Newspapers, Timers, and Name Pickers

Every month I take a look at how people find Free Technology for Teachers and what they search for when they land on the blog. "Google Newspaper Archive," "classroom timer," and "random name picker" were the most frequently searched terms on Free Technology for Teachers during the month of June.

The Google News Newspaper archive offers a large selection of newspapers both in terms of years and geography. In the Google News Newspaper archive you can search for a specific newspaper, search for article titles, or as demonstrated below you can search for a topic.



The Random Name Picker from Russel Tarr's Classtools.net  is one of those tools that can be used in almost every classroom setting. You can use it as a stand-alone tool or you can embed it directly into a page on your classroom blog. In the video embedded below I demonstrate how to embed a random name picker into your classroom blog.


Zero Noise Classroom is a free Chrome App that lets you simultaneously display a countdown timer and a noise meter to your students. The directions about how to use Zero Noise Classroom are kind of hidden in the app so I made the following short video to demonstrate how to adjust the settings in the app.

An Interactive Display of the Declaration of Independence

The Digital Declaration of Independence is a fantastic website on which students can learn about the Declaration of Independence and the men who signed it. The Digital Declaration of Independence is an interactive display of John Trumbull's painting Declaration of Independence, a scan of the text of the Declaration of Independence, and a map of the hometowns of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.

When viewing the Digital Declaration of Independence you will see that each person's head has been highlighted. Click on a highlighted head to be taken to that person's name, to see that person's hometown on the map, and to view a short biography of the person.

Applications for Education
The Digital Declaration of Independence could be a good reference for students to learn about some of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence. Aside from that, the Digital Declaration of Independence is a great model of what can be done with the Neatline mapping and timeline tool.

Short Lessons About Fireworks

Over the weekend fireworks starting popping around my house. To my dog the sounds of fireworks are the sounds of the sky falling. To many people the sounds of fireworks is the sound of summer and celebration.

If you or your children are wondering how the fireworks actually work, take a look at the following videos from National Geographic and Discovery News.




Both of these videos could be the basis of a flipped science lesson. In this post I provided an overview of how to use five services to create flipped video lessons.