The sun is setting on what turned out to be a great last day of July. I spent the last day of the month hanging out at the lake with my kids and going for a little bike ride. I hope that you ended the month in a similarly relaxing way. I say that because, to me, the switch from July to August always feels like mental switch to back-to-school season.
As I do at the end of every month, I've taken a look through my Google Analytics account to find the most popular posts of the month. Take a look below and see if there's anything interesting that you missed during the month.
50 Tech Tuesday Tips is an eBook that I created with busy tech coaches, tech integrators, and media specialists in mind. In it you'll find 50 ideas and tutorials that you can use as the basis of your own short PD sessions. Get a copy today!
August Webinars! This summer I'm hosting a series of Practical Ed Tech webinars. There are two left in the series. You learn more and register through the links below.
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 42,000 subscribers watching my short tutorial videos on a wide array of educational technology tools.
If you're curious about my life outside of education, you can follow me on Instagram or Strava.
This post originally appeared on FreeTech4Teachers.com. If you see it elsewhere, it has been used without permission. Sites that steal my (Richard Byrne's) work include Icons Daily and Daily Dose. Featured image captured by Richard Byrne.
We're planning a little trip this fall to visit some family that we haven't seen since before the start of the pandemic. When we told our daughters that we're going to fly they got very excited about it. We've now been answering questions about flying seemingly nonstop for a few days. Those conversations prompted me to compile this list of resources for teaching and learning about the science of flight.
Turbulence: One of the Great Unsolved Mysteries of Physics is a TED-Ed lesson that explains what turbulence is and the forces that create it. The lesson explains that even though we typically associate turbulence with flying in airplanes, turbulence exists in many other places including oceans.
How Things Fly hosted by the Smithsonian features an interactive module in which students design their own airplanes. The activity starts with a simple and slow airplane that students have to modify until it reaches a target speed and altitude. As students modify the wings, fuselage, and engines of their airplanes they are given instant feedback on the effects of those modifications. In some cases the feedback includes the airplane crashing and the students having to start over again.
If you have ever wondered why airlines sell more tickets than they have seats on an airplane, the TED-Ed lesson Why Do Airlines Sell Too Many Tickets? is for you. In Why Do Airlines Sell Too Many Tickets? you can learn about the mathematics that airlines use to maximize the revenue that they can generate from each flight. That math includes calculating the probability that everyone who holds a ticket for a flight will actually show up for the flight. The way that probability is calculated is explained in the video. Finally, the lesson asks students to consider the ethics of overbooking flights. Watch the video below or go here to see the entire lesson.
Earlier this week I published a lengthy piece about a new tool called TARA and how it can help you save time this fall. My favorite of all the features in TARA is the strategy resource bank that is available to any teacher who wants to use it. In the strategy resource bank you'll find dozens of teaching strategies accompanied by free handouts to use in your classroom.
Applications for Education
The resource bank is obviously a good resource for new teachers but it shouldn’t be overlooked by experienced teachers. When you feel like you’re stuck in a rut or your “old reliable” lesson plan isn’t clicking with kids anymore, browse through TARA’s resource bank for some inspiration for a new strategy to try.
Good morning from Maine where the sun is shining and it's going to be a great day to play outside. A couple of days ago I went on a bike ride and found a lot of wild Maine blueberries. So just like in Blueberries for Sal, this morning we're going back with our pails to pick some wild Maine blueberries. Hopefully, we get enough to save some to have in our pancakes throughout the winter. I hope that you have something equally fun to do this weekend.
50 Tech Tuesday Tips is an eBook that I created with busy tech coaches, tech integrators, and media specialists in mind. In it you'll find 50 ideas and tutorials that you can use as the basis of your own short PD sessions. Get a copy today!
August Webinars! This summer I'm hosting a series of Practical Ed Tech webinars. There are two left in the series. You learn more and register through the links below.
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 42,000 subscribers watching my short tutorial videos on a wide array of educational technology tools.
If you're curious about my life outside of education, you can follow me on Instagram or Strava.
This post originally appeared on FreeTech4Teachers.com. If you see it elsewhere, it has been used without permission. Sites that steal my (Richard Byrne's) work include Icons Daily and Daily Dose. Featured image captured by Richard Byrne.
Flap to the Future is an online game through which students can learn about the evolution of animal flight. The game has four levels for students to progress through. They begin play as a small theropod dinosaur and end play as a futuristic flying animal. Along the way students will also play the game as a microraptor and as a robin. The game is played in a classic video game style of running or flying along a landscape while collecting points for advancement through the game. It's a bit like what you might see if the classic version of Mario Brothers replaced Mario and Luigi with dinosaurs and birds.
Applications for Education
At first Flap to the Future grabbed my attention as a fun game for students to play to learn about bird flight. But the more I played it and the more I read about it I realized that it's could also be a fun way for students to learn about how dinosaurs and how scientists learn about dinosaurs.
If you play Flap to the Future and decide you really like it, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology has free Flap to the Future posters that you can download and print to display in your classroom.
The new video editing features on Chromebooks will actually be found inside of Google Photos on Chromebooks (availability for other platforms seems to be coming later). These will be an update to the current video creation options available in Google Photos. The updated video editing tools in Google Photos will let you create a video from scratch by combining pictures and video clips that are stored in your Google Photos. There is also a new set of themes coming to the video editor that you'll be able to use to create videos.
If the Google Photos video editing tools don't offer everything you need, it appears that you'll soon be able to add the LumaFusion app to your Chromebook for multitrack video editing. Whether or not that's better than using WeVideo, I can't say at this point.
Tomorrow I'm taking my oldest daughter to Storyland for a daddy-daughter hangout day before she starts Kindergarten in a few weeks. Her favorite ride is the Polar Coaster which is a roller coaster that is perfect for kids her age (and for 40-something dads who can't really handle big roller coasters anymore).
Thinking about the Polar Coaster got me to look in my archives for some resources for teaching and learning about the physics of roller coasters. Unfortunately, everything that I wrote about the topic in the past is no longer available. Therefore, I compiled this new list of resources for teaching and learning about the physics of roller coasters.
CK-12 has a lot of interactive simulations for physics and math concepts. One of those is this roller coaster simulator. The voiceover for the simulation is very robotic. The redeeming quality of CK-12's roller coaster simulation is that students can customize the size of the roller coaster to see how the changes they make impact the speed, the potential energy, the kinetic energy, and the heat generated by the roller coaster.
PBS Learning Media offers a handful of resources for teaching and learning about the physics of roller coasters. Energy Transfer in a Roller Coaster is an interactive lesson designed for elementary and middle school students. Energy in a Roller Coaster is a simple interactive graphic that students can use to see how changes in a roller coaster design impact the speed of the roller coaster. Centripetal Force in Roller Coaster Loops is a short video that demonstrates why its not just the harness keeping your seat in a roller coaster.
How Roller Coasters Affect Your Body is a TED-Ed lesson that begins with the story of the first roller coaster in America and the injuries it caused to riders. The lesson then moves on to explain how the forces of a roller coaster can affect your body, how roller coaster designers account for those forces, and why roller coasters have gotten faster and safer over the years.
My daughters have recently become obsessed with Elinor Wonders Why on PBS Kids. The theme song for the show includes the line, "Elinor wonders why, why do birds sing and how do they fly?" That line has been stuck in my head and playing on repeat for the last few days. So in a quest to answer Elinor's question about why birds sing I went back in my archives and found a couple of helpful explanation.
Why do birds sing? And how do they learn the songs that they sing? The answers to those questions and more are revealed in a TED-Ed lesson titled How Do Birds Learn to Sing?
After learning how birds learn to sing, have your students explore The Wall of Birds interactive mural produced by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. The mural features a variety of birds that when clicked on reveal information about that bird, audio of that bird's call, and a map of that bird's natural range.
This afternoon a reader of my weekly newsletter kindly pointed out that Microsoft removed the annotation tool that was in earlier versions of Microsoft Edge. However, there is still a built-in web page capture tool in Microsoft Edge. And that tool does include some basic markup capabilities.
In this new video I demonstrate how to capture and markup web pages in Microsoft Edge.
Applications for Education
The capture and markup tool in Edge can be useful if you want to draw attention to a specific part of a web page for instructional purposes. For example, I might use it to highlight a portion of a news article that I'm discussing in a social studies class. I might also use it to point out design elements to students learning about web design.
A Unit on Saving and Investing for High School Students appears to be created to coincide with the use of The Stock Market Game. In the unit students gather and compare data about financial then use that information in the construction of a portfolio. What's interesting about Mr. Frey's activity is that students will learn to use the Entity Framework in Wolfram's Knowledgebase to create and compile comparisons. (Take a look at this page for a demo of Wolfram's Knowledgebase for finance).
Applications for Education
What makes Mr. Frey's activity outstanding is that it can be used to introduce students to programming concepts in the context of a real-world application (identifying and comparing publicly traded companies). This activity takes The Stock Market Game from manual analysis and speculation to programmatic selection.
This morning my attention was grabbed by a BBC video titled Utah's Great Salt Lake is Running Out of Water. It's a fascinating video about the conditions that have contributed to the Great Salt Lake shrinking by nearly two-thirds in this century. Spoiler alert: drought isn't the biggest contributor to the shrinkage.
Watching the BBC's video about Great Salt Lake prompted me to do a little searching for more information about the lake and its ecosystem. That search led me to a few things worth sharing with students.
In Google Earth you can view timelapse imagery of Great Salt Lake. In the desktop version of Google Earth you can view imagery dating back to the 1970s. In the web version of Google Earth you can view imagery dating back to the1980s. Both will let you see the shrinking shoreline of the lake over the last few decades. Here's a short Google-produced video of the timelapse imagery of Great Salt Lake. On a related note, here's how to find timelapse imagery in Google Earth.
Last year The Natural History Museum of Utah produced Virtual Field Trip - Great Salt Lake. This ten minute video that takes students from the origins of Great Salt Lake through today. Along the way students can learn about changes to the lake's water level and ecosystem.
On related notes, I'll be speaking in Salt Lake City in August. And if you'd like to learn more about using Google Earth in your classroom, join me on August 2nd for a webinar titled To Geography & Beyond With Google Earth and Google Maps.
My daughters love rainbows. They have rainbow dresses, rainbow bracelets, rainbow stickers, and anything else that can have a rainbow on it. So they were super excited last week when we saw a double rainbow from our front porch! (You can look on my Instagram for better pictures of it than the one in this post). Their excitement and later questions about how rainbows are made prompted this post. If you have children in your life who are curious about how rainbows are made, the following two videos are for you.
How to Make a Rainbow is a SciShow Kids video that I featured when it was released about six years ago. The video gives directions for a little activity in which kids can make rainbows appear on white paper by properly positioning a glass of water in front of ray of sunlight. The video then goes on to explain what makes rainbows appear outside.
How Rainbows Form is a Physics Girl video that goes a bit beyond the basics that the SciShow Kids video covered. How Rainbows Form explains dispersion and refraction of light. The video also explains what causes the colors of the rainbow to appear in the order we see them. Finally, at the end of the video viewers learn what causes the appearance of a double rainbow.
Disclosure: TARA is currently an advertiser on FreeTech4Teachers.com
At the end of the last school year I spent some time exploring a new edtech tool called TARA. It’s a service that solves problems for new teachers and veteran teachers. Those problems are having more time to do the parts of your job that you love and finding new resources and ideas to bring into your lesson plans. As the new school year approaches TARA is adding more features for teachers and coaches that could prove to be tremendously helpful this fall.
#1 -TARA Helps You Quickly Find New Strategies
The resource bank is probably my favorite feature of TARA. That’s because the resource bank contains more than six dozen instructional strategies that you can incorporate into your lesson plans that you create in TARA (more on that in the video at the end of this post). The strategies include templates for handouts that you can use in your lesson plan. Most importantly, the strategies in TARA’s resource bank include tips on how to use the strategies and additional readings about strategy implementation. For example, the close reading strategy tips include a link to this helpful guide from the Harvard College Writing Center.
The resource bank is obviously a good resource for new teachers but it shouldn’t be overlooked by experienced teachers. When you feel like you’re stuck in a rut or your “old reliable” lesson plan isn’t clicking with kids anymore, browse through TARA’s resource bank for some inspiration for a new strategy to try.
#2 - Faster Lesson Planning and Modification TARA is designed to be a complete lesson planning tool. To that end, you can write your lesson plans inside of your free TARA dashboard and add supporting resources like handouts from the resource bank to your lesson plans. Once your lesson plan is assembled it’s automatically added to your planning calendar. The best feature of that calendar is that if you’ve created a multiple day lesson plan that you later need to shift (because there was a surprise fire drill that interrupted your day), when you move one part of the lesson plan the rest will shift with it.
Another helpful component of TARA’s free lesson planning tool is that you can tag all of your lesson plans with standards. Currently TARA supports Common Core standards and most state standards (all states will be available this fall).
Finally, if you’ve created a lesson plan that worked well and you want to use the same framework for a future lesson, you can do that in your free TARA account. To do that simply click “create new template” in the lesson planner then paste in the information from the lesson that you want to use as a template. Instructional coaches or administrators using TARA can use the lesson planning tool to create templates to share with teachers.
#3 - Create Shortcuts to Your Frequently Used Resources
In your free TARA account you have a homepage called HQ that you can customize. On your HQ you can place shortcuts to your most frequently used online resources like Infinite Campus, Google Classroom, and Kahoot. You also include shortcuts to resources that are in PDF or Word format. Shortcuts to frequently used resources is only one half of your HQ page. The other half contains your to-do list, a notepad, the resource bank mentioned earlier, and a progress monitoring tab.
#4 - To-do Lists With Attachments and Sharing
Take a look at my screenshot above and you’ll see that my to-do list has a place for attachments, due dates, and sharing. Just the act of writing a to-do list can give you a bit of focus for the day. Beyond that, having attachments to the tasks on your to-do list can be a time-saver when you actually start the task. TARA does have a collaboration component for teaching teams which means that you can share your to-do list to divide and conquer tasks with your team.
#5 - Streamlined Progress Monitoring for Teachers and Administrators
The first four items in this post focused on streamlining lesson planning and task management in TARA. There’s another aspect to TARA that’s equally valuable. That aspect is progress monitoring and coaching.
Teachers can use TARA to keep track of individual students’ progress toward specific goals or objectives. This aspect of TARA was designed for students who have IEPs, but it could be used for any student. In the HQ of your TARA teacher account you can click on the “progress” tab to record observations about their students. Watch this short video to learn more about progress monitoring in TARA.
TARA offers accounts for administrators and instructional coaches to use to give teachers feedback on lesson plans. Administrator accounts also include a place to record notes during observations and then share those observations. The flow of teachers sharing lesson plans and administrators giving feedback is just as quick and more structured than using a collaborative document like Google Docs or Word online.
Get Started Using TARA Today!
Teachers can sign up for free to use TARA right now. After you register I’d start by adding some shortcuts to things like your LMS and most-used resources onto your TARA HQ page. Once that’s done you’ll want to create some classes and start writing lessons. Have a favorite lesson plan already in Google Docs, Word, or PDF? If so, you can import that into your TARA account. Finally, dig around in the resources tab in TARA and look at some of the strategies you might want to use in a new or updated lesson this fall.
On Friday morning I shared a browser extension called BeTimeful that limits your access to social media sites during your working hours. As I wrote in that blog post, there are similar tools worth noting. Here's a short overview of some tools that can help students remove distractions and stay focused while working online.
StayFocusd is a Chrome extension that I've used for years whenever I feel like I'm falling into the bad habit of chasing rabbit holes on the internet. StayFocusd lets me specify the sites that I want to block from myself or limit my time spent viewing them. After specifying the sites and the amount of time I'll allow myself on them, a countdown timer appears whenever I view those sites. The timer resets every 24 hours.
Pomofocus is a task timer that is based on the Pomodoro method of getting things done. On Pomofocus I create a list of tasks then start the timer. Each task is allotted 25 minutes (you can adjust that). After 25 minutes there is a five minute break timer that automatically appears. After the break the next task timer appears.
50 Tech Tuesday Tips is an eBook that I created with busy tech coaches, tech integrators, and media specialists in mind. In it you'll find 50 ideas and tutorials that you can use as the basis of your own short PD sessions. Get a copy today!
July and August Webinars! This summer I'm hosting a series of Practical Ed Tech webinars. There are three left in the series. You learn more and register through the links below.
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 42,000 subscribers watching my short tutorial videos on a wide array of educational technology tools.
If you're curious about my life outside of education, you can follow me on Instagram or Strava.
This post originally appeared on FreeTech4Teachers.com. If you see it elsewhere, it has been used without permission. Sites that steal my (Richard Byrne's) work include Icons Daily and Daily Dose. Featured image captured by Richard Byrne.
If you're a math or science teacher who wants to take a deep dive into how to best utilize PhET's interactive simulations in your classroom, you may want to work through PhET's virtual workshops. The workshops include videos recorded at in-person PhET workshops along with practice activities and resource handouts for teachers.
PhET offers a workshop specifically for math teachers who have computers for every student in their classroom. That workshop is roughly five hours long. There is another workshop that provides a comprehensive overview of everything that PhET offers and the ways in which the simulations can be used in your classroom. That workshop is roughly twenty-one hours long.
BeTimeful is a browser extension that is designed to hide social media distractions during your working hours. There are similar browser extensions that block your access to social media sites during working hours. What makes BeTimeful different is that instead of entirely blocking your access to social media sites, BeTimeful hides all distracting content like "related," "recommended," and "trending," content. What that means is you can post on social media with BeTimeful installed, but you can can't see anything other than your own updates.
When you install BeTimeful you can set working hours for yourself (it imports your Google Calendar settings to do that). Outside of working hours BeTimeful won't hide or block anything. During working hours BeTimeful hides all social media distractions.
BeTimeful can work in Chrome, Firefox, and Edge. It will work on your laptop, desktop, phone, and tablet.
Applications for Education
BeTimeful could be helpful to college or high school students who need a little help staying focused on their work while writing or researching.
The next webinar in my Practical Ed Tech summer series is Search Strategies Students Need to Know. This is the most popular webinar that I host every year and I'm hosting it next Wednesday at 11am ET. I’ve updated it with new activities you can do to help your students get beyond the first page of search results.
If you have ever had a student say, "Google has nothing on this," this webinar is for you!
In the webinar you'll learn how to get your students to look beyond the first page of Google search results and dive deeper into the online research process.
Highlights of the webinar:
Creating search lessons.
Search strategies for all students.
Handouts to guide students through the search process.
Register here to join the live webinar on July 27th at 11am ET!
Recordings will be available for those who register in advance but cannot attend the live session.
Play with Arts & Culture offers more than a dozen interactive games for students to play to test their knowledge and to learn about the connections between art, culture, and geography. The collection of games includes things like jigsaw puzzles to reassemble famous works of art, timeline-based games about cultural events, crosswords, online coloring activities, and location identification games. Some of the games can be played collaboratively and all of the games can be shared directly into Google Classroom as announcements and or assignments.
On a related note, it is possible to share any of the stories in Google Arts & Culture with your students through Google Classroom. That process is demonstrated in this short video.
Offline Google Arts & Culture Activities
In addition to all of the online games, Google Arts & Culture offers a PDF of activities for students. This free PDF includes coloring pages, mazes, and connect-the-dots games for students.
A couple of days ago I read one of Terry Freedman's latest Substack articles. The article is titled A Conversation I Had Which I Still Don't Understand. It's a short dialogue between Terry and the representative of a cab company who can't explain why there's a price difference for two journeys of the same length.
Reading Terry's story reminded me of a Flickr group that Danny Nicholson created more than a decade ago. That group is called Bad Maths. The Bad Maths Flickr group contains lots of examples of bad math spotted in stores and other public places.
The Bad Maths Flickr group could be a good place to find some images that contain simple mathematics problems for your students to solve. For example, ask students to find the flaw in the math of this grocery store offer or this offer for cat food.
On a similar note to the Bad Maths group, seven years ago I took the picture that you see below. Almost as soon as it appeared in my Facebook feed via Instagram, my friend Kelly commented with, "shouldn't they be more concerned about weight than the number of people?" Kelly is a middle school math teacher so this picture was right in her wheelhouse of math prompts.
This morning I hosted a webinar about creating your own apps in your classroom. In one of the demonstrations that I gave I created an app that played a little dog barking noise when a person tapped "I'm a dog person" on the screen. The sound effect that I used came from one of my favorite sources of free media for classroom projects, Pixabay.
Pixabay is best known for its library of free images. It also has libraries of free b-roll videos, music, and sound effects that you can download and reuse for free.
In this short video I demonstrate how to find free sound effects on Pixabay and download them for reuse.
Openverse is another good place to find free images and music to use in your multimedia projects. I recently featured it in this video.
I was recently contacted by a teacher who was leaving her current school district and wanted to know what would happen to all of the bookmarks she had stored in her Chrome profile. Her Chrome profile was tied to her school-issued Google account which was going to be closed when she left the school.
The solution to this problem is to use Google Takeout to download all of the data in your Chrome profile. When you do that you are given an HTML file that includes all of your Chrome bookmarks. You can then take that file and import it into another Chrome profile. All of those steps are demonstrated in this short video that I recorded last night.
At the end of June Google added some new text formatting options to Google Forms. Those options enable you customize the fonts used for titles, section headers, and questions within your Google Forms. Last week Google added even more text formatting options to Google Forms.
The latest update to Google Forms gives you rich text formatting options. That means you can now bold, italicize, underline, and hyperlink any of the text in your form's title, section headers, and questions. In this short video I demonstrate how that works.
Applications for Education
As I demonstrated in the video above, using the hyperlinking tool when writing a question in Google Forms could be a good way to provide students with a direct link to an online article that they have to read, analyze, and then answer questions about.
Google Maps is one of my favorite tools for geography lessons and for some elementary school math lessons. In fact, next month I'm hosting a webinar all about using Google Maps in your classroom. That said, there are some alternatives to Google Maps that I do use from time-to-time. Bing Maps is one of those alternatives.
Bing Maps has a collections feature that you can use to create thematic collections of places. In this brief video I demonstrate how I created a small collection of National Parks in Bing Maps and how I enabled sharing of that collection.
Applications for Education
Creating and sharing a thematic collection of places in Bing Maps could be helpful in preparing an introductory geography lesson. It can also be an activity that you have students do to create a collection of places related to a theme that you assign to them.
Earlier this year Google added new table templates into Google Documents. Those templates include tables for project management and checklists. While those templates are good, there are still times when you might be better off creating your own custom tables in Google Documents. Today, there are more table customization options in Google Docs than ever before.
In this brief video I demonstrate how to create custom tables in Google Docs. The video includes a demonstration of setting default column and row sizes, setting custom color schemes, and setting custom cell padding in your tables in Google Docs.
Applications for Education
One of the ways that I've used tables in Google Docs is to provide students with some structure when they are writing notes in the same document. Some students need a little guidance so that they don't write over each other in a shared notes document. By giving students a table that is color-coded for their names, they know exactly where they should be writing their notes in the document.
Fact Check Explorer is a free tool from Google that anyone can use to explore the veracity of claims made on the Internet. As you can see in my brief video embedded below, on Fact Check Explorer you can enter a topic or name then see a list of articles accompanied by notations about the accuracy of the claims in those articles. You can click through to the source of each article and the fact checker.
Watch this short video that I made for an overview of how to use Google's Fact Check Explorer.
Applications for Education
It should be noted that Fact Check Explorer isn't an infallible tool. That said, it could be a good tool to use to help students get a better understanding of the context around claims that they may have heard from other people and or read on the Internet.
This month I've hosted three webinars and I have two more scheduled before the end of July. By the end of August I'll have hosted seven.
The next webinar in my summer series is DIY App Creation for the Rest of Us. Join this webinar to learn how you can have your students create mobile apps in your classroom even if you don't have any computer science background.
Next week I'm hosting Search Strategies Students Need to Know. This is always my most popular webinar of the summer. If you have ever had a student say, "Google has nothing on this," this webinar is for you! In the webinar you'll learn how to get your students to look beyond the first page of Google search results and dive deeper into the online research process.
Both webinars will be held live and recorded for those who cannot attend the live sessions.
As I mentioned in a blog post yesterday, I'm spending today helping with one of our community's Founder's Day events. The event that I'm helping with is the car show. I'm doing it because I'm friends with care-taker of the collection and because it gives me a chance to look at the cars up close. One of the cars that will be on display today is the 1942 Cadillac that is in the featured picture of this blog post.
The car isn't just any 1942 Cadillac. It has some features that make it different from any other Cadillac produced in the 1942 model year. If you're looking for a little research challenge for the weekend, see if you can figure what makes this car so unique. (A larger picture is included below).
If you think you've figured it out, please let me know. If you'd like help, send me an email and I'll give you some hints. And if you'd like to use this picture as part of your own research lesson, please feel free to do so (just credit me for the picture).
At the end of this month I'm hosting a webinar about teaching search strategies to students. Activities like this one will be included in the webinar. You can learn more and register for the webinar here.