Thank You!

Good morning from Connecticut where I am watching my brother and other members of his club run in the 80th annual road race in our hometown. To borrow a line from Jim Nantz, in my family watching the race "is a tradition unlike any other." But enough about my family...

On this Thanksgiving morning I'd like to say thank you to everyone who has helped keep this blog going for the last nine years. Without your support this blog wouldn't survive. Whether you've taken one of my courses, invited me to your school, or simply shared some of my blog posts with others, you have helped me keep this little project going. Thank you!

A Simple Alternative to Blubbr for Making Video Quizzes

On Wednesday morning I received an email from a reader who had been using Blubbr to create video quizzes for her students. Unfortunately, Blubbr seems to have gone offline so she was looking for a replacement. My immediate suggestion was to try Vizia. Vizia lets you build multiple choice questions into any YouTube video. The responses that you gather appear in either a Google Sheet or a CSV file to download. If you use the Google Sheet option you can then use Flubaroo to grade your students' responses to the quiz. In the video embedded below I provide a demonstration of how to use Vizia.

The Search for Alice's Restaurant

Radio stations all over the United States play Alice's Restaurant Massacree on Thanksgiving Day. While I was looking for a recording of the song on YouTube it occurred to me that many other people were surely doing the same thing. That thought prompted me to go to Wolfram Alpha where I found a chart of Wikipedia traffic for the search term "Alice's Restaurant." So the question/ cultural history lesson for students is "why do people search for that term around Thanksgiving?"

Here's the song:


Happy listening! Happy Thanksgiving!