Are You Being Phished? - A Lesson from Google

Phishing Quiz With Google is an online activity for testing your ability to identify phishing emails. The activity begins when you enter a fake name and fake email address of your choosing. You will then see a series of emails that are addressed to your fake email address. When you see the emails you have to use clues like incongruities in URLs to determine if the email is legitimate or a phishing attempt. As soon as you click the "legitimate"  or "phishing" button you will see an explanation of why the email was legitimate or phishing.

Applications for Education
Phishing Quiz With Google could be a great activity to have students to do as a way to test their knowledge of clues to phishing attempts.

Now You Can Download Your Synth Podcasts

Synth is a free podcasting tool that I've been recommending since its launch last fall. It provides a simple way to create short podcasts that people can reply to with their own audio comments. Think of it kind of like Flipgrid for audio.

Yesterday, Synth announced that you and your students can now download your recordings as MP3 files. You can download an individual recording or a series of threaded recordings.

Making Animoto Videos With Purpose

It was almost eleven years ago that I discovered Animoto during my lunch break between two ninth-grade world geography classes. That day I tried Animoto while eating lunch and decided to have my next class make some short videos with it. In less than 30 minutes all of my students had made videos based on the reports they had written about the countries in Asia they had been studying. They were quick, they were pretty, they weren't terribly meaningful.

What I didn't realize eleven years ago when my students used Animoto then that I do know now is making a video isn't about slapping together a string of images and some music. Making a video is about planning a progression of visuals and using audio to tell a story. This is true whether the video is thirty seconds long or three hours long.

To move my students' Animoto videos from "cute, little summary videos" to something more meaningful I had to start having them plan their videos to tell a story or to make a point. To plan the videos I had students start writing simple outlines in which they stated the purpose of their videos, the images that they were going to use, and the tone of the music that they wanted to use in their videos. Once my students started to do this their videos started to have more purpose than just making a summary of events or concepts.

Animoto is not the only company to offer an easy way to combine pictures, text, and audio to make a video. There are plenty of others that do the same thing. Sharalike is one such service that I've featured in the past. Regardless of the video creation tool that you have students, having them create an outline will go a long way toward improving their videos. Here's a simple planning guide that you can use with your students.