Animals and Reading - The Week in Review

Good morning from Maine where I've spent most of the week on a staycation taking my kids to the Maine Wildlife Park, visiting York's Wild Kingdom, and relaxing while watching stages of the Tour de France (I was so hopeful that Neilson Powless would pull on the yellow jersey). This weekend we'll be hanging out at our favorite lake. I hope that you also have something fun planned for your weekend. 

In the middle of my staycation week I did host one webinar in my Practical Ed Tech summer series. Next week I'm hosting Video Projects for Almost Every Classroom. I hope you'll join me to learn how to plan, conduct, and evaluate five video projects that can be done in almost any K-12 classroom. 

These were the week's most popular posts:
1. A Good Place to Find Free Images and Music for Classroom Projects
2. Geo Artwork - A Fun Game About Geography and Art
3. Summer Reading, Notebooks, and Thinking
4. Best of 2022 So Far - Image Background Removers
5. Best of 2022 So Far - QRToon
6. Best of 2022 So Far - Mote
7. Best of 2022 So Far - Readlee

July and August Webinars!
Starting this week I'm hosting a series of seven Practical Ed Tech webinars. You can register for one or all seven of them. Read about them here or follow the links below to register.

• Video Projects for Almost Every Classroom
• Classroom Podcasting 101
• DIY App Creation for the Rest of Us
• Search Strategies Students Need to Know
• To Geography & Beyond With Google Earth & Maps
• Get Organized With Google Classroom, Calendar, and Keep

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.

Best of 2022 So Far - Smithsonian Canvas

I'm taking the rest of the week off. While I'm gone I'll be republishing some of the most popular posts of the year so far. 

This week the Smithsonian Learning Lab released a new tool that could be very helpful to history and art teachers. The tool is simply called Canvas (no connection to the LMS of the same name). Smithsonian Learning Lab's Canvas tool lets you build collections of Smithsonian digitized artifacts and arrange the display of those artifacts however you like. 

The Canvas tool will work with new collections that you create in your Smithsonian Learning Lab account and it will work with your existing collections. In both cases you can select the layout for the collection, the size of the images, and the color scheme of the notes in your collection. You can also share your Canvas so that your students can view it. Complete directions for using the new Smithsonian Learning Lab Canvas can be found here. Directions for creating collections can be seen here. 

Applications for Education

In the announcement of the Canvas tool the Smithsonian Learning Lab provided a couple of uses for the new tool. Those uses include arranging artifacts for making side-by-side comparisons (great for art teachers/ students) and creating thematic collections that span multiple areas. This Canvas of postcards is a good example of arranging a collection thematically.