The Week in Review - The Most Popular Posts

Max is worn out by Thanksgiving.

Good evening from Orange, Connecticut where I'm spending time with family friends after Thanksgiving. If you celebrated Thanksgiving this week, I hope that it was fun and restful time for you.







Here are this week's most popular posts:
1. 3 Good Tools for Creating Rubrics
2. 11 TED-Ed Videos on How the Human Body Works
3. How to Use Weebly & YouTube to Create a Video Blog Series
4. Three Ways to Share Bundles of Links With Students
5. Create Motivational Posters and Cards on Big Huge Labs
6. Print Posters With Almost Any Printer
7. Explore Petra in Google Maps

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.

AlfaTyping offers great, free typing lessons for kids. 

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. 

Southeastern University offers online M.Ed programs.

An Overlooked YouTube Feature

YouTube contains many useful features that are frequently overlooked. One of those features is using your YouTube channel to store videos even if you don't make them public. Another overlooked aspect of YouTube is that it can serve as a file conversion tool for some video formats.

When you upload videos to YouTube you don't have to make them public. Since YouTube doesn't limit how many files you can upload, you can use your YouTube channel to simply store your video files for free. When you need the files, you can download them at anytime.

Occasionally, you may have a video file that you need converted to MP4. In that case, upload it to your YouTube channel. Once it has been uploaded and processed, you should be able to download it as an MP4. I recently did this with an AVI file.

Check out the screenshots below to see how to download your files from YouTube. (This only works with videos that you own and are in your YouTube account).

Click image for full size.

Click image for full size. 

I'll be sharing many more tips and tricks like this one in my upcoming workshop at the Ed Tech Teacher Google Jamboree in Medfield, Massachusetts. Please join us, it is going to be fun!

Winter Around the World - A Collaborative Student Project

As we head into winter in the northern hemisphere, Shannon Miller has a launched a global, collaborative project for students. Winter Around the World is an effort to collect stories, pictures, poems, and songs about winter. The submissions will be organized into a Google Slides presentation and then assembled into an ebook. The project is open students of all ages.

Applications for Education
Winter Around the World could provide a great way for students to see a different perspective on winter. My students associate snow and cold with winter while other students might not ever see snow during their winter seasons. Beyond the visual differences, students participating in Winter Around the World could learn about the activities that are popular during winters in different parts of the world.

The deadline for submissions to Winter Around the World is December 1st. If that deadline is too tight for your classroom, consider creating your winter around the world project with the teachers you are connected to through social media.