Slides, Experiments, and Skis - The Week in Review

Good morning from Maine where everything is covered in snow this morning! The first proper snowstorm of the year rolled in yesterday and it's still snowing as I write this morning. After I take care of shoveling it will be time for fun in the snow. My oldest daughter has been eagerly anticipating getting out on her skis so we're going to do that this weekend. We also have tickets to see a Disney on Ice performance this weekend. It's going to be a fun-filled weekend for us. I hope that you're weekend is equally fun!

Before I head out to do some snow removal, I have this week's list of the most popular posts to share with you. 

These were the week's most popular posts:
1. A New Google Slides Feature That Could Help Reduce Collaborator Confusion
2. Color Our Collections - National Portrait Gallery Coloring Pages
3. Get Your Free Copy of The 2022-23 Practical Ed Tech Handbook
4. Ten Canva Features for Students - An Experiment
5. A Short Overview of ChatGPT
6. Artificial Intelligence in Canva Documents
7. Can I Use That Picture? - A Short Guide to Using Pictures from the Web

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!

Workshops and eBooks

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. Book me for this school year and I'll include copies of my eBook for all of the teachers in your school. 

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.

New Features of the LOC's By the People

By the People is a Library of Congress project that I've written about and featured in my Teaching History With Technology courses since 2018. On By the People teachers and students can contribute to crowd-sourcing transcriptions of thousands of primary source documents. Some of the collections that I've featured over the years have been campaigns to transcribe collections of documents written by soldiers in the American Civil War, the journals of Walt Whitman, and letters written by James Garfield.

This week the Library of Congress announced some new features of the By the People website. The most significant of those features is an updated image viewer. The image viewer now includes filters that can be used to help people more closely analyze the details of primary source documents housed in By the People collections that still need to be transcribed. Some other new features include updated profile pages for registered contributors and easier identification of documents that still need to be transcribed. 

Applications for Education
For years I've recommended using By the People as a means to get high school students to dive into primary sources to learn about the people and events featured in the collections while also learning about the importance of accurately transcribing primary sources. The LOC now has a page of resources for teachers who would like to have their students participate in transcribe-a-thon events that utilize the By the People collections.