The 2016 Summer Olympic Games begin at the end of this week. The lead-up to the games has been full of new stories about physical, political, and economic conditions in Brazil. ESRI has published an interactive storymap about all of these issues. On Ready or Not, Let the Games Begin you can scroll through a story that features summaries of stories about construction of Olympic venues, issues regarding displacement of residents of Rio de Janiero, the zika virus, pollution, and security around the Olympic Games. At various points in the story you can click on maps to learn more about each issue.
Applications for Education
Back in 2008 I had students in my ninth grade world geography course write persuasive essays on the question of whether not the Olympic Games benefited the people who lived in the areas immediately surrounding the event venues. Ready or Not, Let the Games Begin provides students with background on the 2016 Olympic Games that they could use in making persuasive arguments about this year's Olympic Games.
A few weeks ago Microsoft released more than 200 free ebooks. Those ebooks cover everything from Windows 10 accessibility settings to keyboard shortcuts to school-wide deployment of Windows 10 (links open PDFs). The list of free ebooks isn't limited to just Windows 10. As you browse the list you will find free guides to OneNote, Outlook, and the entire Office suite. For the IT professionals the list of titles includes plenty of guides to server set-up and maintenance as well as database management.
DropItToMe is a free tool that you can integrate with your Google Drive, Dropbox, or OneNote account. DropItToMe lets you collect files from anyone and have those files directly deposited into a Google Drive, Dropbox, or OneNote folder. The beauty of using DropItToMe is that people sending files to you don't see the contents of the folder. So rather than creating a shared folder in which everyone can see everything submitted, you create one folder to which anyone can contribute but only you can access the contents. Watch my video embedded below to see how the DropItToMe system works.
Applications for Education
This morning I received an email from a reader who was looking for a way to collect pictures from her school's student body to use in the yearbook. She didn't want to use a shared folder because she didn't want to risk having students accidentally delete files. She also didn't want to use email because then she'd be inundated with email attachments. DropItToMe was the perfect solution for her because she could collect lots of pictures from the student body without having to share a folder or get flooded with email attachments.
