom. Of course it's me, but I've never been happy with the process of establishing that, with all of its top-down implications. I like the result, but the process is very stressful - what with all of the envelope-pushing and peeing on hydrants and such. I'm coming home exhausted, grinding my teeth at night and am frustrated that I'm not doing something that shows more wisdom.

Feeling very stressed out, I started searching for some soothing music to play while grading some online homework submissions, but everything was distracting and added to my stress rather than lessening it. Then I remembered a nature-sounds LP that I used to play while studying in college (yes, I'm old enough to have taken a record player to college), so I did a google search on "nature sounds".

And I found this little bit of loveliness:

This elegantly simple miracle is called a "Free Nature Sounds Mixer" and it can be found at http://naturesoundsfor.me/

Right now I just have it playing while I work in another tab, but if I wanted to I could download my soundscape as a 1-30 minute long file.

In the time it has taken me to open up this blog post, I am NOTICABLY less stressed - I just literally felt the tense muscles in my forehead relax.

Every single one of my class openings will include a 3-minute calm-down that features this mix tomorrow. I'll report back on the students' reactions.

How 2 create a self-playing webquest

Teachers often create lists of websites they want their students to use for a project - but the challenge becomes: how do you get the students to go to those sites, not wander all over the internet, and not get frustrated by the challenges of typing in a bunch of addresses when the internet is very unforgiving of type-o's?

Enter "Furly", which can be found at www.fur.ly


You can enter any number of addresses - each time you click on the field to enter one, the next empty field appears. When you're done, click GO.

The website will give you a very short url like this one --> http://fur.ly/e63

When a student enters this short url, they will see your first site with a navigation controls bar across the top that allows them to click back and forth among the list of sites in your list.

Go ahead and try the one I created to see what it's like. The address is permanent, at least it is as permanent as anything on the internet is...

It would be a very easy thing to require students to only work in your list of pre-approved sites, and very easy to monitor by looking for the orange navigation bar across the top.