The Practical Ed Tech Podcast - Episode 33 - Larry Bird

In this week's episode of The Practical Ed Tech Podcast I'm back from the flu and from a short vacation. Highlights of this episode include new Google Docs tools, a new way to make videos from text, and a cute app for little kids like mine. As always, I answered a handful of questions from readers, viewers, and listeners like you!

Get the complete show notes in this Google Doc.

Listen to the episode right here or on your favorite podcast network.



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Volcanoes 101 - Updated

A few years ago National Geographic published a video titled Volcanoes 101. Last month they published a new video with the same name. The new Volcanoes 101 explains the types of volcanoes, their shapes, common locations, and what causes volcanoes to erupt.



On a related note, The BBC has a series of interactive guides that explain how natural disasters are caused. The series of guides is twelve years old, but still includes good information presented in a clear manner for students. Included in this series is a twelve part animated explanation of volcanic eruptions. The series also includes explanations of hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and tsunamis.

Applications for Education
Volcanoes 101 is the right length and has the right style and pacing to make it an excellent choice for a flipped lesson intended to introduce the big concepts of a lesson about deserts. My go-to tool for making flipped lessons continues to be EDpuzzle. You can learn how to use EDpuzzle by watching the following video.

5 Ways to Create Social Videos

Yesterday, I wrote about a new video creation tool called InVideo. InVideo is one of many tools to emerge in the last couple years that is designed to help users create eye-catching videos to post on social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter. These videos use a mix of images and text to grab your attention and quickly tell a short story. Most include music, but can also be effective even when the music is turned off. If you're using social media to share school or classroom announcements, you might want to try making social media videos. Here are five tools worth trying for making social media videos.

Lumen 5
Lumen5 is a service that will produce a video for you based upon your written work. To create a video with Lumen5 you can enter the URL of your published work or paste in the text of your blog post. Lumen5 will then select highlights from your writing to feature in a video. Lumen5 generates a preview of a video for you based on the title, keywords, and key phrases in your blog post. The video will consist of images and video clips matched to the words in your blog post.Completed Lumen5 projects can be shared directly to Facebook. You can also download your video to use on Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and anywhere else that you like post short videos.

Canva
Canva offers tons of templates for making social media graphics. One of the overlooked options for sharing Canva graphics is exporting as MP4. In the following video I demonstrate how to create a video with Canva.



Adobe Spark
Like Canva, Adobe Spark offers a lot of templates for making social media graphics. Adobe Spark also offers a dedicated video editor for making videos. You can make a video from scratch or use one of the templates that is designed specifically for posting on social media.



Sharalike
Sharalike is a simple video creation tool that is available as a browser-based tool as well as an Android app and iOS app. All three versions let you bulk upload/ import a collection of pictures then drag and drop those pictures into the sequence in which you want them to appear. Once you've arranged your images you can add music from Sharalike's library of free, royalty-free music. Sharalike will then create the video for you. I've successfully uploaded as many as 45 pictures at once to Sharalike to make a video. The only downside to Sharalike is that you can't download your video, you have to watch it online.



Headliner
Headliner is an online video creation tool that offers templates designed for creating videos to share on social media. Headliner also offers a neat service that will turn your spoken audio or podcast files into video files. Headliner offers their pro version to schools for free.