An Easy Way to Create Video Blog Entries

One of the things that I always mention in my workshops on classroom blogging is the idea that blog posts don't have to be limited to text. In fact, they don't need to have text at all if you are having students make video blog entries. Posting video blog entries can be a great way to have students share reflections on things they have learned and experience in your classroom during a week.

Blogger makes it easy to create video blog entries. The following screenshots outline the process for posting video blog entries on Blogger. (The directions assume that you already have created a blog on Blogger).

1. Select the video icon in the post editor.

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2. Choose "from your webcam" then grant Blogger access to your webcam. Finally, click record.

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3. Use the recording button to stop and start the video recording.

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4. Click select to insert your video into your post.

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5. Publish your post just like any other Blogger post.

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A Round-up of Recent Google Classroom & Drive Updates

Last week Google released a bunch of updates that could affect Google Apps for Education users. I covered all of them either here or on one of my other blogs. Here's a round-up of all of the updates.

1. Share to Classroom is a new Chrome extension that will let you push webpages to your student's screens. They will not need to click any links, the pages will just appear on their screens. Read more about it here.

2. Explore is a new feature of Google Sheets. Explore provides suggested graphs and charts based on the data in your spreadsheets. Click here to learn more.

3. The research function in Google Docs is now available in the Google Docs Android app. Learn more here.

4. There is a new way to access the Google Drive templates gallery. Watch a video here to see the new option.

5. Voice typing is now a native feature of Google Documents. It works quite well. See it in action in a video here.

6. The Google Drive iOS app will soon allow you to select multiple files for offline access. More information is available here.