The Practical Ed Tech Podcast - Episode 37 - More Online Teaching

More schools are closing every day, my superintendent told us to make two week's worth of online lesson plans, and school sports in Maine have been suspended until the end of April. Almost every ed tech company seems to be making their products free in response to school closures. Those topics and more are discussed in this week's episode of The Practical Ed Tech Podcast.

And as always, in this episode, I shared some new and updated tools before answering bunch of questions from readers and viewers.

Listen to episode 37 of The Practical Ed Tech Podcast right here or on your favorite podcast network. The show notes can be found here.




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MonkeyLearn - A Neat Word Cloud Generator

MonkeyLearn is a new tool for creating word clouds from text that you supply. As you can see in my video that is embedded below, MonkeyLearn lets you customize the display of your word clouds before you download them as PNG files. MonkeyLearn does more than just make word clouds. You can use it to extract keyword from a document. You can also use it to analyze the sentiment of a document.


Applications for Education
MonkeyLearn, like other word cloud generators, could be useful in providing students with a nice way to visualize the most frequently used words in passages of text they are reading and or writing. In the context of analyzing their own writing word clouds can help students identify words or phrases that they might be using a little too often.

Reminder - Free Webinar on Remote Learning - Today at 1pm ET

There are tons of free webinars about remote learning that have been offered in the last week and are scheduled for the coming days. Many of those appear to be vendor-specific. Rushton Hurley, former principal of an online school and founder of Next Vista for Learning, is hosting a free webinar today at 1pm ET that is not vendor-specific. Rushton will be addressing questions around how to transition to online teaching. This webinar will complement the guide, Emergencies and Switching to Online Learning, that he published last week.

Rushton will be using Zoom to host the webinar. If you're interested in learning how to host an online meeting with Zoom, watch my short video that is embedded below.