Week in Review - Greetings from Calgary

By the time you read this I'll (hopefully) be flying over the Rocky Mountains on my way home from the Teacher 2 Teacher conference in Bow Island, Alberta. As I write this I'm in Calgary getting ready to fly home. Traveling made it difficult to get as many posts written as I would have liked so I want to thank all of you for your patience with the slight change is posting schedule over the last five days.

Here are the seven most popular items of the last week:
1. Many Ways to Use Flip Cameras in the Classroom
2. Nine Tools for Collaboratively Creating Mind Maps
3. Has Anyone Seen a Missing Hour of Sleep?
4. Smarthistory - A Multimedia Art History Book
5. Free eBook - The Amazing Web 2.0 Projects Book
6. Jamendo - Free Music for Multimedia Projects
7. Why Do We Connect?

As always, thank you to everyone that has shared this blog with your friends and colleagues. Because of you, this week we came close to having 3000 fans of Free Technology for Teachers on Facebook.

If you're new to Free Technology for Teachers, welcome, I'm glad you've found this blog. If you like what you see in the links above, please consider subscribing to the blog via RSS or email.
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How to Track Topics With Google Alerts

On Thursday at the Teacher 2 Teacher conference I introduced a couple of folks to Google Alerts. Those introductions came out of their questions about how I was able to keep track of where Free Technology for Teachers was mentioned online. Then today at the same conference I sat in on Silvia Tolisano's presentation about student blogging in which she told participants about Google Alerts. In both cases we were telling people about Google Alerts so that they can easily track topics online.

Google Alerts is a great tool for tracking your name online, tracking work you've posted online, and tracking the topics in you have an interest. You can create a Google Alert for any search term(s) you like. Once you've established an alert, you can choose to have Google send you an email anytime your chosen terms appear online. Alternatively, you can choose to have your alerts delivered to your Google Reader account.

The image below outlines how to create Google Alerts.
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Applications for Education
Google Alerts can be a great way to find resources you can use in your classroom. For example, if you're a mathematics teacher, set up an alert for "mathematics lessons" or "mathematics games" and new content will be delivered to you. In a course that requires students to share current events stories, Google Alerts could be useful for students to track stories on a particular news topic.

How to Add Pages to Blogger Blogs

As I shared yesterday, I've recently started adding stand-alone pages to Free Technology for Teachers. I'm using them on here to share some of the most popular tutorials and resources that I've posted over the last couple of years. The screen captures below will show you the steps to creating and publishing pages in Blogger.

Step 1 (click to enlarge)











Step 2 (click to enlarge)











Step 3 (click to enlarge)











Step 4 (click to enlarge)










Applications for Education
I've been on the road this week, but when I get back home I plan to start moving many of the resources on my classroom blog into pages for easier navigation by my students. When completed my students will no longer have to search the archives for older resources because as I teach US History I'll be organizing my pages by era in US History. If you teach another subject you can use the same concept to organize resources by unit or theme.

Do You Use an Interactive Whiteboard?

I've been at the Teacher 2 Teacher conference in Bow Island, Alberta this week. The conference has nearly 80 sessions and many of those sessions have featured interactive whiteboard lessons. Since I have interactive whiteboards on my brain, I thought I'd share four good blogs/sites that feature interactive whiteboard materials.

James Hollis is the man behind Teachers Love SMART Boards. James regularly updates his blog with great SMART Board-friendly resources. His latest post features a neat mathematics resource called Math Zapper.

Harvey's Homepage features great how-to lessons for teachers as well as other interactive whiteboard materials that teachers can access. Harvey's Homepage is the work of retired math teacher and James Madison University instructor Harvey Almarode.








The Whiteboard Blog written by Danny Nicholson offers teachers regular updates on resources for SMART Boards and Promethean interactive whiteboards. Danny was a science teacher for years before becoming a consultant. Make sure you check out his free interactive whiteboard files for science and mathematics.

All three of the people mentioned above are at the Teacher 2 Teacher conference with me. There is one other blog that I need to mention to SMART Board users and that is Anne Marie's Talking SMART Boards & Much More. Anne Marie has great resources, particularly resources for younger grades.

Free Webinar - Learning Civics Through Gaming

Yesterday I shared a post about Our Courts. Our Courts hosts detailed lesson plans and three fantastic games for teaching US Civics. Shortly after that post went live Andy Blanco from the Learning Games Network told me about a free webinar about teaching Civics with games that his organization is conducting next Wednesday, March 24 at 5pm PST. The free webinar will be focused on teaching Civics using the games from Our Courts. You can learn more about the webinar here and here.

C-Span Video Library Expands

C-Span has offered selected videos of various government events and related unofficial political events for a long time. Recently, C-Span has greatly expanded their video offerings to include every C-Span program since 1987. The new C-Span video library can be searched by category, quantity of video views, and the frequency with which videos have been shared. All of the videos can be embedded into your blog or website.

Embedded below is a video about President Nixon's visit to China in 1972.


Thanks to Open Culture for the news about the C-Span Video Library.

Applications for Education
I have to admit that the C-Span Video Library could use more search options, but the sheer quantity of videos is impressive. If you need a video about any topic in US History or politics in the 20th or 21st Century you would do well to start your search in the C-Span Video Library.

Here are some related items that may be of interest to you:
WWI Video Map
The Bayeux Tapestry Animated
Smarthistory - A Multimedia Art History Book