The Week in Review - Roll With the Changes

Good morning from Maine where it has been a week all about rolling with the changes (insert REO Speedwagon earworm here). On the weather front we went from unseasonably warm temperatures early in the week to cold rainy to end the week. In school we went from hybrid classes to full online classes in the span of one staff meeting (on Zoom, of course). This is the second time we've gone to 100% online classes this year. Since August we've had weeks of fully in-person classes, weeks of hybrid classes, and weeks of completely online classes. In short, this fall has been all about rolling with the changes and doing the best we can for our students. 

I'm looking forward to spending some time offline this weekend. I hope that you have a chance to do the same after you take a look at this week's most popular posts. 

These were the week's most popular posts:

1. Three Thanksgiving Science Lessons
2. A Handful of Games for Fun Typing Practice
3. How to Create and Conduct Polls in PowerPoint and Google Slides
4. Wizer Now Offers a Google Drive Add-on
5. Two Ed Tech Guys Take Questions & Share Cool Stuff - Episode 25!
6. Mixkit Now Offers Free Sound Effects, Music, and Video Clips for Your Multimedia Projects
7. How to Record a Video in PowerPoint (Windows Desktop Version)

Professional Development Opportunities 
This coming Tuesday I'm hosting a webinar all about using formative assessment in online and hybrid classrooms. Learn more and register here!

Through Practical Ed Tech I'm currently offering an on-demand course called A Crash Course in Making & Teaching With Video. 

Thank you for your support! 

• More than 300 of you have participated in a Practical Ed Tech course or webinar this year. Those registrations help keep Free Technology for Teachers and Practical Ed Tech going. I couldn't do it without you!
• Pixton EDU is a great tool for creating comics and storyboards. 
• Wakelet is a great tool for making collections of resources, recording video, and more!
• GAT Labs offers a great, free guide to using Google Workspaces in online classrooms.  

Other Places to Follow Me:

• The Practical Ed Tech Newsletter comes out every Sunday evening/ Monday morning. It features my favorite tip of the week and the week's most popular posts from Free Technology for Teachers.
• My YouTube channel has more than 30,000 subscribers watching my short tutorial videos on a wide array of edtech tools. 
• I've been Tweeting as @rmbyrne for thirteen years. 
• The Free Technology for Teachers Facebook page features new and old posts from this blog throughout the week. 
• And if you're curious about my life outside of education, you can follow me on Instagram or Strava.

How to Improve Audio Playback in Zoom

On Thursday morning one of my colleagues asked me how to improve the quality of the sound when he plays videos in Zoom meetings. Zoom actually has a simple way to do that built right into the screen sharing menu. 

To improve the quality of the audio when playing a video in a Zoom meeting you need to enable the option to share computer sound. By doing that you'll be broadcasting the audio as it comes out of the video instead of broadcasting the audio that is picked up by your external microphone. Making that switch can eliminate some of the echo and distortion that can occur when sharing a video in Zoom. In this short video I give a demonstration of how to change the audio setting when screen sharing in Zoom.