Videos, Certificates, and Birds - The Week in Review

Good morning from Maine where we have gone from it feeling like it was barely spring to feeling like it's the middle of summer in the span of one week. The temperature got up to 86F yesterday and it's going to be even warmer today. It's going to be great for playing outside, riding bikes, and having fun wearing shorts and tee shirts for the first time in 2022. 

Another sign that spring is quickly turning into summer is the increasing number of bird nests around our house. We even have a grosbeak nesting on our property. This week a male grosbeak started visiting our window bird feeder during our dinner time. We enjoy the show that nature provides. I hope that you're able to do the same wherever you live. Speaking of which, Steven Rinella has published a new book that I highly recommend to anyone who is interested in getting kids outside and engaged with nature. It's titled Outdoor Kids in an Inside World. 

These were the week's most popular posts:
1. Three Tools for Quickly & Easily Creating End-of-Year Slideshow Videos
2. How to Create and Send Personalized Certificates in Google Workspace
3. Quick and Easy Ways to Remove Image Backgrounds
4. Create Location-based Reminders in Google Keep
5. Living Wage vs. Minimum Wage
6. How to Create Your Own Virtual Reality Tours
7. SplashLearn - More Than Just Fun Math and ELA Practice

Summer Workshops for Your School!
I'm going back on the road this summer to host professional development workshops in-person! If you'd like to have me come to your school, please get in touch with me soon.

Spring and Summer Webinars
I conduct professional development webinars throughout the year. I'll host a free one-hour webinar for any school or group that purchases ten or more copies of 50 Tech Tuesday Tips.

Thanks to This Month's Banner Advertisers!

• Kikori App offers a huge library of SEL activities for all ages. 
• WriteReader is a great tool for multimedia writing. 

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 41,000 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 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.

A Cool Lesson for a Hot Spring Day - How the Popsicle Was Invented

It was 86F here in Maine yesterday. In the afternoon my kids had popsicles outside for the first time in 2022! That prompted my five-year-old to ask, "why are they called popsicles?" I didn't have a good answer despite the fact that I did recall watching a TED-Ed lesson about popsicles a few years ago. So I went and looked it up. 

How the Popsicle Was Invented explains the origin of the tasty treat itself as well as the name "Popsicle." This TED-Ed lesson doesn't include any multiple choice or discussion questions. It's just a fun little lesson for students to think about as the weather warms and ice cream trucks start to appear in neighborhoods (side note, ice cream trucks is one of the few things I miss about living in a suburb).

Applications for Education
You could extend this lesson by doing a little kitchen science lesson with elementary school students. They could experiment with sugar content and flavoring. And they could compare the time it takes for a Popsicle to freeze to the time it takes for an equal amount of water without sugar or flavoring to freeze.