Friday, March 12, 2021

Copyright & Creative Commons for K-12 Educators - Free Webinar on Monday

Copyright is a topic that I've written about many times over the years. It's a topic that I'm passionate about and I'm always happy to answer questions about. In the last few weeks I've had a lot of questions about copyright and Creative Commons. So to answer those questions and more I'm hosting a free webinar titled Copyright and Creative Commons for K-12 Educators. You can register for it right here or through the form below. 

Topics that will be covered in this webinar:
1. The differences between Copyright and Creative Commons.
2. Why "it's for education" isn't always a valid justification for Fair Use.
3. Where to find Creative Commons and public domain media for school projects.
4. Any questions that you want to ask!

Will it be recorded?
Yes, the webinar will be recorded. The recording will be posted on my YouTube channel (subscribe to be notified when it's live). 

Disclaimer: I am not an attorney. Contents of the webinar should not be taken as legal advice for your specific situation.

How Does Artificial Intelligence Learn? - A TED-Ed Lesson I'm Using Today

Every once in a while a new video pops-up at a time that perfectly coincides with where I am in my curriculum. That just happened this morning as I was planning to introduce the role of artificial intelligence in IoT (Internet of Things) to my Comp Tech I students. Yesterday, TED-Ed released a new video on the topic of AI. The video is titled How Does Artificial Intelligence Learn? 

How Does Artificial Intelligence Learn? provides a concise overview supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement machine learning. The narration of the video is quite flat and boring, but the explanations are good so I'm going to use the video at the beginning of my class today to get students thinking about and asking questions about AI. 

New Seesaw Feature - Add Your Voice to Objects

Seesaw recently added a helpful new feature that enables you to add your voice to objects in Seesaw activities. It is different from the previous, and still available, voice recording tool. The new voice recording feature allows you to record explanations of shapes, images, and objects in a Seesaw activity and have those explanations directly connected to the shapes, images, and objects. Your students will see a little audio icon right next to any object to which you've add your voice explanation. Watch my short video to see how the new voice recording feature works. 



Applications for Education
This new voice recording feature in Seesaw could be great for adding explanations of objects and images in Seesaw activities. For example, it could be a great way for an art teacher to explain elements of lighting in photograph. The new voice feature could also be useful for creating audio prompts that your students respond to. For example, I might add my voice to a historical photograph of Main Street in my town and ask students to respond with what they notice what's the same and what's different from how Main Street looks today.

ICYMI - Two Ed Tech Guys Take Questions & Share Cool Stuff

Every other Thursday Rushton Hurley and I host a free webinar called Two Ed Tech Guys Take Questions & Share Cool Stuff. If you missed the last episode, you can watch the recording right here. Some of the questions that we tackled in the last episode covered shuffling Google Forms, publishing books, photo editing, learning management systems, and appointment scheduling services. 


We'll be hosting another live installment of Two Ed Tech Guys Take Questions & Share Cool Stuff next Thursday at 4pm ET/ 1pm PT. Join us!

A Sweet Science Project

My daughters, like almost all children, love candy! So my daughters and I are going to attempt to make our own rock candy this weekend. They love doing little projects like this and I'm hoping that they'll like this one as well. The inspiration for doing this came from watching a recent SciShow Kids episode titled Make Your Own Rock Candy! 



The video above provides directions, but we'll be following written directions from Science Bob. I used the OneNote web clipper to save the directions as an easy-to-read PDF that I printed (I don't want my laptop anywhere near where we're working in the kitchen).