Picture Books, Story Maps, and Emojis - The Week in Review

Good morning from Maine where I'm home after a few days in Detroit for the MACUL Conference. It was great to meet many of you who have been following this little blog of mine for years. Getting to meet teachers all over the world is one of the best things to come from writing this blog for last 11+ years. Thank you!

The snow just keeps falling here in Maine even though the calendar says that it's spring. Eventually, the snow will stop and the warm weather will arrive and then it will be time for the Practical Ed Tech Summer Camp. The early registration discount is available until the end of March.

These were the week's most popular posts:
1. Where On Google Earth is Carmen Sandiego? - A Great Geography Game
2. 5 Free Tools for Creating Online Picture Books
3. Are You Being Phished? - A Lesson from Google
4. A New Way to Add Images to Google Sheets
5. How to Create a Map-based Story With StoryMap JS
6. How to Add Emojis to Word Documents - And How to Use Them in a Lesson
7. 5 Ways to Tell Stories With Maps

The Practical Ed Tech Summer Camp is happening on July 15th and 16th. I've secured a beautiful location for it that offers lots of activities for the whole family within walking distance. Register in March and save $50! Registration is now open here.

Please visit the official advertisers that help keep this blog going.
Practical Ed Tech is the brand through which I offer PD webinars.
TypingClub offers more than 600 typing lessons for kids.
Storyboard That is my go-to tool for creating storyboards.
University of Maryland Baltimore County offers a great program on instructional design.

Make Trading Cards for Historical and Fictional Characters

Read Write Think Trading Cards is a free tool that students can use to create trading cards about people, places, and events both real and fictional. You can use it in your web browser, as an Android app, or as an iOS app. In this video I demonstrate how to use Read Write Think Trading Cards in your web browser.




Applications for Education
Some of the ways that the Read Write Think Trading Card app could be used by students is to create a set of trading cards about characters in a novel, to create a set of cards about people of historical significance, or to create cards about places that they're studying in their geography lessons.

How to Manage Chrome Extensions & Google Docs Add-ons

Earlier this week during the Practical Ed Tech Live Q&A I addressed a topic that I have received a lot of questions about during the last few weeks. That topic is the vetting or trustworthiness of add-ons for G Suite tools (Docs, Slides, Sheets, and Forms) and Chrome extensions. One of my recommendations on that topic is to disable or remove the add-ons and extensions that you find yourself not using on any kind of regular basis. The fewer third-party services you have connected to your account, the fewer opportunities there are for your account to be compromised in some way. In the following videos I demonstrate how to manage Chrome extensions and G Suite add-ons.