60 Second Adventures in Thought

Here are some short thought-provoking animated videos from The Open University. 60 Second Adventures in Thought is a series of videos explaining six famous thought experiments. The videos are narrated by David Mitchell. Watch Schrodinger's Cat in the video below.



Applications for Education
If you're looking for some short conversation starters for your lessons in history, science, mathematics, or sociology take 60 seconds to show one of these videos to your students.

Page O Rama - Quickly Create Simple Webpages

Back in August I published a list of five services that students can use to publish online in less than a minute. Today, I have another service, called Page O Rama, to add to that list. Page O Rama is a free service for quickly creating stand alone webpages.

Creating a webpage with Page O Rama is very simple. Just visit the Page O Rama homepage, select a web address, title your page, and start typing. Page O Rama offers a good selection of text editing tools including page breaks. If you want to, you can add images to your Page O Rama pages too. If you think your page is something that you're going to want to edit and update occasionally, you can enter your email address to create an administrative log-in.

Applications for Education
Page O Rama could be a good service for having students share examples of their writing online for peer review or other purposes. The benefit of using a service like Page O Rama instead of a full-fledged blogging platform is that your students can publish anonymously without having to enter an email address or register for an account.

Call for Submissions - Best Digital Storytelling Projects

For quite a while I've been thinking about writing an ebook on digital storytelling. Like my other ebooks, this one will be free for people to view and download as long as they don't try to sell it. In thinking about the framework of the ebook, I realized that although I have a lot to say on the technical aspects of digital storytelling my examples of digital storytelling projects are limited to my classroom and a few other examples that I've picked up at conferences and through reading blog posts over the years. Therefore, I've decided to put out a call for submissions for what will tentatively be titled, Digital Storytelling in the Classroom. How to and Best Practices.

Would you like to contribute?

If so, please send me an elevator pitch describing the project along with what you and your students learned from the project. Tell me what insight you can offer to other teachers about designing and assessing digital storytelling projects. Please let me know what grade you teach. If your pitch is selected, I'll ask you for a roughly 1,000 words plus images (if available) contribution to the ebook. My hope is to select three examples from elementary school, middle school, and high school teachers for a total of nine best examples. Send your pitch to me at richardbyrne (at) freetech4teachers.com and please put "digital storytelling submission" in the subject line. Please contact me by November 8. 

If your submission is selected it will be included in the free ebook. You will also have space for an author bio within which you can link to your blog/ website/ wiki/ social media profiles. And, of course, you will receive a digital copy of the ebook. 

My goal is to publish the ebook in early December.