Practical Ed Tech Live - Episode 7

Earlier today I hosted the seventh episode of Practical Ed Tech Live. In today's episode I answered five questions from readers and put out a call for help with one question. The video of today's episode of Practical Ed Tech Live is embedded below. The list of questions answered in the episode can be seen here.

12 Lessons About Inventions That Kind of Changed the World

TED-Ed has a series of twelve video lessons called Moments of Vision. The videos in the series teach short lessons about inventions that may or may not have changed the world. For example, the invention of the stethoscope did change health care. The invention of the Popsicle, however, just makes summer days a little more enjoyable. Those are just two of the twelve inventions featured in TED-Ed's Moments of Vision series.


Ask your students to look around their homes or around your school for everyday items that many of us use. Then send them off to research and present the origins of those everyday items. Here are two items that come to mind as I look at my desk; screw top jars and tabs on soda pop cans.

Try Kami for Annotating PDFs

This afternoon during Practical Ed Tech Live I answered a request for a tool that can be used to annotate PDFs. One of the suggestions that I made was to try Kami.

Kami is a tool that you can use to draw, type, and highlight on PDFs. You can import PDFs into Kami from your Google Drive or you can import them from your desktop. Kami can be integrated with Google Classroom to make it easy to share annotated PDFs with your students and for them to share with you.

Learn how to get started with Kami by watching one of the tutorials embedded below.


Applications for Education
Kami could be used by students to annotate historical documents that have been scanned and saved as PDFs. For example, many of the featured daily documents from the U.S. National Archives are PDFs.