How to Create Simple Comics on Pixton

On Monday I shared some thoughts about using Pixton to engage students in creative writing. Over the last couple of days some folks have asked me for a little more guidance on how to get started with Pixton. In the video embedded below I provide a demonstration of how to create a simple comic story on Pixton. The video includes a tutorial on designing characters to use in your comics on Pixton.


Disclosure: Pixton is currently an advertiser on FreeTech4Teachers.com

The World of 7 Billion - A Student Video Contest

The World of 7 Billion is an annual video contest designed to get students to think about issues related to population growth. The contest asks middle school and high school students to produce sixty second videos about how population growth impacts one of the following three issues; climate change, ocean health, or rapid urbanization. Students' videos must also propose a sustainable solution to the issues that they choose to highlight in their videos. Submissions are due by February 23, 2017.

Applications for Education
Creating a video for the World of 7 Billion contest could be a good opportunity for students to incorporate and demonstrate their understanding of topics that they have studied in science and in geography. The 60 second limit on the videos will force students to be concise.

A set of free resources for teaching students about issues related to population growth is available from Population Education, the sponsors of this contest.

If your students have Chromebooks or Windows laptops, I recommend using WeVideo or Adobe Spark to create videos for this contest. In a Mac or iPad environment, I would use iMovie. Click here for my longer list of video creation resources.

How to Refine Google Searches According to Date

Google's search function has a lot of handy features that students often overlook while conducting research. One of those features is the option to refine search results according to a range of dates. As I explain in the video embedded below, refining a search according to date can be a good way to discover what was written in the past about a person, event, or place.



Search strategies like this one and many more will be covered in more detail in Teaching History With Technology starting in October.