The Week in Review - The Most Popular Posts

Good evening from a plane in the sky somewhere over North Carolina. I'm on my way to work with Vicki Davis and the teachers at her school in Georgia on Monday. I'm flying down a day early to spend time with Vicki's lovely family. If you're not familiar with Vicki's work, take a look at her Cool Cat Teacher blog.

Wherever you are this weekend, I hope that you have some fun things planned for yourself too.

Here are this week's most popular posts:
1. Write Music in Google Documents
2. My 5 Favorite Google Sheets Add-ons & How to Use Them
3. Zing! - Thousands of Free eBooks for Students
4. Historical Investigations for Students to Complete
5. 7 Highlights from The Practical Ed Tech Handbook
6. Four Visual Dictionaries and a Thesaurus for Kids
7. Bizarre Borders - Fun Geography and History Lessons

Would you like to have me speak at your school or conference?

Click here to learn about my professional development services. 

Please visit the official advertisers that help keep this blog going.

Practical Ed Tech is the brand through which I offer PD webinars.

BoomWriter provides a fantastic tool for creating writing lessons. 

Storyboard That is my go-to tool for creating storyboards and cartoon stories.

HelloTalk is a mobile community for learning a new language.
MasteryConnect offers a series of apps for identifying standards. 

Discovery Education & Wilkes University offer online courses for earning Master's degrees in Instructional Media.

PrepFactory offers a great place for students to prepare for SAT and ACT tests.

The University of Maryland Baltimore County offers graduate programs for teachers.

Boise State University offers a 100% online program in educational technology.

EdTechTeacher is hosting host workshops in six cities in the U.S. in the summer.

SeeSaw is a great iPad app for creating digital portfolios.

Lesley University offers online education programs for teachers.

PortfolioGen is a professional portfolio tool for teachers.  

Southeastern University offers online M.Ed programs.

Create a Digital Portfolio on PortfolioGen

Disclosure: PortfolioGen is currently an advertiser on FreeTech4Teachers.com.

PortfolioGen is a nice digital portfolio service for students and teachers. Teachers can use PortfolioGen to create a professional portfolio that includes examples of their lesson plans and media they've created. Of course, PortfolioGen pages can also be used to display all of the information like education and certification that would be found on resume.  PortfolioGen pages can include contact forms for potential employers to use to get in touch with teachers.

Students can use PortfolioGen to display examples of their best work in text, visual, and audio format. Students using PortfolioGen as part of a college entrance application can display things like references from teachers and employers.

If you decide to use PortfolioGen portfolio primarily for text and static visual content, you may be interested in the option to download your portfolio as a PDF.

How to Share Videos Through Google Drive

Google Drive is an incredibly useful tool for storing and sharing files even if they have been created outside of the Google Apps suite. I use it to store screencast videos that I've created. I also use it to store video clips that I've recorded on my mobile phone. In the video embedded below I demonstrate how to use Google Drive to store and share video files.


Applications for Education
On a fairly regular basis I am asked for recommendations on how to privately share videos without using YouTube. Storing your video files on Google Drive makes it easy privately share videos with students and their parents.