As many readers of this blog already know, Next Vista for Learning is one of my favorite video sharing sites for students and teachers. Videos hosted on Next Vista are created by teachers and students for the purpose of sharing good news and good lessons with other teachers and students.
The careers section of Next Vista is one that guidance counselors and anyone else helping students learn about careers should bookmark. The careers section of Next Vista contains 110 videos about a wide variety of career fields. Some of the videos are available in Spanish and most of the videos include interviews with people talking about their jobs. Two of the videos are embedded below.
Creating a custom search engine is a good way to provide some gentle web search assistance to students. Through Google Custom Search Engines you can create search engines that only include websites that are appropriate for your students' reading levels. The slides and video below provide directions for creating your own Google Custom Search Engine.
If you would like a copy of these slides open the slide editor then select "file, make a copy." You will have to be logged into your Google Account to make the copy.
Next week marks the thirteenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. C-SPAN Classroom has organized a collection of videos about 9/11. The videos are intended for classroom use. The collection includes news footage from September 11, 2001 along with reflections on 9/11 from President Bush, Vice-President Cheney, New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and President Obama.
More resources for teaching about 9/11. Understanding 9/11: A Television Archive is hosted on The Internet Archive. It is an assembled collection of more than 3,000 hours of news footage from September 11, 2001 and the six days immediately following. You can explore the footage in a timeline grid format. I spent time watching some of the news footage and it took me right back to many of the same feelings that I had almost ten years ago watching it live from a FedEx sales office in Tempe, Arizona.
Story Corps offers three animated stories of the real experiences of people affected by the events of 9/11. All three videos are embedded as one playlist below.
Earlier this week I shared a great Google Spreadsheet Add-on called Save As Doc. Save As Doc allows you to select a set of cells from a spreadsheet and have the information in those cells converted into an easy-to-read Google Document. I had a few people ask questions about how it worked so I made the following video demonstration of how to use Save As Doc.
Applications for Education
I love to use Google Forms to create and deliver quizzes to students. The problem with that has always been that when I start to add-in short answer or essay questions, the spreadsheet of responses becomes unwieldy and difficult to read. Save As Doc can solve that problem for me by allowing me to select the cells containing my students' short answer responses to turn into a document that I can easily print, read, and grade.
Earlier this week Google released a new customization option for Google Forms. You can now customize the background and header images in your Google Forms and customize the fonts used in your Google Forms. In the video below I provide a short overview of how to use the new customization options.
Screenshots of the process demonstrated above can be found here.
