How Do Airplanes Fly? - And Five Ways to Flip This Video

Last month I had the privilege to fly on an A380. The A380 is the largest commercial jet in the world. As I saw the plane towering over the jetway in Dallas I couldn't help but be amazed at the engineering that makes it possible for something so large to fly across the Pacific in one shot.  The explanation can be found in a Minute Physics video that Airbus recently sponsored. How Do Airplanes Fly? explains the roles of wings, propellers, turbines, and wind currents in making a plane fly.


This video could be the basis of a flipped science lesson. In this post I provided an overview of how to use five services to create flipped video lessons.

How to Create Bookshelves in Google Books

This afternoon I received an email from a reader who had seen my video about conducting research in Google Books and now wanted to build Google Books bookshelves of his own. To demonstrate that process I created the short video that you see embedded below.


Applications for Education
Creating bookshelves in Google Books is a great way to organize a selection of books around a topic that your students are studying. Think of creating Google Books bookshelves as a way of building reading lists for students.

WhatsDue - Schedule and Send Reminders to Students

WhatsDue is a free service (available for Android and iOS) that enables teachers to create and send due date reminders to their students. Students receive the reminders as push notifications on their iOS and or Android devices.

Here's how WhatsDue works. First, the teacher registers for a free account on the WhatsDue website and creates a class or classes. Each class is assigned its own unique join code. Teachers then invite students and parents to join the class through the join code. Once students have joined the class they will begin receiving due date reminders on their mobile devices.

Teachers can create multiple classes and schedule multiple reminders for each class from one dashboard on the WhatsDue website. Students opening WhatsDue on their iPhones or Android phones will see reminders of approaching due dates and past due dates.

Applications for Education
If you have been leery of using other reminder systems because of privacy concerns with phone numbers or two-way communication, WhatsDue might be for you. It doesn't require phone numbers and it doesn't have two-way communication. It also allows students to be reminded of assignments on a schedule that works for them. For example, they can set the app to remind them of assignments a day before or a couple of hours before an assignment is due.