The Week in Review - The Most Popular Posts

Good morning from Maine where I'm up before most reasonable are awake on a weekend. Getting a few minutes alone to think and write requires me to get up before 5am. Having two toddlers will do that to a person. Before everyone starts stirring, I have this week's list of the most popular posts to share with you.

This week I wrapped-up my online course titled Video Projects for Almost Every Classroom. I'll be offering some new online PD opportunities in March so check the blog on Monday for those. I also like to remind you that registration is now open for the 2020 Practical Ed Tech Summer Camp.

These were the week's most popular posts:
1. How to Quickly Turn a Blog Post Into a Video
2. Ten Fun and Challenging Geography Games for Students of All Ages
3. Mixkit - Hundreds of Free Music and Video Clips for Multimedia Presentations
4. Three Good Ways to Create Rubrics - Tutorials Included
5. How to Quickly Turn a Podcast Into a Video
6. Rubrics for Videos, Podcasts, Blogs, and More
7. The Practical Ed Tech Podcast - Episode 34 Featuring Dr. La'Tonya Rease Miles

2020 Practical Ed Tech Summer Camp!
Registration is open for the 2020 Practical Ed Tech Summer. Head here to learn more and score a discount code.

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!

• Nearly 100 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 it includes my tip of the week and a summary of the week's most popular posts from FreeTech4Teachers.com.
• My YouTube Channel - More than 17,000 people subscribe 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.

How to Search the Smithsonian's Open Access Collection

Earlier this week the Smithsonian launched a new open access collection. Smithsonian Open Access contains more than 2.8 million digital artifacts that you can view and download for free. While the Smithsonian Open Access homepage does have a couple of introductory videos, they're more promotional than they are instructional. That's why I created the following short video overview of how to search Smithsonian Open Access.

How to Use Mixkit to Find Free Audio and Video Clips for Your Projects

Mixkit is a good place to find free video clips and audio clips to use in your multimedia projects. I wrote about it earlier this week and mentioned it on my podcast. For those who would prefer a visual overview of how to use Mixkit to find free audio an video clips, I offer the following tutorial video.


As I mentioned in the video, the licensing terms for assets on Mixkit are pretty clear. You can download videos and audio files from Mixkit to re-use and remix. You don't have to credit Mixkit, but they will appreciate it if you do.

If you're looking for more places to find free audio files to use in classroom projects, check out this list that I published on Practical Ed Tech.