Three Google Classroom Updates That You Will Appreciate

Six updates to Google Classroom were released yesterday. Three of those updates could immediately improve your use of Google Classroom this fall. Those three features are demonstrated in my video embedded below. In the video you will see how to view all of a single student's work in one stream, how to display class codes for easier viewing by students, and how to rearrange the order in which your Classrooms are displayed in your homepage.


Learn more about how to use Google Classroom in next week's webinar Keeping Track With Google Keep, Calendar, and Classroom. 

Practical Ed Tech Live Episode #13

On Tuesday afternoon I hosted another episode of Practical Ed Tech Live. As I do in every episode, I answered some questions that I had received in advance and some that were submitted live. The questions that were submitted in advance can be seen in this document. The video of the episode is embedded below.

Three Good Videos About Solar Eclipses

On August 21st a solar eclipse will cover a large portion of the United States. If you're in an area that the eclipse will cover, you may want to have your students build solar eclipse viewing boxes. But before doing that, you may want to have your students review how eclipses happen. The following three videos are good for that purpose.

Of the three videos in this post, this one from Vox is the most detailed and is well suited to use in a flipped lesson tool like EDpuzzle.


If you need a short refresher to post in a classroom blog, the following video from the Washington Post is a good choice.


Finally, for elementary school classrooms, SciShow Kids offers the following lesson about solar eclipses. The shortcoming of this video is that it is based on the solar eclipse that covered parts of Europe in 2015. That might be a little confusing for some students.

Teaching History With Technology - Expanded to Four Weeks

This afternoon at 3pm EST I am starting the latest version of my Practical Ed Tech online course Teaching History With Technology. I've hosted this course six times this year and the last two times I had to schedule additional sessions to cover all of the content and questions. So I finally decided to just schedule it as a four week course instead of a three week course. Part of the reason for that is explained in my video below.


Click here to register for Teaching History With Technology.

Solar System and Storyboards - Free Lesson Plans

Disclosure: Storyboard That is an advertiser on FreeTech4Teachers.com

Storyboard That offers a robust platform on which students and teachers can create comics and storyboards. Even those who don't fancy themselves as artists can make great comics by utilizing Storyboard That's galleries of thousands of pre-made characters, scenes, and objects.

In addition to offering a great platform for creating graphics, Storyboard That offers more than one hundred free lesson plans covering topics in language arts, history, physical education, math, world languages, and science. With the solar eclipse coming later this month in North America, it's timely to share Storyboard That's lesson plans about the solar system.

Storyboard That offers free lesson plans for teaching solar system vocabulary, the planets, and a lesson about Galileo and theories about the solar system. Each lesson plan includes instructions and rubrics. The lesson plans also include templates for making storyboards in Storyboard That, but you could also just use paper and pencil to make the storyboard and have the same lesson plan outcomes.

Watch the videos in my playlist below to learn how to use Storyboard That.