AR, VR, and Bowling - The Week in Review

Good morning from Maine where the sun is shining to start this Memorial Day weekend. We're going to Maine Wildlife Park, riding bicycles, and playing outside for as long as we can put with the black flies this weekend. I hope that wherever you are this weekend, you can get outside too.

Before I head out for a day of outdoor fun, I have this week's list of the most popular posts of the week.

These were the week's most popular posts:
1. How to Make an Animated Timeline in Google Slides
2. Nine Tutorials for Making Your Own Mobile App
3. 7 Good Apps for Getting Started With AR & VR
4. A Good and Free Summer Activity for Rainy Days
5. 5 Places to Find Summer Math Activities for Elementary School Students
6. Fishbowl - A New Professional Network for Teachers
7. Five DIY Virtual Reality Projects for Students

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• More than 250 of you have participated in a Practical Ed Tech webinar this year. Thank you!
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• Fishbowl is a professional network for educators that is unlike any other social network you've tried. 
• University of Maryland, Baltimore County has been supporting this blog for many years. 

Three Good Resources to Help Students Become Discerning News Consumers

Earlier this week TED-Ed published a new lesson titled Can You Spot the Problem With These Headlines? The short video lesson walks students through dissecting a couple of hypothetical news headlines. By watching the video students can begin to understand how headlines are written to entice readers and how misleading headlines are created.


Here are a couple of other resources that I've previously featured for helping students learn to discern the information that they find online and in other media.

Factitious
Factitious is a game for testing your skill at identifying fake and misleading news stories. The game was developed by the American University Game Lab and the American University's School of Communication. To play Factitious simply go to the site and select quick start. You'll then see an article appear on the screen. Read through the article, click the source listed at the bottom, and then select either the green check mark or red X to indicate whether or not you think the article is a real news story. After you make your selection you'll get instant feedback and an explanation of how you can tell if the article was a real or fake news story.

Checkology
Checkology is a service that is designed to help students develop those skills. Checkology's free version offers four interactive modules for students to complete. Each of the modules is comprised of between twenty and forty-seven instructional video clips and interactive comprehension checks. The four modules are titled Info Zones, Democracy's Watchdog, Practicing Quality Journalism, and Misinformation. As you might expect, the contents of the modules gets progressively more difficult as each section is completed.