This afternoon I facilitated a short workshop on using Google Calendar in school settings. One of the things that I shared in that workshop was the idea of putting lesson outlines in calendar events then making the calendar public so that parents could see what was happening in your classroom. Someone in that workshop raised the question of what to do if there is a calendar event that you don't want to make public. The answer to that is to mark specific events as private events within a public calendar. In the video embedded below I demonstrate how to do that.
The following tutorials can help you get the most out of using Google Calendar.
With Valentine's Day coming up this weekend it's a good time looking for at science and statistics related to the day. The following video from It's Okay To Be Smart (produced by PBS Digital Studios) explains why humans kiss, the history of symbols associated with kissing, and some cultural views of kissing. When I saw this video I immediately thought of my friend Jeni who teaches high school health.
The following fun video, also from It's Okay to Smart, attempts to use math to determine the odds of a 25 year old woman finding love in New York. (Remember, the video is just for fun).
I'm not sure if this feature is new or I was just slow to notice it, but this week I noticed that you can now search the Free Technology for Teachers Facebook page for my older Facebook posts. More than 400,000 people are now following that page. The search function on the Free Technology for Teachers Facebook page works much like the one in this blog. You can enter a broad term like "math" to find posts related to that topic or you can be more specific to find a particular type of tool by entering a term like "flipped classroom."
This evening I gave a short webinar presentation on my five favorite Google tools for social studies teachers and students. The webinar was hosted by the New England ISTE group. The content of key elements of the webinar are outlined below. Besides what you see featured below we also looked at Google's Ngram Viewer.
1. Google Maps & Earth. In addition to zooming and panning across places in a way that a paper map could never replicate, Google Maps and Google Earth provide great tools for illustrating stories in a geographic context. The videos below demonstrate how to use Google Maps and Google Earth Tour Builder.
2. The Google News Paper Archive can be a great place for students to find old news articles about the topics they're studying in your classroom. Watch the video below to learn how to use it.
3. Google Books provides students with access to hundreds of thousands of books and periodical articles that are in the public domain. I like to create bookshelves within Google Books to help my students get started accessing some of the titles that will be useful to them.
4. Google Scholar is a research tool that is often overlooked by students. Google Scholar provides students with access to court opinions, patents, and peer-reviewed scholarly works. See the features of Google Scholar in my video embedded below.
5. Timeline JS is technically not a Google tool but it does work with Google Sheets. Timeline JS provides a template for creating and publishing multimedia timelines through a Google Spreadsheet.
