Canva Adds New Awesome New Features!

Last week I shared a video tutorial about how to create greeting cards with Canva's excellent templates and design tools. That's an example of just one of the many things that students can design in Canva. This week Canva released more design and publishing features.

Canva now offers dynamic chart editing. In other words you can pick a template that includes a chart and edit any of the content displayed in that chart.

All Canva designs can now be embedded into blog posts and websites. This removes the need for you to download your design then upload it to your blog or website. If you make a change to your design after you embed it, the updated design will automatically be displayed in your blog post. And speaking of design updates, you can now invite others to collaborate with you on your designs.

Finally, and perhaps most exciting, Canva designs can now be published as webpages. To do this just click the share button on your design and select the option to publish as a webpage. This option could be great for folks who want to create webpages to serve as flyers for school events.

Teaching History With Technology - An Online PD Course

Last summer twenty-five middle school and high school teachers joined me to learn about tools and tactics for teaching history with technology. During the fall quite a few people expressed interest in participating in the next offering of the course. Registration is now open for the January section of Teaching History With Technology. The course begins on January 9th at 7pm Eastern Time.

Teaching History With Technology is a three week course in which you will learn how to develop engaging and challenging history activities. You will learn how to use tools like Google Earth and Maps, multimedia timelines, and video production tools. You will discover primary source databases, and learn how to help your students become better researchers. This course features three interactive online meetings along with a discussion forum in which you can further interact with me and your classmates. Certificates of completion are awarded for three hours of professional development.

Course FAQs

• The course begins on January 9th at 7pm ET. 
• The cost is $97.
• All webinars are conducted live.
• The sessions are recorded for those who cannot make it to the live sessions.  
• Certificates for 3 hours of PD will be awarded to participants. 

Richard, why are you charging for the course? 

I explain the answer in this video. 

Spend the Summer in Washington D.C. as a C-SPAN Fellow

Summer might be six months away, but it's already time to start thinking about summer professional development opportunities. Social studies teachers should take note of C-SPAN's 2017 Summer Fellowship Program.

The C-SPAN Teacher Fellowship Program brings together teachers and media specialists to work together for four weeks in Washington, D.C. The fellows work together to develop new teaching materials. Teachers selected for the program will receive an award valued at $7,000 (including lodging and travel costs). You can learn more and find the application here. Applications are due by March 3, 2017.