Weather, Explorers, and Designs - The Week in Review

Good morning from Maine where it's a cold and rainy start to the month of April. Normally, we'd be heading outside to play today. The weather is probably going to keep us in. We're still going to have a fun day anyway because we're having a family cupcake decorating competition! The best part is that everyone will win because we'll get to eat cupcakes all weekend. I hope that you also do something fun this weekend. 

These were the week's most popular posts:
1. Hello History - An AI App for Chatting With Historical Figures
2. Students Can Learn About Weather Patterns and Make Forecasts in the Smithsonian Weather Lab
3. Have a Chat With Hundreds of Historical Figures
4. How to Use the Latest Version of Focusable
5. Seven Tips for Good Infographic Design
6. All About Explorers - It's Still a Great Site
7. How to Use Microsoft Designer

Make More Money This Year!

If you're looking for a way to put a little more money in your pocket this year, my self-paced course How to Create and Sell Digital Products in 2023 is for you! It's one of three on-demand courses that I currently offer.

Workshops and eBooks

If you'd like to have me speak at your school or conference, please send me an email at richardbyrne (at) freetech4teachers.com or fill out the form on this page.  

Animated Explanations

Making and Teaching With Animated Explanations is a five-part, self-paced course that teaches you how to make a variety of animations. More importantly, it teaches you why making animations is a valuable and fun classroom activity for students of all ages. 

Other Places to Follow Me:

• The Practical Ed Tech Newsletter comes out every Sunday evening/ Monday morning. It features my favorite tip of the week and the week's most popular posts from Free Technology for Teachers.
• My YouTube channel has more than 45,000 subscribers watching my short tutorial videos on a wide array of educational technology tools. 
• I've been Tweeting as @rmbyrne for fifteen years. 
• I update my LinkedIn profile a time or two every week.
• The Free Technology for Teachers Facebook page features new and old posts from this blog throughout the week. 
• If you're curious about my life outside of education, you can follow me on Strava.

This post originally appeared on FreeTech4Teachers.com. If you see it elsewhere, it has been used without permission. Featured image captured by Richard Byrne.

Apps and Sites for Learning About Fresh Water

Earlier this week I was looking through a list of augmented reality apps that I've tried over the years when I was reminded of the World Wildlife Fund's Free Rivers app. Playing with that app again prompted me to look for some similar resources. Here's a few fun apps and sites that students can use to learn about the importance of fresh water in the ecosystem. 

WWF Free Rivers

WWF Free Rivers is a free augmented reality iPad app produced by the World Wildlife Foundation. The app uses augmented reality to present a story about rivers. In the app students learn about the importance of free-flowing rivers in world. The app offers a series of sections or experiences through which students can learn about how free flowing rivers support wildlife, agriculture, and people.

WWF Free Rivers tells students stories about the implications of changes in weather patterns, damming rivers, and pollution on river ecosystems. Students interact with these stories by moving their iPads and or by pinching and zooming on elements in the stories. Unlike some other AR apps the animations within WWF Free Rivers can be experienced by students from a variety of angles. A great example of this is found early in the app when students can see what a dam does to a river. During that experience students can see the dam from above, from below, and from the sides.

Aquation

Aquation is a free iOS, Android, and web game offered by the the Smithsonian Science Education Center. The game, designed for students in upper elementary school or middle school, teaches students about the distribution of clean water and what can be done to balance global water resources. In the game students select a region to explore its current water supplies. Based on the information provided students take action in the form of building desalination plants, conducting further research, reacting to natural events, and attempting to move water between regions.

River Runner

River Runner is a neat website that shows you how a drop of water travels from anywhere in the United States to the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, or the Gulf of Mexico. To use River Runner simply go to the site and click on any location in the United States. As soon as you click on the map, River Runner will generate and play an animation of the path that a drop of water would travel from that location to get to the ocean. You can stop the animation, rewind it, and fast forward it if you like. The animation is based on data collected from the USGS. The code for the site can be found here on GitHub. 

Puppy and Classes - The Month in Review

Good evening from Maine where the sun has set on the month of March. The month for me can be summarized by "puppy" and "classes." We got a new dog this month. His name is Rangeley Noodle and he has an Instagram account. This month I hosted a new professional development course on PracticalEdTech.com. Dozens of you supported my work by joining that course or one of my self-paced courses. Thank you!

These were the most popular posts in March:
1. A Round-up of Pi Day Resources
2. Hello History - An AI App for Chatting With Historical Figures
3. AI Tools are Coming to Google Workspace Tools
4. How to Add Q&A to Your Google Slides Presentations
5. Changes are Coming to Your Favorite Google Workspace Tools
6. An Overview of Using and Detecting Artificial Intelligence
7. A Lesson in Writing Myths
8. Three Activities All Teachers Can Create in TeacherMade
9. 167 Math In "Real Life" Lessons
10. 15 Microsoft Forms Tutorials for Teachers

Make More Money This Year!

If you're looking for a way to put a little more money in your pocket this year, my self-paced course How to Create and Sell Digital Products in 2023 is for you! It's one of three on-demand courses that I currently offer.

Workshops and eBooks

If you'd like to have me speak at your school or conference, please send me an email at richardbyrne (at) freetech4teachers.com or fill out the form on this page.  

Animated Explanations

Making and Teaching With Animated Explanations is a five-part, self-paced course that teaches you how to make a variety of animations. More importantly, it teaches you why making animations is a valuable and fun classroom activity for students of all ages. 

Other Places to Follow Me:

• The Practical Ed Tech Newsletter comes out every Sunday evening/ Monday morning. It features my favorite tip of the week and the week's most popular posts from Free Technology for Teachers.
• My YouTube channel has more than 45,000 subscribers watching my short tutorial videos on a wide array of educational technology tools. 
• I've been Tweeting as @rmbyrne for fifteen years. 
• I update my LinkedIn profile a time or two every week.
• The Free Technology for Teachers Facebook page features new and old posts from this blog throughout the week. 
• If you're curious about my life outside of education, you can follow me on Strava.

This post originally appeared on FreeTech4Teachers.com. If you see it elsewhere, it has been used without permission. Featured image captured by Richard Byrne.

New! Freehand Drawings in Canva

Last week Canva hosted a big event to announce a bunch of new features. One of those features is something that I've thought they should have added years ago, a freehand drawing tool. 

Canva's freehand drawing tool lets you choose a drawing tool (pencil, pen, highlighter) and customize it to make the lines it creates just about any color and thickness that you like. And as you'll see in my new demo video embedded below, you can mix and match all of the drawing features on one canvas. 

Video - How to Make Freehand Drawings in Canva

Applications for Education
The new drawing tool in Canva could be great for quickly adding sketches to your slideshows. Sometimes it's faster and easier to just make a sketch than it is to try to combine a bunch of pre-made shapes to create the demonstration image that you need. You can also combine your sketches with some of the animation tools in Canva to create a little video.

Check out this playlist for more than 60 oher Canva tutorials.

Pacing Group Activities With Focusable

A few weeks ago I ran a workshop in which I changed up the way that I paced the session. What I've almost always done is give a little instruction then time to try and complete a little practice activity. Then I'll hold a little debrief before moving onto the next activity. It's a pretty common format that I'm sure you also learned in one of the methods courses that you took at some point. 

What I did differently in my workshop a few weeks ago was to use Focusable to pace the workshop. Specifically, I used Focusable to keep track of the blocks of work time. When the time was up I then had everyone follow along with the breathing exercise that Focusable suggested before we did the debrief. I then summarized the debrief in a video in Focusable before moving onto the next workshop activity. 

I found that having everyone participate in the Focusable breathing and recharge activities was a better way of getting everyone's attention than using the old method of saying something like, "okay, let's talk about this." Perhaps it was just the novelty of following along with the breathing exercise, but it worked well for refocusing the group for a short discussion. It's definitely something that I'll do again in future workshops. 

Speaking of workshops, I'd love to run a workshop at your school this summer. To learn more about that, please visit this page or send me an email at richard (at) byrne.media

Video - How to Use Focusable