Tuesday, January 15, 2019

How to Use Canva to Create a Timeline

Canva is one of those great tools that the more time you spend with it the more cool features you discover in it. One of those features is the ability to create timelines to save as images and PDFs. Canva has about a dozen timeline templates that you can modify by altering the text size and style, inserting images, and dragging-and-dropping other design elements. Watch the following short video to learn how to create a timeline in Canva.

The History of Science

The History of Science is a Crash Course series that just came to my attention when I stumbled onto The Atomic Bomb: Crash Course History of Science #33. The entire series features videos hosted by Hank Green in which he explains how big questions in science were answered and how big breakthroughs were made. Like most Crash Course videos these are heavy on the presenter (Hank in this case) and light on visual aids. And they're probably best used with students who already have a firm understanding of the basics of the topics.


Try using these videos in EDpuzzle to build comprehension and reflection questions for your students to answer while watching or after watching the videos.

Search and Save Videos Within Wakelet

Wakelet is quickly becoming a popular tool for bookmarking and note-taking individually and or collaboratively. You can use Wakelet to create collections and sub-collections of notes, bookmarks, pictures, and videos. Speaking of videos, you can search for YouTube videos from within your Wakelet account. Watch the following short video to see how that feature works.


Applications for Education
I can see Wakelet's integrated YouTube search being useful when either you or your students are creating collections of resources arranged around a central topic. For example, when creating a collection of resources about WWII students could use the integrated video search to find relevant videos without leaving Wakelet and going directly to YouTube.

How to Save Time When Posting Social Media Updates

Yesterday, I saw quite a few Tweets and Facebook posts along the lines of "I'll just use social media updates now" in response to the news that Remind will no longer be able to deliver text messages to Verizon users for free. If that's your plan or you currently use social media to share updates about your class or school, then you might want to try using an update scheduler to save time and update on a consistent basis. Hootsuite is a great tool for that purpose. 

Hootsuite is a service that you can use to schedule social media updates. You can connect Hootsuite to your Twitter account, Facebook page(s), Pinterest account, and LinkedIn account. Once you have connected your social media account(s) to your Hootsuite account you can schedule up to thirty messages at a time to appear in the future on your social media accounts. (You can schedule more messages at a time if you purchase a Hootsuite premium plan). Not only can you schedule messages through Hootsuite, you can also reply to responses to your social media postings from within your Hootsuite dashboard.

Applications for Education
If you are using social media to share updates about your school or your classroom, Hootsuite can save you time as you can simply schedule a week's worth of updates in a few minutes on a Monday morning and then only have to worry about handling responses for the rest of the week. Hootsuite also makes it easy to see updates from multiple social media channels in one place which saves time compared to going to each social media platform individually.

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