The Week in Review - The Most Popular Posts

Good morning from cold and dreary Maine. It seems like forever since we've seen the sun. To add insult to injury what was supposed to be snow turned out to be two days of sleet. I hope that wherever you are this weekend, the weather is a bit cheerier than it is here.

This week I announced that I'm going to host a free webinar on this coming Monday afternoon. The webinar is designed for tech coaches, instructional coaches, principals, and anyone who is in charge of encouraging teachers to use technology in new and meaningful ways in their classrooms. There is still time to register here. And speaking of registering, there is one week left to get the super-early discount on the Practical Ed Tech Summer Camp registration.

These were the week's most popular posts:
1. PayGrade - A Classroom Economy Simulation You Can Use All Year
2. Two Ways to Make Progress Trackers With Google Sheets
3. Designing & Sending Certificates With Google Slides and Forms
4. Three Interesting Ways to Use Google Slides Besides Making Presentations
5. A Great Set of Videos for Teaching Networking and Computer Hardware Concepts
6. Short Lessons on Colds and Flu
7. Free Webinar - Three Steps to Encourage Technology Integration

I'll come to your school in 2020! 
Send me an email at richardbyrne (at) freetech4teachers.com to learn more about how we can work together. This year I'm offering an opportunity to bring me to your school for free! Ask me for details.

Thank You for Your Support!

• More than 50 of you have already participated in a Practical Ed Tech webinar this year. Thank you!
• PayGrade.io offers a fantastic way for students to learn personal finance lessons. 
• University of Maryland, Baltimore County has been supporting this blog for many years.

Other Places to Follow My Work

Besides FreeTech4Teachers.com and the daily email digest, there are other ways to keep up with what I'm publishing. 

• Practical Ed Tech Newsletter - This comes out once per week (Sunday night/ Monday morning) and includes my tip of the week and a summary of the week's most popular posts from FreeTech4Teachers.com.
• My YouTube Channel - More than 16,000 are subscribed to my YouTube channel for my regular series of tutorial videos including more than 300 Google tools tutorials. 
• The Practical Ed Tech Podcast is where I answer questions from readers, share news and notes, and occasionally talk to interesting people in education. 
• Facebook - The FreeTech4Teachers.com Facebook page has nearly 450,000 followers. 
• Twitter - I've been Tweeting away for the last twelve years at twitter.com/rmbyrne
• Instagram - this is mostly pictures of my kids, my dogs, my bikes, my skis, and fly fishing.

Do Politics Make Us Irrational? - A TED-Ed Lesson

As the 2020 Presidential primaries and caucuses roll on more there is no avoiding political advertising unless you shut off your television, your radio, and never go on YouTube. Politics stir up all kinds of feelings in us. People who are otherwise very even-keeled sometimes get very passionate and perhaps irrational when it comes to politics. That's the topic of the latest TED-Ed lesson.

Do Politics Make Us Irrational? explains the results of 2013 study about how politics can affect other parts of our decision making processes. Watch all the way through the lesson and you'll learn that it might not be just politics but any other deeply held allegiance that can cause us to make decisions that might be a little bit irrational. The lesson is made relatable to students through the us of an analogy between politics and sports. Watch the lesson as embedded below and find some good discussion questions here.