Last-minute Tickets Available for the Practical Ed Tech Summer Camp

Due to two last-minute cancellations (due to school budget cuts) two seats have opened for the previously sold-out Practical Ed Tech Summer Camp. The Practical Ed Tech Summer Camp is a two-day hands-on event that I am hosting at the beautiful Sunday River Resort in Maine on July 22nd and 23rd. Click here for all of the details and to register. 

Here's a little Animoto video that I made from pictures that I took around the site of where the Practical Ed Tech Summer Camp will be held.


Make your own photo slideshow at Animoto.

A Timeline of Flight and Other Resources for Learning About Aviation

CNET's Road Trip 2013 stopped in Dayton, Ohio today. Today's stop focused on the Wright brothers. One of the resources shared by CNET was the National Park Service's timeline of the Wright brothers. That timeline is part of a larger timeline about inventions and innovation in the United States.

After looking at the National Park Service's timeline of the Wright brothers I looked for some more resources about the history of aviation. Scholastic offers a small set of activities for students to complete to learn about the Wright brothers, Amelia Earhart, and NASA missions.

You can find plenty of videos about aviation on YouTube. This is one playlist that you might find appropriate for your lessons. The first video in the playlist is short and direct which is what makes it my first choice for classroom use.

FunBrain - Dozens of Educational Games for K-8

FunBrain hosts a collection games that elementary school and middle school students can use to practice mathematics and language arts. A few of the games on FunBrain that I tried include Grammar Gorillas, Mad Libs School Rules, and Math Basketball. In Grammar Gorillas students "feed" a gorilla by correctly identifying parts of speech. Mad Libs School Rules, like any Mad Libs activity, asks students to fill in the blanks in a story with verbs, nouns, and adjectives. Math Basketball presents students with math problems to solve in order to pass and shoot a basketball.

Applications for Education
The FunBrain games aren't anything special in terms of format or visual effects. If you're looking for some practice activities for your students then FunBrain is worth taking a look at. The games are arranged into grade level collections.

The Two Cutest Explanations of Social Media That You'll See Today

There are so many social networks on the web today that it can be hard to keep track of which ones to use for which purposes. Avalaunch Media is here to help with two of the cutest explanations that you'll see today. Social MEDogIA Explained and Social MEowDIA Explained are explanations of social media from the perspectives of dogs and cats.

http://avalaunchmedia.com/paws-vs-claws/

http://avalaunchmedia.com/paws-vs-claws/

The infographics are part of a campaign to raise money for two charities, NEADS and The Humane Society of the United States. The money raised during the campaign in July will be donated to the two organizations. 2/3 will go to the infographic that gets the most votes and 1/3 will go to the other.

Applications for Education
If you find yourself trying to explain social media and social networks to a colleague who loves pets, these infographics might be a cute way to help them understand the purposes of the various networks depicted in the infographics.

H/T to Cool Infographics.

Zoho Survey - A Survey Tool Packed With Features

Zoho offers a nice suite of online word processing, presentation, and spreadsheet tools. Recently, Zoho announced the launch of Zoho Survey. Zoho Survey is a feature-packed tool for creating online quizzes and surveys.

Zoho Survey allows you to mix and match 21 response formats while you're creating your surveys. Within those response formats there are additional features you may find useful. For example, you can specify a maximum number of characters entered in an open-ended response field. You will also find that you can apply "if then" logic to any response field. This means that you can ask a short answer question and send respondents to a new question based upon their responses. For example, I could ask students to enter which class they're in and send them to a set of questions just for their class. (This can also be done in Google Forms but only if you use multiple choice responses).

When you're ready to publish your Zoho Survey you can embed it into a blog post or webpage. You can also send out a link to your survey. One of the options that you can choose for your published survey is to limit responses to one per computer. Another useful option is to set a date to automatically stop allowing responses.

Zoho Survey is available to use in your web browser and as an iPad app.

You can see my sample survey here.