Candy, Pizza, and Games - The Month in Review

Good evening from Maine where the sun has set on the month of October and my daughters have finally fallen asleep after the excitement of trick o' treating. As I do at the end of every month, I've taken a few minutes to look at the analytics for Free Technology for Teachers for the month to see what was popular with all of you. Take a look at the list and see if there is something interesting that you missed during the month. 

These were the most popular posts in October:
1. Three Alternatives to ViewPure for Distraction-free YouTube Viewing
2. Tutorials for Getting Started With the Smithsonian Learning Lab
3. GeoGeek AR - An Augmented Reality Geography Game
4. How to Catch Monsters - A Halloween Play Script
5. How to Create Green Screen Videos in Canva
6. Halloween-themed Physical Education Lesson Plans
7. C-SPAN Offers a Free Electoral College Poster
8. Five Google Workspace Tips That Can Make Your Day Better
9. A Great Alternative to Quizlet
10. The Science of Pizza, Diets, and the Esophagus

Workshops and Keynotes

If you'd like to have me speak at your school or conference, please send me an email at richardbyrne (at) freetech4teachers.com or fill out the form on this page. 

50 Tech Tuesday Tips!

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!

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 43,000 subscribers watching my short tutorial videos on a wide array of educational technology tools. 
• I've been Tweeting as @rmbyrne for fifteen years. 
• The Free Technology for Teachers Facebook page features new and old posts from this blog throughout the week. 
• If you're curious about my life outside of education, you can follow me on Strava.

This post originally appeared on FreeTech4Teachers.com. If you see it elsewhere, it has been used without permission. Featured image captured by Richard Byrne.

The Difference Between Stocks and Bonds

Last week I finished reading Liar's Poker written by Michael Lewis. The book is partly about his experience as a bond salesman at Salomon Brothers in the 1980's and partly about expansion of the bond market itself during the 1980's. The parts about how the bond market evolved to compete with the stock market in the minds of traders in the 1980's were the most fascinating parts of the book for me. I was telling a neighbor about the book over the weekend and she mentioned that she didn't know what the difference between a bond and stock really is. I gave her my brief explanation then turned to YouTube for a better one. 

TD Ameritrade's YouTube channel offers a concise explanation of the difference between stocks and bonds. A much longer explanation is offered in this older Khan Academy video. 

TD Ameritrade also offers a concise explanation of how the bond market works and what bonds are used for (spoiler, they're not just for lame gifts from old uncles). 

Applications for Education

Both of these videos could be helpful primers for lessons about the basics of financial markets and lessons about personal finance. With a free EDpuzzle account you can add multiple choice, true/false, and short answer questions into these videos. In this video I provide a complete overview of how to use EDpuzzle to create video lessons using videos that you find online.

Free Webinar This Tuesday - Two Ed Tech Guys Take Questions

This coming Tuesday, November 1st at 8pm ET/ 5pm PT Rushton Hurley and I will be hosting the second episode of our third season of Two EdTech Guys Take Questions and Share Cool Stuff. Just like the title says we take questions, answer questions, and share some cool stuff that we've found around the web. We'd love to have you join us for this fun and free half-hour webinar. You can register here to join us live. 

If you have a question for us, send it to me at richardbyrne (at) freetech4teachers.com or just join us live and drop your question into the chat. And to see what our little webinars are all about, watch the recording of the October episode of season three. 

Grateful Dead Writing Prompts

One of the things that people sometimes find surprising about me is that I enjoy listening to and watching old Grateful Dead shows. One of my all-time favorites is this October 31, 1980 performance of Ripple. I was watching it for about the hundredth time last week when I was struck by the images that appear from about the 1:26 mark to the 1:36 mark. In that frame we see a young couple (I'd guess their age to be mid-20's) swaying with their arms around each other. I began to wonder about them. My wondering thoughts could be the beginning of a few writing prompts. 

Here's what I wondered about that couple:

• Did they meet that night?
• What were they thinking about each other?
• Did they continue to follow the Dead?
• Did they grow up together, get married, and have kids?
• If they had kids, did they take them to any Grateful Dead shows?
• Are they still alive? 
• Were they as happy as I think they are in that scene?

Of course, you can play this "what if? what happened?" game with any picture or video clip of a couple of people. I just chose this one because it stands out to me and it gave me an excuse to write about one of my favorite Grateful songs.

One Last Round-up of Halloween Resources

As my daughters have reminded me about 1,000 times in the last week, tomorrow is Halloween. If you have elementary school students who are equally excited about Halloween and you want to include a little Halloween-themed activity into your day tomorrow, take a look through this round-up of resources that I've previously shared throughout the month. 

How to Catch Monsters is a free play script published by Playbooks Reader's Theater. The play was written to be performed by students in first through third grade. The play centers around two children who are trying to catch blue, green, and purple monsters. The children do get a little help from their work-from-home dad. In all there are six roles for students to play. There is also a narrator role for a teacher to play in How to Catch Monsters. The How to Catch Monsters script is color coded to make it a little easier for students to follow. The script also includes some cues and other notes to help students perform the play.

Playing Kahoot games is a fun way to review almost anything including Halloween safety. That's why a few years ago I made the following video to demonstrate how to find and modify Halloween safety games in Kahoot. 

OPEN Phys Ed has a collection of more than a dozen Halloween-themed lesson plans for physical education classes. The collection is titled Pumpkin Patch Games and you can access all of them as PDFs and or Word files. Like all of the OPEN Phys Ed resources that I've reviewed over the last few years, the Pumpkin Patch Games are designed to be as inclusive as possible. The games aren't your "traditional" ball-sports type of games that make some kids loathe physical education classes. A few of the games students might enjoy include Silly Spooky Storytime (my older daughter would love that one), Monster Mash, and Pickles in the Pumpkin Patch.  In addition to directions for each of the dozen+ games in Pumpkin Patch Games, OPEN provides music playlists that you might want to use while kids are playing the various games in your gym.

ReadWorks offers a collection of Halloween-themed articles for a  K-8 audience and a few for 9-12. The articles covered topics like the history of Halloween, pumpkin farms, and the history of ghost stories. Like all ReadWorks articles, you'll find comprehension questions and vocabulary sets to accompany the articles. A read aloud feature is also available in ReadWorks.

SciShow Kids has a playlist of videos covering topics that are frequently connected to symbols of Halloween. Those topics are bats, spiders, skeletons, and the changing colors of leaves. In the video about bats students learn how bats use sound to find their way at night, how and why bats hang upside down, and how they rear their offspring. In the video on spiders students learn about the role of spiders in controlling flying insect populations and how spiders create webs. In the video about the human skeleton students can learn about the functions of the skeleton as well as how bones grow and heal over time. Finally, in the video on leaves students learn about the correlation between chlorophyll, sunlight, and leaf color.

PBS Learning Media has a collection of Halloween-themed lessons for elementary school students. One of the those lessons is all about the historical traditions that contributed to the creation of Halloween. The materials for this lesson include a short video, video discussion questions, and a vocabulary sheet. All of the items in PBS Learning Media's Halloween collection can be shared to Google Classroom where you can add questions for students answer after watching the videos.

How to Create a Digital Map Collection in Wakelet

Wakelet is a free, collaborative bookmarking and file organization tool that puts things into a nice visual display. So when a former colleague emailed me a couple of days ago to ask for help creating a collection of digital maps Wakelet was one of the first tools to come to mind (Padlet was the other). To a Wakelet collection you can add links (with previews) for Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Street View imagery, and Bing Maps. 

Watch this short video to learn how to create a digital map collection in Wakelet. 

Applications for Education
My former colleague who emailed me for help (and inspired this blog post) was looking for a way to create a collection of maps views of landmarks related to the American Revolution. He wanted his students to simply click and be taken to the exact view that he had selected. You could do the exact same thing or make your Wakelet collection collaborative to allow students to add map links to places that they investigated on their own.

Chrome, Crows, and Games - The Week in Review

Good morning from Maine where the sunrise is still more than an hour away as I drink my first cup of coffee. It's going to be an exciting day in our house because we're going to see Disney Frozen on Ice! To say that my daughters are excited about it would be an understatement. They would have slept in their Frozen costumes last night if we had let them. The rest of the weekend will be a more mundane schedule of raking leaves and riding bikes. I hope that you have a fun and relaxing weekend. 

This week more people registered for Animated Explanations which begins on November 1st. Register by midnight (ET) on October 31st to be a part of the inaugural class!

These were the week's most popular posts:
1. Five Great Chrome Extensions for Teachers
2. TED-Ed Lessons With a Halloween Theme
3. A Fun Tool for Creating Avatars
4. How to Set Notifications for Individual Google Documents
5. Trick O' Treat Safety Review Games
6. The Differences Between Crows and Ravens
7. Five More Things Students Can Explain With Simple Animations

Workshops and Keynotes

If you'd like to have me speak at your school or conference, please send me an email at richardbyrne (at) freetech4teachers.com or fill out the form on this page. 

50 Tech Tuesday Tips!

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!

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 43,000 subscribers watching my short tutorial videos on a wide array of educational technology tools. 
• I've been Tweeting as @rmbyrne for fifteen years. 
• The Free Technology for Teachers Facebook page features new and old posts from this blog throughout the week. 
• If you're curious about my life outside of education, you can follow me on Strava.

This post originally appeared on FreeTech4Teachers.com. If you see it elsewhere, it has been used without permission. Featured image captured by Richard Byrne.

How to Import PDFs Into Book Creator Projects

About a week ago Book Creator rolled-out the third or fourth new feature of this school year. That feature is the ability to import PDFs to use in your Book Creator projects. I had a cold and couldn't speak well last week so I had to wait until this week to give Book Creator's new feature a try and record a video about it. The new feature works well and as I demonstrate in this new video, importing a PDF into Book Creator can be a good way to turn a boring document into a multimedia booklet. 

One of the other new features added to Book Creator for this school year include audio, video, and text commenting. Watch this video to see how that works.

How to Adjust Playback Volume in Google Slides

Support for audio files was welcome addition to Google Slides when it was announced in the fall of 2019. But four years later there are still some quirks to it to watch out for. And sometimes the setting you need isn't quickly found. That was the case a few days ago when someone emailed me to ask about adjusting the volume of audio playback in Google Slides.

In this brief video I demonstrate how to adjust the volume of the audio playback in a Google Slides presentation. In the video I also demonstrate how to hide the playback icon. 

Make Green Screen Videos With Zoom and Adobe Express

A few weeks ago I shared directions for creating green screen videos in Canva. That method is great because it doesn't require you to record in front of a physical green screen. Today, I'd like to share another method that doesn't require you to record in front of a physical green screen. That method uses a combination of Zoom and Adobe Express. 

Zoom's desktop client has an option to replace your background with any picture that you want to upload to your Zoom account. Host a Zoom meeting without any participants in it, replace the background, and start talking. When you end the meeting you'll have an MP4 that you can import in Adobe Express for further editing and or combine with other video clips.

In this short video I demonstrate how to create a green screen video by using a combination of Zoom and Adobe Express. 

Applications for Education
As someone who spent years teaching world geography classes, one of my favorite uses of green screens is to have students create "on location" video reports about places they've researched. This combination of Zoom and Adobe Express makes it easy to make those videos without the need for a physical green screen.

Finding and Exploring 15 Minute Cities

City Access Map is an interactive map that anyone can use to find and explore the walkability of cities around the world. Specifically, City Access Map lets you explore cities in which residents can access needed services within a fifteen minute walk. City Access Map calls these cities 15 Minute Cities. 

You can explore City Access Map by browsing through the listing of cities or by simply panning, zooming, and clicking on an interactive globe. Once you've chosen a city to look at it in more detail you can adjust the display based on filters that you select. Those filters are things like schools, hospitals, libraries, parks, and public transportation centers. 

Watch this brief video for an overview of City Access Map. 

Applications for Education
As I explained in the video above, to be listed on City Access Map the city needs to have at least 500,000 people. That leaves a lot of towns and small cities off the map. That inspired me to think about having students use tools like Google Maps and Bing Maps to evaluate where they live to determine how many services are available to them within a fifteen minute walk and how "walkable" their communities are in general.

H/T to Maps Mania. 

How to Set Notifications for Individual Google Documents

Google Drive has long let you receive email and desktop notifications for edits and comments to your shared Google Docs. Unfortunately, it was an "all or nothing" setting. In other words, you could either receive notifications or not receive notifications for all documents. Recently, Google Docs was updated so that you can now set notification preferences for individual documents. Watch this short video that I recorded to see how to set individual notifications for your shared Google Documents. 

Applications for Education
Long ago I turned off all notifications for files in my Google Drive because I could get quickly overwhelmed by all of the notifications created from files that I shared with students and that they shared with me. That meant I'd occasionally miss an update to documents that I had shared with colleagues. Being able to turn on notifications for individual documents could be a great way to make sure that I get notifications for only the most important or time-sensitive documents in my account.

Five More Things Students Can Explain With Simple Animations

Last week I shared five suggestions for things that students can explain with simple animations. This week I have five more ideas to share with you. But first I'd like to remind you that creating simple animations to illustrate understanding of concepts can be done by just about anyone in just about any context. That’s kind of the idea behind Dan Roam’s book The Back of the Napkin and it’s the idea behind my upcoming Making and Teaching With Animated Explanations course.

• What happens when water freezes? (A question from my five-year-old).
• How the Internet works.
• The stock market.
• Fractions
• Long and short vowel sounds (a suggestion from a Kindergarten teacher that I know).

Click here to learn more about and register for Animated Explanations.

The Differences Between Crows and Ravens

Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven gets read a lot in schools at this time of year. Why you should read Poe's work is explained in one of the Halloween-themed TED-Ed lessons that I shared a few days ago. What's not explained in those lessons is the difference between a raven and a crow. To answer that question, turn to a couple of resources from The Cornell Lab's Bird Academy. 

Caw vs. Croak: Inside the Calls of Crows and Ravens is an interesting three minute explanation of the differences between the calls that crows and ravens make. The narrator of the video even explains what some of the different calls mean to the birds. 

American Crows and Common Ravens is a reference page that describes the physical differences between crows and ravens. At the bottom of the page there is a short and fun quiz to test your crow and raven identification skills. 

Applications for Education

If you're fortunate to live in an area that has both crows and ravens, take your class on a little walk to see if they can spot the each and identify them by sight and or sound. 

A Fun Tool for Creating Avatars

The internet is full of websites on which you can make little icons and avatars. What it's not full of is free sites for that purpose that aren't littered with pop-up ads and similar annoyances. That's why I was happy to find Mustachio. Mustachio is a free site that anyone can use to create a simple avatar. 

To create an avatar on Mustachio simply go to the site and click on the flashing avatar until you see one that you like. You can then customize the basic avatar you've chosen. Some of the many customization options include changing the jawline of your avatar, adding or removing wrinkles, changing ear shape, and changing hair, skin, and eye colors. Watch this brief video to see how easy it is to create and download a free avatar on Mustachio. 

Applications for Education

Using a custom avatar can be a good alternative to using the stock avatars that students are assigned by various sites that they use for your class. It's also a good alternative to using their actual pictures. And creating a custom avatar is a quick and fun process that can be used as a reward or incentive in for reaching a goal in your classroom. I know some elementary school teachers who start the year with students using standard avatars and then as the year goes on students will get to create their own avatars when they've reached a particular goal for the class. 

How to Create a Timed Quiz in Microsoft Forms

Microsoft Forms recently got some new features that are helpful for teachers. One of those new features is the ability to set a time limit for completing a quiz once it has been started. This is different than the setting to automatically close a form at a given date and time. This new timed quiz option automatically closes a form based on how long it has been open on an individual viewer's computer. Watch my new video to learn how to create a timed quiz in Microsoft Forms. 

Applications for Education

In the past if you wanted to create a timed quiz with Microsoft Forms you had to set specific times for the form to automatically open and close. While that worked in some situations, it wasn't an ideal method because it didn't account for some students needing a little more time to actually open the form on their computers and it would require you to re-open the submission period for students who were absent the first time you gave the quiz. This new timed option lets you give your quiz in a manner so that every student has an equal amount of time to complete it. (The merits or lack thereof of giving timed quizzes is a debate for another time).  

My Top Five Tips for Creating Instructional Videos

Over the years I’ve made more than 1,000 videos for my YouTube channel and nearly as many for students in my classrooms. Here are five tips that I’ve figured out along the way.

Keep it short and sweet.
Two five minute videos are better than one ten minute video. Even though it’s the same amount of time, watching two five minute videos seems like less of a chore to students than sitting through one ten minute video. Additionally, by breaking it up into smaller chunks you give your students the chance to think about what they’ve watched or complete a short practice activity before watching the next video lesson.

Include Highlights, Drawings, or Annotations.
Watch any of my screencast videos and you’ll notice that I have my mouse pointer highlighted to make it easier for viewers to see where I’m clicking. When I’m creating video lessons for computer science students I’ll also zoom in and highlight or circle the line of code that I’m editing.

Occasionally, I like to use text annotations to remind viewers of what they’re looking at. For example, when making a video about Google Classroom I’ll overlay an annotation that reads “teacher view” or “student view.” Last week I used annotations to correct something that I misstated at the end of this video about an augmented reality geography game. 

When I taught U.S. History I would use drawing tools to circle or draw arrows pointing to places on a map in my video lessons.

Turn on, elevate, and look at your webcam.
Even if it’s subconsciously, students want to see your face and know that you’re there. Turning on your camera, even when making a screencast video, can improve the chances that your students will watch your video and pay attention to it. Put your camera at eye level or slightly higher. Doing this makes it easier to make eye contact with your camera which makes for a far better viewing experience than looking up your nose. A better viewing experience is going to increase the odds of students watching your video all the way through to the end.

Create a Call to Action
This seems simple but a lot of people overlook it. Ask students to do something either during the video or immediately after viewing your video. Your call to action could be in the form of a few multiple choice questions that are built into the video. Another call to action could be a prompt for students to try the problem solving method you explained in your video. The point is, you don’t want students to be passive viewers of your video lesson.

Make it accessible.
Thanks to the influence of my friend Dr. Beth Holland, in the last few years I’ve been more conscious of trying to make instructional materials as accessible as possible to all students. This means making sure materials are accessible on a variety of devices and it means making sure that my videos are captioned.

Fortunately, when you distribute a video lesson via YouTube captioning and resizing are done for you. If you use something other than YouTube, you can still have automatic captioning done for you in Chrome. Here’s a demo of how I created captions for a video that wasn’t hosted on YouTube.

The Common Cold Is Still Here! - Why Is It So Hard to Cure?

If you watched the video that I published on Wednesday you can hear me beginning to lose my voice. That's because like everyone else in my house and seemingly everyone in my neighborhood, I had a cold last week. Thankfully, none of us had COVID-19. But it was a reminder that the common cold is still around and can still make you feel crummy for a few days. 

Almost as if they were looking into our house, the producers of TED-Ed released a new video on Friday titled Why Is It So Hard to Cure the Common Cold? The video provides a concise explanation of the type of virus that causes common colds, what makes it different from COVID-19, and what makes it so hard to cure or create a vaccine against. 

Why Is It So Hard to Cure the Common Cold? is the latest addition to TED-Ed's playlist titled Humans vs. Viruses in which you can find another nineteen lessons about things like how vaccines work, how the human immune system works, and how often you should get a flu shot. 

On a related note, Colds, the Flu, and You is a video from SciShow Kids that explains the differences between common colds and influenza.

Trick O' Treat Safety Review Games

Halloween is just eight days away. If you're an elementary school teacher, you might be planning to do some trick o' treating safety reviews with your students. Playing Kahoot games is a fun way to review almost anything including Halloween safety. That's why a few years ago I made the following video to demonstrate how to find and modify Halloween safety games in Kahoot. 

Geography, Monsters, and Drawings - The Week in Review

Good morning from Maine where the sun is rising and it's a brisk 29F as I sip my dark roast coffee. It was a busy week here my little part of the world. We had two birthdays in my house, we all fought off little colds, and I announced a new course that I'm super excited about hosting in November. 

This weekend I have hours of leaf blowing and raking ahead of me. But I'll be sure to make time for riding bikes with my kids and taking our dogs for some walks in the woods. This is the best time of year to explore the Maine woods. I hope that you have an equally fun weekend ahead of you. 

These were the week's most popular posts:
1. GeoGeek AR - An Augmented Reality Geography Game
2. How to Catch Monsters - A Halloween Play Script
3. Five Google Workspace Tips That Can Make Your Day Better
4. C-SPAN Offers a Free Electoral College Poster
5. Halloween-themed Physical Education Lesson Plans
6. Five Ways QR Codes Can Be Helpful in Your School
7. Another Good Place to Find Free Drawings for Classroom Projects

I'll Come You!

If you'd like me to come to your school or conference, please send me an email at richardbyrne (at) freetech4teachers.com or fill out the form on this page. 

50 Tech Tuesday Tips!

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!

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 43,000 subscribers watching my short tutorial videos on a wide array of educational technology tools. 
• I've been Tweeting as @rmbyrne for fifteen years. 
• The Free Technology for Teachers Facebook page features new and old posts from this blog throughout the week. 
• If you're curious about my life outside of education, you can follow me on Strava.

This post originally appeared on FreeTech4Teachers.com. If you see it elsewhere, it has been used without permission. Featured image captured by Richard Byrne.

TED-Ed Lessons With a Halloween Theme

Halloween is a little more than a week away. It is during the next week that a lot of students will be introduced to the work of Edgar Allan Poe. A TED-Ed lesson examines what made Poe's macabre works timeless classics. In Why Should You Read Edgar Allan Poe? students can learn about Poe's guiding principles for writing, the recurring themes of his work, and the personal factors in his life that contributed to his writing. Find the complete lesson here or watch the video as embedded below.

If your students are going to do some Halloween-themed writing, TED-Ed has a lesson titled How to Make Your Writing Suspenseful that could be helpful to them. The lesson is part of a larger TED-Ed playlist called The Writer's Workshop. 

Vampires: Folklore, Fantasy, and Fact is a TED-Ed lesson that explores the myth of vampires. 

Why Does the Road Crack? - Another Question from my Daughters

One of my favorite things to do these days is to ride bikes with my daughters. Sometimes I even record those rides on Strava because my older daughter now wants to keep track of how fast she can go down a little section of road in our neighborhood (current record 10.5mph). When we were riding earlier this week she complained about the cracks in the pavement in one part of our neighborhood and asked, "why does the road crack?" 

I did my best to answer my daughter's question of "why does the road crack?" by explaining that there is a lot of water in the ground in our area. When that water freezes it expands and pushes up on the pavement which then makes it crack. She's six, so I'm not sure she quite got it even when I made the analogy to one of our clay garden pots cracking for the same reason last winter. 

As I almost always do when my daughters ask me a question that I haven't thought about in a long time, I turned to YouTube in search of a visual explanation of why roads crack in the winter. After a little searching I found this video from the Minnesota Department of Transportation. Jump to the 1:14 mark in the video to see an old visual of what happens when wet soil freezes. 

This topic is a great one for an animated explanation. Student can use some simple animation tools to create an explanation of what happens when water and or soil freezes and pushes up against a fixed or rigid object. Register for my new Animated Explanations course to learn how to create and use animated explanations in your classroom.

Five Things Students Can Explain With Simple Animations

One of my all-time favorite tech coaching experiences was helping an eighth grade science class produce short animations to explain forms of energy. It was one of my favorite experiences for two reasons. First, the teacher came to me and said, “I’m sick of boring PowerPoints. Get them to do anything else.” Second, the kids really grabbed onto the project and were excited to work on it. In the end, everyone was happy with the project.

Creating simple animations to illustrate understanding of concepts isn’t limited to eighth grade science classes. It can be done by just about anyone in just about any context. That’s kind of the idea behind Dan Roam’s book The Back of the Napkin and it’s the idea behind my upcoming Making and Teaching With Animated Explanations course.

To give some ideas of how animated explanations might be used in your classroom, here are five things students can explain with simple animations.

• Expansion and contraction of geopolitical borders over time.
• Steps to solve real world math problems like calculating the height of a tree.
• How plants grow from seeds.
• Literary concepts like foreshadowing, personification, or paradox.
• How satellites stay in orbit.

Click here to learn more about and register for Animated Explanations.

You Should Write About Rainbows!

Today is my youngest daughter's 5th birthday! When I told her that I needed to do some writing this morning she said, "you should write about rainbows!" So that's what this post is all about (for the record, the writing that I had planned to do this morning was about some cool resources for Geography Awareness Week coming up in November). 

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.

How Rainbows Form and What Shape They Really Are is a short video from ABC Australia. The video explains how rainbows are made, but also explains why we only see part of rainbow and not the full circle of a rainbow. (By the way, I'm not related to the presenter any more than I'm related to lead singer of Talking Heads). 

Now You Can Import PDFs Into Book Creator

Earlier this fall Book Creator added some helpful new features in the form of audio, video, and text commenting. This week the folks at Book Creator rolled-out another new and helpful feature. That feature is the ability to import PDFs to use in your Book Creator multimedia books. Here's a thirty second demo of the new import PDF option in Book Creator (I've caught a cold and lost my voice otherwise I'd make a longer and more detailed demo video). 

Applications for Education
The new import PDF option in Book Creator will let you take your existing PDFs and turn them into multimedia, interactive pages that you can share with your students. Likewise, students can import PDF designs they've made with tools like Adobe Express or Canva to enhance their own multimedia books in Book Creator. And don't forget that you can export Google Slides, PowerPoint, and Keynote presentations as PDFs that you could then import into Book Creator to develop a multimedia book to share online.

Another Good Place to Find Free Drawings for Classroom Projects

Earlier this year I published a list of good places to find free images and drawings to use in your classroom projects. Thanks to something that Troy Patterson Tweeted earlier this week I have another good resource to add to that list. 

CocoMaterial is an online library of nearly 2,500 drawings that you can download and re-use for free. Unlike some similar sites, CocoMaterial doesn't offer anything but drawings and doesn't litter the search results page with advertisements for other images that you have to purchase. Watch this short video for an overview of CocoMaterial. 

Applications for Education
The drawings that are available on CocoMaterial are clean, simple, and easy to see. They could be great for use in classroom projects like simple web design, infographic design, or to just brighten-up the newsletters that you send home to parents.

Halloween-themed Physical Education Lesson Plans

Halloween is less than two weeks away. I don't know about your students and children, but mine are very excited about it! That's why I was excited to get an email from OPEN Phys Ed earlier this week that linked to more than a dozen Halloween-themed lesson plans for physical education classes. The collection is titled Pumpkin Patch Games and you can access all of them as PDFs and or Word files. 

Like all of the OPEN Phys Ed resources that I've reviewed over the last few years, the Pumpkin Patch Games are designed to be as inclusive as possible. The games aren't your "traditional" ball-sports type of games that make some kids loathe physical education classes. A few of the games students might enjoy include Silly Spooky Storytime (my older daughter would love that one), Monster Mash, and Pickles in the Pumpkin Patch. 

In addition to directions for each of the dozen+ games in Pumpkin Patch Games, OPEN provides music playlists that you might want to use while kids are playing the various games in your gym. 

For even more OPEN Phys Ed resources take a look at the following links:

• Rhythm Fit
• Family Phys Ed Week
• OPEN National Field Day

How to Play GeoGeek AR

Last week I wrote a brief overview of a fun geography app called GeoGeek AR. The "AR" in the app's name stands for augmented reality. The use of AR makes it possible to put a digital globe right into your classroom or anywhere else that your students are standing when holding an iPad or Android tablet. Yesterday, a reader emailed me for an explanation of how to use the app. Like most things, it's easier to show it in a screencast than it is to write out directions. So I made this short demo video. Watch it to the end for a special guest appearance by one of my dogs. 

Applications for Education

As I wrote last week, GeoGeek AR doesn't require you to register in order to play. That can make it a good option for use on shared classroom iPads. Overall, it's a fun little game for practicing place identification. 

Five Google Workspace Tips That Can Make Your Day Better

The best part of a being a teacher is making connections with kids. Making those connections takes time. Unfortunately, teaching also comes with a lot of procedural and administrative tasks that take away from the time that can be used to build those connections with students. But you can get some of that time back when you use helpful systems to streamline administrative tasks. In this new video I highlight five Google Workspace tips that can make your day a little better by streamlining some routine tasks. 


Watch the video above to learn about:

• Creating email templates.
• Using an email schedule.
• Streamlining meeting scheduling. 
• Creating unforgettable reminders. 
• Quickly creating helpful things with Google Sheets templates. 

Making and Teaching With Animated Explanations - A New Practical Ed Tech Course

At the end of this week’s Practical Ed Tech newsletter I teased a new online course that I’ve been developing. That course is Animated Explanations. It will begin on November 1st.

In Animated Explanations you’ll learn why creating animations is a great teaching and learning activity in elementary school, middle school, and high school classrooms. Of course, you’ll also learn how you and your students can create animated explanations of a wide range of topics and concepts.

This course is going to be delivered in a little different manner than other courses that I’ve hosted in the past. Rather than being a series of live webinars or being a big dump of materials all at once, this course will be delivered via email. Every week, beginning on November 1st, you’ll receive an email that contains a written lesson, video tutorials, and handouts that you can use in your classroom. In total you’ll receive five lessons that all together should take you about five hours to complete.

As this course will be delivered via email, you’ll be able to ask questions by simply hitting reply at the end of each lesson.

Be a part of the inaugural class!
I’ve offered Animated Explanations in the past as an in-person workshop. This is the first time that I’m presenting it in an online format. I’ll be looking for your feedback throughout the course. And because it’s the first time I’m offering this course in this manner, I’m pricing it much lower than other five-week courses that I’ve hosted in the past.

Register here!

Sign-up for the course today and you’ll receive a welcome email from me within minutes of your registration. Then on November 1st at 6am ET the first lesson will arrive in your inbox.

Course Outline
The course will be delivered in five parts through weekly emails throughout November. The lesson titles are as follows:

• Big Picture(s)
• Creating from Drawings
• Stills to Animations
• Narrated Animations
• Programmed Animations

Questions?
If you want to know more about the course or just make sure that it’s right for you, send me an email at richard (at) byrne.media and I’ll be happy to answer any and all questions that you have.

Register here!

Sign-up for the course today and you’ll receive a welcome email from me within minutes of your registration. Then on November 1st at 6am ET the first lesson will arrive in your inbox.

A note about registration fees: Registration fees from my Practical Ed Tech courses are what help to keep Free Technology for Teachers going. Without them this blog would have ended years ago. Thank you to all who have supported it over the years. 

C-SPAN Offers a Free Electoral College Poster

C-SPAN Classroom is one of my go-to sources of ideas for lessons on current events related to U.S. government and politics. Membership in C-SPAN Classroom is free and provides members with lots of digital and physical resources. One of the resources C-SPAN Classroom is currently offering to members is a poster about the Electoral College. This is an update to the one that they offered back in 2016. You can request a printed, full-size copy of the poster right here and get a smaller JPG version of it here. 

C-SPAN's 2024 Electoral College Map shows the number of Electoral votes each state has in 2024. The poster also includes the Electoral vote and popular vote tallies of the every election dating back to 1900. 

Applications for Education
The poster on its own is nice, but students will need some guidance in understanding what all of the information really means. To that end C-SPAN Classroom offers free lesson plans about the Electoral College including this one titled The Electoral College and the Constitution. 

How to Catch Monsters - A Halloween Play Script

How to Catch Monsters is a free play script published by Playbooks Reader's Theater. The play was written to be performed by students in first through third grade. The play centers around two children who are trying to catch blue, green, and purple monsters. The children do get a little help from their work-from-home dad. In all there are six roles for students to play. There is also a narrator role for a teacher to play in How to Catch Monsters. 

The How to Catch Monsters script is color coded to make it a little easier for students to follow. The script also includes some cues and other notes to help students perform the play. 

Applications for Education
Performing How to Catch Monsters could be a fun Halloween-themed activity for elementary school students. You can read the entire script online and or print it for free from the Playbooks Reader's Theater website. One concern I do have about the script is that it might be a bit too advanced for some first and second grade students. The whole script is less than thirty pages so it won't take you long to decide if it's a good fit for your students.

Two EdTech Guys Take Questions - Season Three, Episode Two

Last week Rushton Hurley and I hosted the second episode of the third season of our Two Ed Tech Guys Take Questions series. We were joined by a handful of fine folks and even more people were registered to join us. If you missed our live broadcast, you can now watch the recording and find all of the associated links right here on Next Vista for Learning. The recording is also available to view here on Rushton's YouTube channel and as embedded below. 
 

We'll be hosting the next episode of this series on November 1st. Register here for the live session and to receive an email containing the recording and all of the resources we mention in the webinar. Until then feel free to email me or Rushton with your questions.