Simpleshow Foundation Seeks Volunteers to Help Educate Through Video

The Simpleshow Foundation is a non-profit organization founder by mysimpleshow's founders for the purpose of helping to educate the world through video. The Simpleshow Foundation recently partnered with the United Nations System Staff College (UNSSC) to develop videos to explain the 17 sustainable development goals of UN Agenda 2030.

The Simpleshow Foundation is seeking volunteer contributors to produce simple videos to explain the sustainable development goals of UN Agenda 2030. Producers can use mysimpleshow's free video production to create and donate their videos.

There are just four steps to volunteering through the Simpleshow Foundation:

• Volunteer and sign up for the program.
• Choose one of the offered topics or suggest one of your own.
• Create explainer videos with mysimpleshow, an easy-to-use online video-creator.
• Donate the video to the Simpleshow Foundation and it will be published through a variety of channels including the video library on the Simpleshow Foundation's website.

In addition to offering free video creation tools and hosting videos, the Simpleshow Foundation runs free video workshops for universities as well as educational projects in cooperation with Wikipedia.

Disclosure: The Simpleshow Foundation is a non-profit started by mysimpleshow. Mysimpleshow is an advertiser on this blog. 

Be Internet Awesome - Google's New Internet Safety Curriculum

Be Internet Awesome is Google's new Internet safety curriculum. I learned about it from Larry Ferlazzo and then spent some time exploring it myself. The Be Internet Awesome site features a game called Interland. The game is set in a virtual world that students navigate by correctly answering questions about Internet safety. The graphics of the game are great and there are some elements in which students navigate, but there is also a heavy reliance multiple choice questions in the game. Watch an overview of the game in the video below.


Be Internet Awesome is based on five key concepts for kids:

• Share with care.
• Don't fall for fake.
• Secure your secrets.
• It's cool to be kind.
• When in doubt, talk it out. 

There is a 48 page PDF containing lesson plans on each concept in the Be Internet Awesome curriculum that teachers can download for free. 

The Interland game featured in the video above can be distributed through Google Classroom. G Suite administrators can push the game to the task bar on managed Chromebooks. 

An Overview of Google's Public Data Explorer

Google's Public Data Explorer draws on data sets from the World Bank, the US CDC, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, and other sources of public data. In all there are eighty data sets. The Public Data Explorer makes it possible to quickly create visual representations and visual comparisons of the data sets. Each visualization you create has a unique URL that you can direct people to or you can embed the visualization in a blog or website.

In the video embedded below I demonstrate how to use Google's Public Data Explorer.



Applications for Education
Google's Public Data Explorer is a tool that I have used in civics courses that I have taught. I would ask students to analyze data and then create a public policy proposal based on that analysis. The Public Data Explorer is useful in helping students compare data sets.

Free Webinar - Behind the Scenes at Common Craft

Common Craft burst onto the explainer video scene way back in 2007 with RSS in Plain English. That video demonstrated a new way for students and professionals to create effective and engaging explanatory videos. In the ten years since RSS in Plain English hit the web, many teachers, students, and creative professionals have created their own explanatory videos using the Common Craft model.

On June 21st, for the first time ever, Lee Lefever (the voice of Common Craft videos) will host a free webinar in which you can go behind the scenes of a Common Craft video. You'll learn how he and his wife Sachi craft engaging and effective explanatory videos.

Learn more and register here. I'll be there and I hope that you will be there too.

More Than 500 Tutorial Videos + Live Q&A

My YouTube channel currently has more than 500 videos that I have created to demonstrate all kinds of ed tech tools for everything from creating videos to saving time while grading quizzes to mapping a safe biking route for your kids. And for the last two months I have been using my YouTube channel to host live Q&A sessions that I call Practical Ed Tech Live.

Join me on my YouTube channel tomorrow at 3:30pm EDT. You can join me on my YouTube channel or on the Practical Ed Tech Facebook page. I'll answer your questions live as they appear. I'll also answer questions that are sent to me in advance via email or Facebook.

Subscribe to my YouTube channel and turn on alerts to be notified when the broadcast starts.