Apply for a National Geographic Teaching Adventure

The Grosvenor Teacher Fellow Program is an annual program administered by National Geographic. This unique professional development program, open to teachers in the U.S. and Canada takes teachers on field work expeditions to interesting places all over the world. Some of the places teachers could go through the program include Antarctica, the Galapagos Islands, Iceland, Greenland, and Norway.

Applications are due by December 31st. You can get read a set of program FAQs here and see a sample application here. The program is limited and competitive so click here to apply today.

How to Use Canva to Create Greeting Cards

Canva is a free graphic creation tool that I use to create a lot of the graphics that appear in my blog posts and Facebook posts. Canva makes it easy for anyone to create great looking graphics in all kinds of shapes and sizes. Canva offers free templates for creating holiday greetings. In the video embedded below I demonstrate how to use Canva to create greeting cards.


Canva works in your web browser. You can also use their free iPad app to create your holiday card designs.

Applications for Education
If you're thinking about giving an assignment in which your students write letters to family members for the holidays, consider adding a splash of color by using Canva's holiday design templates.

Three Ways to Make Your Blog Posts More Helpful

One of the central purposes of this blog and thousands of others on the web is to help others. Blogs that help people solve problems get a lot of return visitors. Apply that concept to your classroom, library, or school blog the next time you craft a blog post for it. If your post helps a student, a parent, or a colleague solve a problem, he or she is more likely to return to the blog in the future. Here are three things that you can do to make your blog more helpful to others.

1. Include a video. 
This could be a screencast video that you create or it could be an informative video that you found on the web. Screencast videos are particularly helpful when you're trying to show someone the steps to solving a problem.

2. Include hand-outs.
If you find that your blog post is going much past 600 words, consider making it available as a PDF that folks can download to read as a printed copy. Similarly, if you're including slides in your blog post, consider letting people download them to print and write notes on.

3. Include a chart.
This could be a pro-con chart, a flow chart, or a chart comparing similar iPad apps. Over the years I've found that people love having charts, especially ones they can download, to help them make decisions.

More ideas about improving your blog will be shared in my upcoming webinar, Winning Blog Strategies. I hope that you'll join me for it next Wednesday.