How Playing Sports Benefits the Brain and Body

How Playing Sports Benefits Your Body and Your Brain is the title of a recently released TED-Ed lesson. The video in the lesson teaches viewers about the psychology benefits of teamwork and overcoming defeat. Students watching the video can also learn how playing sports can help a person avoid or overcome feelings of depression. The complete lesson can be found here.


My one complaint about this lesson is that it does put a heavy emphasis on team sports. I wish that it would have included more references to participating in individual sports that can be pursued without the need to find a team.

How to Create a KWL Chart in Padlet

One of my favorite ways to use Padlet is to have students collaboratively create multimedia KWL (Know, Want, Learn) charts. To provide students with guidance on where to place their notes, I use a custom background on Padlet. The background is a just a screenshot of a three column page that I make in Google Documents (any other document program will work just as well) that is uploaded to Padlet. Eighteen months ago I published a video about how to do this, but since Padlet changed their user interface last month I have made a new video on how to create KWL charts in Padlet. The new video is embedded below.

How to Create Multimedia Timelines

Late last week I wrote a blog post about The History Project which is a site for collaboratively creating multimedia timelines. The History Project includes an audio recording tool that you can use to talk about events in the timelines that you create. I received a couple of questions about that recording feature so I made a video that demonstrates how it works. Watch my video embedded below to learn how to create multimedia timelines on The History Project.