Analyzing Word Choice in a Presidential Statement

President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on this day in 1963. Later in the same day Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as President of the United States. President Johnson took the oath of office on Air Force One. When the plane landed at Andrews Air Force Base he gave a short statement. His speech card is today's featured document in the National Archives' daily document series.

One of the interesting things on President Johnson's speech card is the freehand editing that was done to it. I would have students look at the speech card and analyze why President Johnson edited out things like "every American" and replaced it with "all people." When looked at in light of the Cold War that choice and some of his other editing choices are significant.

An audio recording of President Johnson's statement can be heard here on the LBJ Library website.

See Larry Ferlazzo's blog for a long list of more resources about the assassination of JFK.

Create Narrated Map Tours on a Chromebook

On Sunday and Monday I shared a couple of videos about making narrated Google Earth tours. Unfortunately, Google Earth doesn't work on a Chromebook. So if you want your students to create narrated map tours, the best thing to do is to have them map a series of placemarks in Google's My Maps tool then record a screencast in which they talk about the places on their maps.

You can learn how to use Google's My Maps tools by watching the video embedded below.


A couple of good options for recording a screencast on a Chromebook are Nimbus Screenshot and Capture Cast.

Apply Now for Early Access to Google Team Drives

A couple of months ago Google announced the development of a new product called Team Drives. Team Drives is a version of Google Drive designed specifically for team use. Rather than just sharing a single file or folder, Team Drives will give everyone in the team access to everything in the Team Drives account by default. 

Team Drives is a feature that will only be available to G Suite for Education and G Suite for Business users. G Suite for Education domain administrators can apply today for early access to Team Drives. Learn more about Team Drives in this post on the G Suite Update Alerts blog. 

Applications for Education

The default sharing settings in Team Drives might be a bit too open for use by younger students. But it could be great for high school and college students working together on long-term projects. Team Drives could also be a great asset for academic departments that want to have all members sharing lesson ideas and resources. 

Pic4Carto - Find Creative Commons Images Based on Location

There are plenty of places to find public domain and Creative Commons licensed pictures on the web. Some of my favorite places were featured in this post on Practical Ed Tech. Pic4Carto is an interesting site that I will probably add to that list in the future.

Pic4Carto is a site that lets you browse for street level images (don't call them Streetview because that is specific to Google Maps) all over the world. The vast majority of the images found through Pic4Carto are labeled with a Creative Commons license. The images come from Flickr, Mapillary, and the Wikimedia Commons.

To find images on Pic4Carto you simply have to zoom-in on a location until you see a grid appear over the map. Once the grid appears you will see a number inside each square. Those numbers indicate how many pictures are available for that area. You can then click on the number to see the images (be patient because it takes a minute to load).

Applications for Education
Pic4Carto could be a good tool for students to use to find images specific to a place that they are studying in a geography or history lesson. I can see myself using it when teaching current events to show students what a place that they are reading about in the news looks like.

H/T to Maps Mania.