More Google Books Browsing and Searching Tips

Over the years I've written a handful of posts about using Google Books as a research tool. I even made a video about the process. Recently, Dan Russell produced a great video on the topic. Watch Dan Russell's 1MM Browsing the Virtual Bookshelf to learn how to quickly find summaries of books, reviews, and common terms and phrases used in a book. You can also see how to search within a book in Google Books. The video is embedded below.

An Easy Way to Add To-do Lists to Google Calendar

HashtagTodo is a neat service that enables you to quickly create to-do lists in your Google Calendars. With HashtagTodo enabled in your Google Account you can create a to-do list in any of your Google Calendars by simply adding #todo to the end of any calendar event title. Once you've added the #todo to your event HashtagTodo will create a daily event listing all of your to-do items for the day. When you've completed a task on your to-do list, delete it from your calendar and it's deleted from your list. If you don't complete an item on your list for the day, it is automatically rolled over to the next day.

Applications for Education
For students who are already using Google Calendar to keep track of their schedules, HashtagTodo could be a great addition to their calendars. HashtagTodo will display students' to-do lists to them whether they use the Google Calendar mobile apps or the desktop version of Google Calendar.

Click here for five other good ways that students can keep track of their assignments this year.

H/T to Lifehacker. 

Free National Parks Passes for U.S. Fourth Grade Students

From my trip to Yellowstone in 2006.

Every Kid in a Park is a National Park Foundation initiative intended to get students and their families to explore national parks, forests, and wildlife refuges in the United States. The program provides fourth grade students in U.S. schools with a free pass to all national parks (parents and siblings also get in for free). Parents and students can register for passes individually. Teachers can click here to get passes for all of their fourth grade students.

Applications for Education
As long time readers of this blog know, I am a big advocate for getting kids outdoors to exercise, explore, and learn. Every Kid in a Park provides an excellent opportunity to introduce students to the joys of the great outdoors. To help teachers get the most out of a park visit with students, Every Kid in a Park offers some suggested field trip activities in every state in the union.

H/T to LifeHacker.

First Episode of #askRichardByrne Recorded

Last week I announced that I will be starting a new video series tentatively called #askRichardByrne. This week I recorded the first episode with my Mind Rocket Media Group partner Dr. Rod Berger. The raw video has now been sent off for editing and should be available soon on EdCircuit. In the meantime, if you have an ed tech question for me please use the hashtag #askRichardByrne on Twitter or post your questions on the EdCircuit Facebook page (a Mind Rocket Media Group property).

As I mentioned last week, I attempted to do a series like this on my own a couple of years ago and found that I didn't have the time to do all of the video editing that was necessary. By working with MindRocket Media Group I don't have to worry about that and I can just focus on answering your questions.

And, of course, you're always welcome to email me at richardbyrne (at) freetech4teachers.com I do my best to answer all of email every week. A good way to get to the top of my priority inbox is to address me by name in your email.