How to Use Creative Commons Search

Whenever I talk to students and teachers about creating multimedia projects I always encourage using images that are either owned by them or are in the public domain. Doing that avoids infringing on someone's copyright. It's not always possible to find the right image for a project in your personal images or in the public domain. In those cases it's time to search for images that have a Creative Commons license.

One of the better places to conduct a search for images that have a Creative Commons licenses is on the Creative Commons search page. Through the Creative Commons search you can find pictures from a variety of services. The best part of Creative Commons search is that when you do find a picture you like the attribution information is readily available for you to copy and paste into your credits or citation page.

In the following video I demonstrate how to use Creative Commons search.

How to Clear the Ambient Noise from a Podcast Recording

One of the things that can ruin an otherwise good podcast is an annoying hiss or similar ambient noise in the background. Fortunately, there are ways to remove or replace that noise in post-production. I was recently looking for a way to do this when I came across a video from Make Use Of on how to remove ambient noise by using Audacity.


Applications for Education
Recording podcasts can be a good way for students to record and share their thoughts about any topic they pic or are assigned. Students can record alone or record a conversation with friends, classmates, or family. Don't let an annoying hiss in the background ruin an otherwise great conversation recorded by students, try using this method in Audacity to remove that ambient noise.

For a complete Audacity tutorial and other methods of recording podcasts, check out this article that I published last fall.

The Cost of Owning a Car - Free Lesson Plan

The cover image on my personal Facebook page is currently a picture of my first car. I'm pretty sure I paid $1500 for it which was a hefty sum for me back in the fall of 1996. That car needed a little bit of brake work to pass the state's safety inspection and then needed about a dozen other little repairs over the next two years. Fortunately, I had someone in my life who taught me a lot about working on cars and saved me lots of money in the process. I made the same mistake that many young people make in believing that saving money to purchase the car was all that I needed. That's why I got excited when I saw an email from EconEdLink that featured their free lesson plan titled Owning a Car.

Owning a Car is a free lesson plan from EconEdLink that is designed as a personal finance lesson for high school students. The lesson is based around a video titled What are the True Costs of Car Ownership? The video was produced as a collaboration between Bank of America and Khan Academy. The lesson plan has students first estimate what they think the costs of car ownership are then watch the video while taking notes (template provided) about the actual costs of car ownership. The follow-up activity has students comparing ownership costs for a variety of vehicle types.

To build upon EconEdLink's Owning a Car lesson plan consider showing your students Common Craft's videos about insurance and borrowing money. You can preview both of those videos as embedded below.



Disclosure: I have a long-standing in-kind relationship with Common Craft. 

5 Highlights of Getting Organized With Google Classroom, Calendar, and Keep

This Thursday at 4pm ET I'm hosting a Practical Ed Tech Webinar titled Get Organized With Google Classroom, Calendar, and Keep. It is the first of four webinars that I'm hosting on Practical Ed Tech in August.

In the video embedded below I highlight the key elements of Thursday's webinar.

Register Here

5 Highlights of the Webinar

• How to streamline your workflow through Google Classroom.
• How to organize and share resources with students.
• How to keep track of goals (yours and your students’) through Google Keep and Calendar.
• How to streamline meetings and meeting scheduling.
• How to save time when giving feedback on students’ documents and presentations.

Professional Development Certificates

• I provide a certificate for attending the webinar. Whether or not the organization that governs your teaching certificate/ license will accept it is a determination that you will have to make. Some organizations will accept it for contact hours/ credits toward certificate/license renewal and some will not.