Friday, July 19, 2019

Another Great Source of Ed Tech Tools Tutorial Videos

On Thursday I shared my playlist of more than 300 Google tools tutorial videos. Today I'd like to highlight someone else's YouTube channel. Brad Dale regularly publishes quick tutorial videos about a variety of helpful, free tools including Wakelet, Flipgrid, and Google Drawings. And it's through Brad's YouTube channel that I learned about a neat tool for generating transcripts of YouTube videos. That tool is called Gnotes.io. It will automatically create a transcript of any YouTube video that you choose. That transcript can be saved directly into your Google Docs too. Watch Brad's video below to see how Gnotes.io creates transcripts of YouTube videos.

Neil and Buzz Go For a Walk - A Tour of the First Hours on the Moon

This weekend marks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing. By now you've probably seen Google's Google Earth story about the mission. If you haven't seen it, it's worth a few minutes of your time. Neil and Buzz Go For a Walk is another neat site about the Apollo 11 mission that's worth bookmarking.

Neil and Buzz Go For a Walk is the story of the first two hours Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin spent on the moon. The site is a scrolling display of the highlights of the transcript of Armstrong and Aldrin to each other and to NASA while on the surface of the moon. As you scroll through the transcript's highlights you'll see little drawings representing Aldrin and Armstrong as well as a little timeline.

Applications for Education 
Neil and Buzz Go For a Walk offers an engaging presentation of the transcript of Aldrin and Armstrong's first hours on the moon. Before showing the site to students I'd ask them to make some guesses as to what the surface of the moon looks like up close and how it feels. I'd also ask them to share their thoughts about what they would talk about to each other if they were the first people to land on the moon.

Thanks to Maps Mania for the link to Neil and Buzz Go For a Walk. Check out Maps Mania for more great map-based stories and websites.