AI, AI, and AI - The Month in Review

Good evening from Maine where the sun has set on the shortest month of the year. It also seemed to be the coldest month of the year. And to close out the month we're having another snowstorm! 

AI (artificial intelligence) is the most popular topic in all of the educational technology landscape today. Likewise, four of the most popular posts on this blog in February were about artificial intelligence tools. 

As I do at the end of every month, I've put together a list of the ten most popular posts of the month. Take a look and see if there's something interesting that you missed earlier this month. 

1. 10 Tools for Gathering Real-time Feedback From Students
2. Free Course on ChatGPT and AI in Education
3. The Makers of ChatGPT Have Launched a Tool to Detect Text Written With AI
4. Three Good Tools for Recording Brainstorming Sessions
5. 75 Google Documents Tutorials
6. Three Tools for Detecting Writing Created by AI
7. 167 Math In "Real Life" Lessons
8. GPTZero - Another Tool to Detect Writing Created by AI
9. New Padlet Feature! Present Padlet Walls as Slideshows
10. Lumen5 - Quickly Turn Your Writing Into Videos

Make More Money This Year!

If you're looking for a way to put a little more money in your pocket this year, my self-paced course How to Create and Sell Digital Products in 2023 is for you! It's one of three on-demand courses that I currently offer.

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. 

50 Tech Tuesday Tips!

50 Tech Tuesday Tips is an eBook that I created with busy tech coaches, tech integration specialists, 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 nearly 45,000 subscribers watching my short tutorial videos on a wide array of educational technology tools. 
• I've been Tweeting as @rmbyrne for fifteen years. 
• I update my LinkedIn profile a time or two every week.
• 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.

Great Art Explained

Despite the efforts of my friend Maggie, I don't always understand what makes one work of art great and a similar-looking one fit for display in a Hilton Garden Inn. I thought about that last weekend when I came across a YouTube channel called Great Art Explained. The channel seems to have been made for folks just like me. 

Great Art Explained features twenty-five videos that provide ten to fifteen minute explanations of some of the works of Van Gogh, Picasso, Warhol, Monet, Hokusai, and many others. The videos that I watched over the weekend explained both the artwork itself and the life of the artist and how that influenced their artwork. 

Applications for Education

Great Art Explained could be a good resource for art teachers as well as history teachers. The videos are short enough to be useful for flipped classroom lessons while still providing enough depth to spark good classroom discussions about the works. 

On a related note, you might also be interested in this collection of more than 900 art history books available to view online. 

Chromebook Keyboard Considerations for Kindergarten

My oldest daughter is in Kindergarten this year. Recently, she started using a Chromebook in her classroom. The Chromebook that she uses at school is different from the one we have at home. The difference is minor for most of us, but it's huge for kids her age. That difference is found on the keyboard. 

The Chromebook that my daughter uses at school has all of the letters appearing as capitalized letters on the keyboard. For example, the letter a appears as "A" and the letter q appears as "Q." That is accomplished through the use of a Chromebook keyboard overlay. The Chromebook that we have at home doesn't have an overlay and therefore the keys appear in all lowercase letters. 

The trouble with a keyboard that appears in all lowercase letters is that the letters "a" and "q" don't appear to a Kindergarten student in the same way that they do when handwritten. I only noticed this last week when my daughter wanted to practice typing her full name which includes the letters a and q. She initially struggled because she couldn't find the a and q keys until I showed them to her. At which point she argued with me that "a" wasn't "written the right way." 

My daughter now recognizes all "a" as an a on the keyboard, but it wasn't without a bit of struggle. 

How to Create Your First Canva Presentation

Over the years I've published a lot of Canva tutorials. But until last week I had never created one specifically for students and teachers making their first presentations in Canva. That's what this new video is all about. 

In How to Create Your First Canva Presentation I demonstrate how to sign into your account, how to find projects that have been shared with you, and how to create a new project from scratch. In the video I also cover how to add and customize pictures, drawings, and videos in your slides. The video concludes with a demonstration of how to share a finished presentation made with Canva. 

Watch the videos below to learn how to do even more with your Canva slides after you've created them.

How to Record a Video Presentation in Canva



How to Create an Audio Slideshow Video in Canva

167 Math In "Real Life" Lessons

Math in Real Life is a series of 167 TED-Ed lessons and TED Talks. The "real life" context in these lessons isn't things like "how calculating percentages helps you be a frugal shopper." The "real life" context found in the videos in the Math in Real Life series is broad in nature. For example, you will find lessons about how math is used to guide ships and calculating rates of travel in space.

Applications for Education
The Math in Real Life series of TED-Ed videos, like most TED-Ed videos, could make nice extensions to your classroom instruction.

Chem Collective Virtual Labs

Chem Collective is a project designed and maintained by Carnegie Mellon University's chemistry department and the National Science Digital Library. On Chem Collective you will find virtual labs for chemistry experiments, simulations, visualizations, tutorials, and auto-graded problems. Students and teachers can search the site by resource type or by chemistry topic.

Applications for Education
Chem Collective offers teachers the option to create their own Chem Collective pages containing resources and activities that they have selected from the Chem Collective library for their students.

Chem Collective also offers free virtual lab experiments to run your web browser.

AI, Brainstorming, and Authentication - The Week in Review

Good morning from Maine where the wind is howling and the wind chill makes it feel as though it's -15F right now. It's no wonder our cat has camped himself in front of the stove this morning. I much prefer he do that than rub his head on my laptop as I type this week's week-in-review post. 

This week was school vacation week here in Maine. I took most of the week off to teach skiing lessons, take my own kids skiing, and enjoy a little time away from my computer screen. Somehow I still managed to publish a bunch of new posts throughout the week. Take a look at the list below and see if there is anything that piques your interest. 

These were the week's most popular posts:
1. Free Course on ChatGPT and AI in Education
2. Three Good Tools for Recording Brainstorming Sessions
3. 10 Tools for Gathering Real-time Feedback From Students
4. Warm-up Activities for Group Brainstorming Sessions
5. How to Blur Objects and Faces In Your Videos
6. How to Use the Google Authenticator App With Twitter
7. How to Make a Mini Course

Make More Money This Year!

If you're looking for a way to put a little more money in your pocket this year, my self-paced course How to Create and Sell Digital Products in 2023 is for you! It's one of three on-demand courses that I currently offer.

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. 

50 Tech Tuesday Tips!

50 Tech Tuesday Tips is an eBook that I created with busy tech coaches, tech integration specialists, 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 nearly 45,000 subscribers watching my short tutorial videos on a wide array of educational technology tools. 
• I've been Tweeting as @rmbyrne for fifteen years. 
• I update my LinkedIn profile a time or two every week.
• 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.

"Why Does He Do So Much Sniffing?" - Another Question from My Daughters

 

If you read this blog regularly, you've probably picked up that I love dogs. So of course I was excited years ago when  TED-Ed published a lesson about how dogs "see" with their noses. And I enjoyed it again this week after my youngest daughter asked me why our dog does so much sniffing.

How Do Dogs "See" With Their Noses? provides a great explanation of how dogs noses work. The most interesting part of the video is the explanation of how dogs' senses of smell allow them to identify friends, foes, and potential threats. The video is embedded below. You can find the full lesson here.

Why That Image Link Won't Work in a Flippity Template

Earlier this week I wrote about and published a video about making memory games with Flippity. Almost every time I write about Flippity I get an email from someone who has run into a problem with images not rendering. This week was not an exception to that pattern. 

There are generally two reasons why an image link doesn't render an image in a Flippity template. The first reason is that the link itself is incorrect. The link (URL) has to end in .png or .jpg or .jpeg in order to work correctly. You can usually find the correct URL by simply right-clicking on the image and selecting "copy image address." 

The other reason why an image link might not work in a Flippity template is that the image host doesn't allow hotlinking. For example, Pixabay doesn't allow hotlinking to its images.

What is hotlinking?
In a nutshell, hotlinking is inserting a picture into a blog post through a URL rather than uploading the image file itself to your blog. You can read more about hotlinking on the Simple English Wikipedia or on Host Gator's page about preventing hotlinking to your own work.

Why you and your students should avoid hotlinking.
Hotlinking itself isn't bad if you're only linking to images that you own and control online. For example, let's say that you have a Flickr account to which you upload dozens of pictures that you took. You could use the embed code or the link that Flickr provides to post your images in your blog post.

When hotlinking causes trouble is when you link to another person's image hosted in their account or on their servers. Even if the image is in the public domain you probably don't want to hotlink to it. In fact some services, like Pixabay which hosts public domain images, block attempts at hotlinking. They block hotlinking because when you hotlink you're using more of their bandwidth than if you simply downloaded the image to your computer then uploaded it to your blog.

The biggest concern about hotlinking is not knowing exactly who or what you're linking to. As Sue implied in her Tweet this morning, it is possible that the image you linked to and the image displayed could be changed without warning. It's also possible that the link a student inserts to hotlink links back to site or host laden with malware that could then rain down havoc on your blog.

A Good Series on How Computers Work

We use computers every day. But how many of us actually know how they work? Sure we know how to use the software, but I'm thinking about the hardware. How does that aspect of your computer work? Code.org has a good video series that addresses that question and more.

Through watching the videos in How Computers Work you can learn about memory, logic, circuits, binary, and the interaction between hardware and software. Get started by watching Bill Gates introduce the series.

Applications for Education
If you're planning to do any classroom projects with Raspberry Pi or Arduino, this series of videos could provide a nice primer for students. Similarly, the videos might help students complete the picture of how computers work after completing a hands-on Raspberry Pi or Arduino activity.

My Updated Guide to Media for Classroom Projects

Over the last year some of my old favorite sources of media for classroom projects changed or completely disappeared. They’ve been replaced by some new and updated sources for free sound effects, music, videos, pictures, and drawings to use in classroom projects. That's why I created an updated guide to finding media for classroom projects. 

People who are subscribed to my Practical Ed Tech Tip-of-the-Week Newsletter had a copy of the guide emailed to them on Sunday evening. If you'd like a copy emailed to you, sign-up for my newsletter and I'll be happy to send it to you. A few highlights from the guide are included below.

The Library of Congress can be a good place to find images to use in classroom projects, if you know where to look on the site. I recommend looking in the Free to Use and Reuse collections. Those are collections of images that are thematically arranged. Here’s a brief overview of how to find images on the LOC’s website.



Pixabay is one of my go-to sites for public domain images. Pixabay also offers public domain video clips that you can download for free. To find video clips on Pixabay simply choose "video" from the drop-down menu that appears in the right edge of Pixabay's search box.

Dig CC Mixter offers thousands of songs that are Creative Commons licensed. The site is divided into three main categories. Those categories are Instrumental Music for Film & Video, Free Music for Commercial Projects, and Music for Video Games. Within each category you can search according to genre, instrument, and style. When you click the download icon on a file you will be prompted to copy the attribution information that is required to include in your project. Here's a little video overview of Dig CC Mixter. 

The Google Docs Features Starter Pack

I recently published a playlist of 76 Google Docs tutorials. But you certainly don't need to use all of the features of Google Docs demonstrated in that playlist let alone watch all of the videos. In fact, I'm often asked for a list of the "must-know" features instead of all of the "could use" features. Here are ten features that new users can benefit from learning early on.

1. Font options
Besides the default options in the font drop-down menu there are hundreds of other options available when you choose "more fonts" at the top of that menu. And while we're on the topic of fonts, it is possible to change the default font.

2. Page orientation
In the "File" drop-down menu you'll find a "page setup" option that allows you to change page orientation, set margins, and even change the page background color.

3. Find and Replace (Ctrl + H)
The next time you find yourself sitting down to start writing summative reports before parent-teacher conferences, create a template that you can quickly modify for each student. Then you can use the find and replace function to quickly change names, adjectives, and even entire sentences without having to create each report from scratch.

4. Personal dictionary 
In the "tools" menu select "personal dictionary" to teach the spell check to ignore the spelling of names or other words that are often marked incorrect by spell check despite being spelled correctly. For example, the last name of a friend of mine is Wankowicz, that name is never recognized by spell check unless the spell check is customized through the "personal dictionary" function.

5. Custom spacing
The default line spacing in Google Docs is 1.15. You can change that to anything you like, if you know where the line spacing settings are found. You can find the settings in the "format" menu. You can also find it in the toolbar. See the screenshot below for direction on finding the line spacing settings in the toolbar.

Click image to enlarge.

6. Version history
This feature was formerly called "revision history." Select "version history" to find the various iterations of your document. You can set different names for each version. This is a great feature for seeing the evolution of a student's document.

7. Adding collaborators
Click the "share" button in the upper, right corner of your document to invite people to become collaborators on your document. You can give people full access to edit your document or you can restrict them to only being able to make suggestions and comments on your document.

8. Lock shared documents
Google Docs includes the option to make your document available for anyone to view even if they don't have Google accounts. But just because people can view your document it doesn't mean that they have to be able to make copies of or print your document. Use the "advanced" option on the sharing menu to disable the option to print or copy your public documents.

Click image to enlarge.

9. Insert drawings
Need to insert a signature? Want to quickly add a flow chart to a document? Use Google Drawings within your document. You'll find that option in the "insert" drop-down menu.

10. Export your document.
Prefer to print a PDF? Have someone who insists that you send him or her a Word file attached to an email instead of using Google Docs? You can do both of those things by selecting "download as" in the File menu.

Three Ways to Quickly Map Spreadsheet Data

I recently came across an older Towards Data Science article about ten ways to represent data on maps. Reading the article reminded me of something that I've tried to share with social studies teachers and students over the years. That thing is that a great data set can tell you a lot. A great map can tell you a lot. Putting them together can tell you even more. To that end, here are three ways to quickly create a map of data contained in a spreadsheet. 

Google's My Maps tool lets you import a Google Sheet and have the data from that sheet displayed as placemarks on an interactive map. Watch this video that I created to learn how you can create a map based on data in a Google Sheet.

Felt is a relatively new multimedia mapping tool. In your Felt account you can upload a CSV or Excel file and have the data within the spreadsheet distributed as placemarks and or polygons on a map. After the data is initially loaded you can then customize the design of your map by altering the color, size, and shape of the placemarks and polygons. You can also customize the size and color of the labels on your map after the spreadsheet data has been imported onto your map. Watch my video below to learn how to display your spreadsheet data on a Felt map. 

Heat Map Tool is a tool for easily creating heat maps or incident maps from a CSV file. To create a heat map all you need to do is upload a CSV file then specify your desired display attributes like scale, colors, and opacity. You can edit the display attributes of your map whenever you like. If you're wondering how to create a CSV file you can do so by exporting from a spreadsheet in Google Documents or exporting from an Excel file. Click here for directions on exporting from Excel. The free version of Heat Map Tool allows you to have up to 100 data points on your map and up to 500 hits per day on your map.

How to Create Your Own Online Memory Games

A few years ago one of my students created a memory game app with the MIT App Inventor. It was a great exercise through which she learned about all of the variables and parts of the app that need to be designed. If you're a little more pressed for time than my student was and you just want to quickly generate some matching games for your students to play, there are easier methods than programming your own app.

Matching Game is one of the many Google Sheets templates that Flippity offers. Like all Flippity templates you can make a copy of the template, modify it by adding your own words or terms, and then clicking the activity URL provided by Flippity. Try a sample Flippity Matching Game here and get the template here. Watch my new video that is embedded below for guidance on using the templates. 

Educandy is a game builder that offers a handful of online game creation templates. One of those is a matching or memory game template. To use the template you simply provide a list of words or terms and Educandy does the rest. Your game will be assigned its own URL that you can distribute to your students. Watch this video to see how Educandy works.

How to Blur Objects and Faces In Your Videos

Yesterday I published a post about using two-factor authentication on Twitter. In that post I included a video demonstration. In that video I blurred the QR code and the verification code that was sent to me. If you're making tutorial videos to share with others, you'll want to do the same. Fortunately, blurring objects in your videos is easy to do. There are two methods that I regularly use and recommend to others.  

For years YouTube's built-in editor has included a tool for blurring faces and objects in your videos. The editor has two blurring options. The first option is "automatic face blurring" which automatically detects faces and blurs them. The downside to using that option is that it will blur all faces for the whole length of the video. That's fine unless you want to selectively blur faces or you want to blur something besides a face. The other blurring option in the YouTube editor is to selectively blur. That option lets you manually place a blurry box or oval over a section of your video. Both blurring options are demonstrated in this short video. 

Screencastify's video editor also offers an easy way to blur faces and objects in your videos. In Screencastify's video editor you can choose to blur any face or object for as long as you like in your videos. You can also have multiple blurs running simultaneously in your video. Screencastify's object blurring feature is demonstrated in this video. 

Stocks, Bonds, Options, and Economics

A couple of days ago I published a short video that I made to explain stock options. In planning to make that video I went back through my archives to look at some related resources that I've shared over the years. Here are some highlights from my archive of resources for teaching and learning about stocks, bonds, options, and economics in general. 

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). 

Inflation Explained in One Minute provides a very basic explanation of the concept of inflation. It could be fine as a conversation starter or introduction to a lesson. However, if viewed on its own without additional information it might give students the impression that inflation is solely caused by changes in money supply. 



How Inflation Works is an excellent twelve minute video lesson produced by CNBC International. The video does a great job of explaining demand-pull inflation and cost-push inflation. Going beyond the basics the video also provides an excellent comparison of the economic theories of Milton and Keynes. Students will also learn how the consumer price index is calculated and how it is indicative of inflation. Finally, the video concludes with historical examples of inflation around the world and the causes of those hyper-inflationary episodes. I should note that the video will lend itself to introducing other concepts to your students including the importance of the federal reserve's interest rate.



If you or your students would prefer an animated lesson about inflation, The School of Life offers this solid explanation of cost-push and demand-pull inflation.



TED-Ed Lessons on Economics
TED-Ed has four lessons that could fit in well with a larger discussion and lessons related to inflation.

Why Can't Governments Print an Unlimited Amount of Money? explains the concept of quantitative easing in the context of the last two years.

What Give a Dollar Bill Its Value? explains the role of the Federal Reserve in trying to control inflation and deflation.

What Causes an Economic Recession? uses the context of the Bronze Age to introduce the factors that can lead to economic recessions today. Those include inflation, borrowing habits, saving habits, spending habits, and government decisions.

What Causes Economic Bubbles? uses the context of the tulip industry of the 1600's to explain what causes an economic bubble and what happens when it bursts.

How Does the Stock Market Work? is a TED-Ed lesson that provides a four minute overview of the origin of stock markets, why companies offer stock, and the basic factors that influence the prices of publicly-traded stocks. 

A Crash Course in Economics

Crash Course Economics is a thirty-six part video series. In it there are videos covering everything from the basics of supply and demand to the 2008 financial crisis to behavioral economics and a whole lot in between. 

60 Second Adventures in Economics

The Open University hosts a series of six short videos intended to introduce viewers to some of the basic concepts of macroeconomics. In 60 Second Adventures in Economics you will find short videos explaining things like the Paradox of Thrift and Comparative Advantage.

How to Make a Mini Course

The Internet is not lacking for tools to create online courses. I've tried a lot of them over the years. The bad ones force you to become an expert on how to use their platforms before you can publish your own courses. The good ones make it easy for you to develop and publish a course without having to learn any complicated programs. Mini Course Generator is a good one that I recently tried for the first time. 

Mini Course Generator enables you to quickly create an online course from scratch or by following one of their simple templates. Whichever option you choose, the building of your course is done in the same manner. You build your course in a series of index card-like frames. Within each frame you can include images, text, video, and questions (open response or multiple choice). When you have finished building your course you can embed it in your existing website or you can publish it at its own URL provided by Mini Course Generator. Watch my short video that is embedded below to see how easy it is to create a course with Mini Course Generator. 

Video - How to Create a Mini Course

Applications for Education

I'm planning to use Mini Course Generator create a little course to supplement an in-person professional development workshop that I'm running in a few weeks. The course content will include a recap of what was covered in the workshop and some suggested activities for further learning. 

How to Use the Google Authenticator App With Twitter

In what appears to be an on-going quest to drive users away, late last week Elon Musk Twitter announced that it would soon start charging for two factor account authentication done via text messaging (SMS). That doesn't mean that you won't be able to use two-factor authentication for free, it just means that you'll have to do it through a method that doesn't require the use of text messaging. One free option is to use the Google Authenticator app for Android or the Google Authenticator app for iOS. 

It's easiest to use two devices (your phone and a laptop) to set-up two-factor authentication on Twitter via the Google Authenticator app. Then  you'll first need to install the app on your phone. You'll then need to navigate to your Twitter security settings and open the option for two-factor authentication. In Twitter settings for two-factor authentication select "authenticator app." When you make that selection a QR code will appear on your screen. Use the Google Authenticator app to scan the QR code to generate a six-digit code to enter on Twitter. Once you've done that, your set-up of two-factor authentication for your Twitter account is complete. 

If the preceding paragraph seemed a little complicated, watch this video for a short overview of how to use the Google Authenticator app for two-factor authentication of your Twitter account. 

Video - How to Use the Google Authenticator App to Verify Your Twitter Account  

Warm-up Activities for Group Brainstorming Sessions

Last week I published a blog post about tools for recording brainstorming sessions. That ended up being one of the most popular things I've published this month. 

Writing that post reminded me of a set of brainstorming warm-up activities designed by Ethos3. Ethos3 is a presentation design company that has worked with some of the biggest name brands in the world. The Ethos3 Slideshare channel is a good place to get some inspiration and tips for designing your own slideshows. One of those slideshows is Wake Up Brain! In the slideshow you'll find five warm-up activities that can be done at the start of almost any brainstorming session.

Wake Up Brain! from Ethos3

Applications for Education
Whether you're brainstorming with colleagues to craft a new mission statement for your school or you're brainstorming creative story ideas with your middle school students, the warm-up activities in this slideshow can help you get the ball rolling.

A Brief Explanation of Options

As kind of a hobby I dabble in options trading (I made $6 last week). I mentioned this to a friend of mine last Friday and he, like many other people I've talked to about it over the years, said, "I've heard of that, but I don't what it means." That conversation inspired me to create a short video explanation of what options are. You can watch the video here or as embedded below. 

Video - A Short Explanation of Stock Options



Applications for Education
While I made the video to explain options to my adult friends, it could also be used as an introductory video in a high school business class. If your class is playing a stock market simulation game, this video might be helpful to you and your students.

This style of video is one of many that I teach you how to make in my self-paced Animated Explanations course.

Brainstorms, Pictures, and Videos - The Week in Review

Good morning from Maine where winter weather has returned after a brief respite on Thursday. It was sunny, dry, and warm enough to ride my bike outside for the first time since the start of the year. This weekend, I'm back to skiing and teaching skiing. I hope that you have something equally fun planned for your weekend. And if you're starting a long weekend or vacation week, I hope you enjoy the extra time off. 

These were the week's most popular posts:
1. 10 Tools for Gathering Real-time Feedback From Students
2. Three Good Tools for Recording Brainstorming Sessions
3. Concise Explanations of DNS & IP
4. Two Ways to Use Pictures in Formative Assessment
5. Lumen5 - Quickly Turn Your Writing Into Videos
6. Free Shapegrams from Tony Vincent!
7. 25 Gmail Tips for Teachers and Students

Learn How to Create and Sell Digital Products!
If you're looking for a way to put a little more money in your pocket this year, my self-paced course How to Create and Sell Digital Products in 2023 is for you! It's one of three on-demand courses that I currently offer.

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. 

50 Tech Tuesday Tips!

50 Tech Tuesday Tips is an eBook that I created with busy tech coaches, tech integration specialists, 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 nearly 45,000 subscribers watching my short tutorial videos on a wide array of educational technology tools. 
• I've been Tweeting as @rmbyrne for fifteen years. 
• I update my LinkedIn profile a time or two every week.
• 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.

Free Course on ChatGPT and AI in Education

Do you have questions and concerns about artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT and their potential impact on schools? Have you heard of ChatGPT, but haven't tried it because you're not sure if it's a fad or something you should learn about? If you answered "yes" to either of those questions, Rushton Hurley's new course ChatGPT: Boom or Our Doom? is for you. 

ChatGPT: Boom or Our Doom? is a free, self-paced course in which Rushton leads you through five lessons about ChatGPT and its implications for classrooms. Each lesson features a five minute video and a suggested practice or reflection activity. The lessons cover what ChatGPT is and how it works, how to handle concerns about cheating, and using ChatGPT to create materials and activities for your classes. 

The course is hosted by an organization called Warm Demanders. The sign-up process does require you to enter your email address then check your email to access the actual course materials. 

If you're looking for a good, concise overview of ChatGPT and it's implications for your classroom, taking Rushton's free course is a great place to start. 

On a related note, I've made a couple of videos about ChatGPT and AI. Those videos are included below. 

A Short Overview of ChatGPT



How to Detect Articles Written by ChatGPT

An Overview of Microsoft's Search Coach

Last summer Microsoft announced a new Teams product that would be rolling to education users over the coming school year. That product is called Search Coach and it appears to now be widely available to all Microsoft Teams education users. 

As its name implies, Search Coach in Microsoft Teams provides students with tips to improve their search methods. The tips provided are based on students' search behaviors. 

There's more to Search Coach than just providing search tips to students. Teachers can use Search Coach to get insight into their students' search behaviors. The insights provided to teachers include number of searches attempted, links opened, and search terms used. 

Another notable aspect of Search Coach is the ability to restrict search results according to domain type, file type, and date. Teachers can also enable restrictions on search operators. 

Mike Tholfsen recently published a detailed video overview of all aspects of Search Coach. You can watch his video here or as embedded below. 

Applications for Education
Microsoft currently offers a half-dozen lesson plans that incorporate the use of Search Coach.

I think Search Coach could be a valuable tool for coaching students through the search process. That said, I'm afraid that some people might use it as a tool to simply block students' access to some parts of the Internet without teaching them how to improve their search behaviour. But the same could be said for just about any web filtering tools.

If you're interested in learning even more about search and teaching search there are two resources I recommend. First, Dan Russell's The Joy of Search should be in every school's library of resources for teachers. Second, I offer a self-paced course on search strategies students need to know.

Q&A With Two Ed Tech Guys

Three years ago Rushton Hurley and I started a series of live Q&A webinars titled Two EdTech Guys Take Questions and Share Cool Stuff. While we've stopped hosting live webinars, we are still answering lots of questions and still sharing cool stuff. Now we're doing that in a recorded format. The first episode of the recorded series is now available to view right here and as embedded below. 


In the episode we tackled questions about ChatGPT and educational games. We also shared a cool thing from our pal Tony Vincent and took a look at "Uber for tractors." You can find all of the resources from all of the episodes of the series right here on Next Vista for Learning. 

Three Good Tools for Recording Brainstorming Sessions

Earlier this week on Practical Ed Tech I published an article about using the Nominal Group Technique for classroom brainstorming sessions. What follows is an excerpt from that article. 

Even if you host your NGT brainstorming sessions in person, you’ll want to create a record of the ideas shared by students. Here are some tools that you can use to have students share their ideas with the group and create a record of those ideas. 

Post-it Mobile Apps
The Post-it mobile apps for Android and iOS let you take a picture of physical sticky notes and then sort them on a digital canvas. This is a great tool for those who want to use the traditional paper-based method of having students write notes on paper and then post them to a bulletin board for review by the whole class. 

Padlet
Padlet is a tool that I’ve been using for more than a decade. It enables you to create a digital bulletin board or cork board to which your students can add digital sticky notes. Their notes can include text, pictures, video, and audio files. If you enable the options for it, you can let your students indicate which notes are their favorites by using little stars and thumbs-up icons. Watch this video for an overview of hosting brainstorming sessions on Padlet.



Canva
The whiteboard templates in Canva are intended to be used collaboratively. They can be used for a variety of purposes including hosting brainstorming sessions, designing flowcharts, and making KWL charts. To help you and your collaborators focus on the task at hand, Canva has added a timer option to the whiteboard templates. The timer is found in the bottom, left corner of the templates. You can set the timer of any interval that works for your group. Watch the following video to learn how to use Canva's whiteboard templates.

Writing With Emojis

Yesterday I wrote about Tony Vincent's new page of free Shapegrams. As I mentioned in that post, Tony has always had great ideas for using clever graphics in the classroom. In fact, five years ago Tony Tweeted a slick graphic that convinced me to pay more attention to the clever used of emojis. 

In the graphic seen here Tony created a game in which students have to decipher school terms based on the emojis displayed. If you want to do a similar thing, you could do so in Google Docs, Word, or with Brush Ninja. Tutorials for all three of those options are embedded below. 

How to Add Emojis to Your Word Documents



How to Use Inline Emojis in Google Docs



Make Animated GIFs, Emoji Art, and More with Brush Ninja

Free Shapegrams from Tony Vincent!

I've known Tony Vincent for at least a dozen years. In all that time he's always had awesome graphics on his website and in his presentations. So when he recently reached out to tell me about his new page of free Shapegrams, I knew I had to share it with all of you. 

Shapegrams are digital drawings creating by using the drawing tools, shapes, and fill tools available in Google Slides and Google Drawings. On his free Shapegrams page Tony offers directions and templates for making a house, a face, an ice cream cone, and a lion. But I noticed that once I started looking into the templates I got more ideas for making neat things with the Shapegrams model. 

Watch this video for an overview of how to use the Shapegrams model to create a house. And if you like Dad Jokes, you're going to love Tony's introduction to the lesson. 

Applications for Education
Students can use the Shapegrams model to create a set of slides to tell a story or to simply serve as the backdrop for a story. If you use the transitions and animations tools in Google Slides, you could make your Shapegrams move as a part of a simple animated story.

Three Tools for Building Your Own Online Games That Aren't Kahoot-like

Earlier today I fielded a question from a reader who was looking for some suggestions for tools he could use to create some online games for his students to play. Specifically, he was looking for some alternatives to the typical suggestions of Kahoot, Quizizz, and Gimkit. There are a lot of options that I could have shared, but there were three that immediately came to my mind. 

TinyTap is an app and website that I've been using and recommending since its initial launch nearly a decade ago. On the TinyTap platform you can create a variety of educational games for your students to play on their iPads or in the web browser on any computer. I wrote a long series of tutorials on TinyTap last year. My favorite of those was this one in which I explained how to create a game that students talk to. Watch this video for an overview of how to get started making your first game on TinyTap. 

Educandy is a service for creating simple vocabulary games and multiple choice trivia games. A convenient aspect of the service is that once you've created a list of vocabulary words it will automatically be applied to multiple game formats for you. In other words, write one word list and you'll get three games that your students can play. Your students can play the games without needing to create an account on the Educandy site. In the following video I provide an overview of how you can create games on Educandy and how your students can access your games.

Flippity has long been one of my go-to recommendations for anyone looking to make games, flashcards, and timelines with Google Sheets. Flippity's board game template lets you create a game that includes up to eight players, has up to three dice to roll, and interactive game squares. You game can also include videos, pictures, Google Drawings, and graphs. And your students can play your game without an email address or having to create any kind of online account. Take a look at my short video below to see how you can create and play your own online board game.

Lumen5 - Quickly Turn Your Writing Into Videos

ChatGPT might be the first thing you think of when you read AI today, but there have been plenty of other AI tools before it. One such tool is Lumen5. Lumen5 is a tool that will produce a video for you based upon your written work.

To create a video with Lumen5 you can enter the URL of your published work or submit the text of an article you've written. Lumen5 will then select highlights from your writing to feature in a video. The video will always begin with the title of your article. From there it will use any subheadings or section headings that you have in your article to create sections of your video. If you don't have subheadings or section headings in your article, Lumen5 will attempt to pull the keywords or phrases from each paragraph. Watch my demo below to see how easy it is to use Lumen5. 

Video - How to Quickly Turn Written Articles Into Videos



Applications for Education
Using a tool like Lumen5 can be a good way for students to create a visual summary of reports they've written. Tools like Lumen5 are also good for quickly creating a video of morning announcements for your school. Anyone who has a written list of the announcements could use Lumen5 to quickly create a video summary that is then shared on your school website or projected on screens in common areas like cafeterias in your school.

By the way, the article that I used in demo video above can be read here.

How to Search Within Desktop and Mobile Pages

How to search within documents, web pages, and spreadsheets is one of the first things that I teach to students at the start of a new semester or new school year (for year-long courses). It's a simple thing that can lead to more efficient use of time spent on research. Over the weekend a reader emailed me for clarification on how her students could search within web pages on their tablets and phones. I recorded this short video to demonstrate how that is done. 

Video - How to Search Within Desktop and Mobile Pages

Applications for Education

Searching within a large web page, a document, or a spreadsheet can be a good way for students to find small pieces of important information residing within them. For example, students conducting genealogical research may come across PDFs of scanned journals. By using CTRL+F or the "search within" function students can quickly determine if a particular name appears in the document and where it appears in the document. Another good use of searching within a page is in computer science when students need to locate one small piece of code in a large page of code. 

Enroll in my self-paced course about search to learn even more about search strategies students need to know.