Breakouts, Outages, and Cool Jobs - The Week in Review

Good morning from Maine where it is nice and chilly. Okay, chilly is an exaggeration. It's downright cold! It was another interesting week of conducting hybrid and online classes. More COVID-19 cases in my community meant fewer students in class and more online. If nothing else, this school year has made me more flexible than ever. I hope that you're also finding something positive in this unusual school year.

Before I head outside to play in the snow with my kids and my dogs, I have just enough time to write this week's list of the most popular posts of the week. Not surprisingly, a couple of the most popular posts dealt with issues related to the outage of Google Classroom and Drive on Monday morning.

These were the most popular posts of the week:
1. My Current Hybrid Classroom Arrangement and Equipment
2. How to Create Freehand Drawings in Google Slides
3. How to Find "Lost" Items in Google Drive
4. Five Ideas for Online Breakout Room Activities
5. What is a DDos Attack? - A Simple Explanation
6. Best Job Ever - National Geographic Stories About Interesting Jobs
7. How to Create Breakout Rooms in Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet

Professional Development Opportunities 
Through Practical Ed Tech I'm currently offering two on-demand learning opportunities:

• A Crash Course in Making & Teaching With Video. 
• Ten Search Strategies Students Need to Know

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 32,000 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.

Five Interesting Lessons About Winter Weather

There is no doubt that winter has arrived here in Maine. The temperature was in the single digits (Fahrenheit) most mornings this week and we had our second significant snow fall this week. The chill in the air and the snow on the ground prompted me to look back at some of my favorite videos for learning about winter weather. Here they are...

How windchill is calculated:
The windchill was -20F last night at my house. The following video explains how windchill is calculated. The video comes from Presh Talwalkar.

 

The psychology of extreme weather:
Television news reporters like to use the word "extreme" whenever we have a lot of rain or snow in a short amount of time. Is the weather really "extreme" or is that just our impression of it? The following Minute Earth video takes on the topic of how extreme weather affects our thinking about weather patterns in general. I found the video to be interesting from a psychology perspective. The video is embedded below.

 

How snowflakes are created:
The following episode of Bytesize Science embedded below explains how snowflakes are created.

 

Thundersnow!
Thundersnow is a video from UNC-TV that explains how thunder sometimes, though rarely, coincides with snowstorms. PBS Learning Media has a set of corresponding lesson materials that you can use with this video.

Winter Moon

Why the Full Moon is Better in Winter explains how the combination of the position of the moon relative to Earth and snow on the ground make the moon appear brighter in the winter than in the summer. Take a look at the video as embedded below.