I've known Scott for ten years or more. He's one of the people in the educational technology space that I've always looked up to and trusted for good advice. Our conversation for the podcast ranged beyond just talking about his new book.
You might not be familiar with Scott's written work, but there's a good chance you've seen the video that he did with Karl Fisch, Did You Know; Shift Happens. I kicked off the conversation by asking him, "what's changed since Did You Know; Shift Happens was published twelve years ago?" Give the podcast a listen to hear his response.
Good morning from Maine where it is a little overcast so I thought I'd cheer things up by sharing this picture of a bright flower I saw this week.
As I do at this time every weekend, I have put together a short list of the most popular posts of the last week. This list is based on total views during the previous seven days. Take a look and see if there are any interesting things that you might have missed.
Besides FreeTech4Teachers.com and the daily email digest, there are other ways to keep up with what I'm publishing.
Practical Ed Tech Newsletter - This comes out once per week (Sunday night/ Monday morning) and includes my tip of the week and a summary of the week's most popular posts from FreeTech4Teachers.com.
My YouTube Channel - More than 15,000 are subscribed to my YouTube channel for my regular series of tutorial videos including more than 300 Google tools tutorials.
We're all busy. And the new school year can feel exceptionally busy. That's not an excuse to ignore basic email etiquette like addressing a person by name when sending him or her a message for the first time or for the first time in a while. Here are a few videos that offer good advice and guidelines for using email in a polite manner.
Emailing Your Teacher, With Captain Communicator is one of my favorite videos about email etiquette. The short video features two students demonstrating how to write an email to a teacher. It's cute and well worth 90 seconds of your time.
The following video was made by a teacher for the purpose of sharing email etiquette tips with students. It's a bit more serious that the Captain Communicator video.
Watch Clear Email Communication by Common Craft to learn how to get a recipient's attention and how to get a response from that recipient.
I was reminded of these lessons this morning when I opened my inbox to three emails from people that I don't know asking me for help with their tech problems. As a teacher it's in my nature to help people. But I'm going to put a lot more effort into helping when I know the other person can at least take the time to type my name.
Time-saving Email Tips
In the following video I highlighted five features of Gmail that teachers should know how to use. A few of these can be big time-savers for you.
Disclosure: I have a long-standing, in-kind relationship with Common Craft.
There was a time when I regularly published longer lists of helpful sites and apps. Over the last few years I got away from doing that with any regularity because I wasn't sure that anyone really benefited from them. But in the last month I've been asked a handful of questions that could have been answered by having a current list. All that is to say that I'm going to start publishing some lists with regularity. First up is the following list of good sites and apps for helping students learn new vocabulary words.
Knoword
This is a game that has been around for nearly a decade. It continues to evolve with the times. The latest version of Knoword has three levels for students to play. The game is played the same way across all three levels. To play the game simply pick a level and then hit "Begin." Once you begin you have 90 seconds to correctly spell as many words as possible. The catch is that you have guess what words to spell based on the definitions that are provided. It's a bit like Jeopardy in that way. You can earn more time to keep the game going by getting streaks of five correct words in row.
Math Vocabulary Cards
Understanding the vocabulary of mathematics is often the first step that students need to take in order to be able to solve math problems. Math Vocabulary Cards can help students overcome that challenge. Math Vocabulary Cards is a free tool designed for elementary school students. The app (available for iOS and for Chrome) offers exactly what its name implies, a series of flashcards of mathematics vocabulary terms. Each card contains a term, a diagram, and a definition. By default the term is hidden and students have to guess the term based on the definition and diagram. Students can also use the cards with the definitions hidden and the terms revealed.
World's Worst Pet
This is an app that has been around for five or six years. While it hasn't had a significant update recently, it still works well on iPads running the latest version of iOS. In the app players have to help bring home Snargg, the world’s worst pet, who has run away. To get Snargg back players have to fill his food dish by learning new vocabulary words. Each of the six levels in the game contain ten dishes (each dish represents a new set of words) that can be filled. Four games are available for each dish. The games are fill-in-the-blank, synonym identification, antonym identification, and definition identification. The app contains a total of 1,000 vocabulary words.
Vocabulary.com Vocabulary.com is an excellent vocabulary study service offering thousands of vocabulary practice lists and activities for students in elementary school through graduate school. In addition to lists of SAT, GRE, and other test prep words, you can find vocabulary lists that are attached to novels, historical documents, famous speeches, and current news articles. When you sign up for Vocabulary.com you will be given an assessment quiz in order to give you suggested lists with which to start your practice. After completing the assessment you can use the practice lists suggested by Vocabulary.com or choose your own lists from the huge gallery of vocabulary lists.
Flippity Flashcards
Flippity is a great service that offers templates for creating all kinds of things in Google Sheets including multimedia flashcards. You or your students can use Flippity's flashcard template to create flashcards for any words or phrases that you choose. The flashcards created through the template are displayed on their own stand-alone webpages. Watch my video below to see how it works.
Winning Words Winning Words is a series of seven iPad apps that feature matching / “memory” style vocabulary games. There are six apps in the series. Each app is played in the same manner of flipping a card and trying to find a match for it. The six apps are synonym match, antonym match, homophone match, compound match, double letter match, verb match, and singular/plural match. Each app supports up to four players and has three levels of difficulty.
PrepFactory PrepFactory is a free service that offers students a great selection of free SAT and ACT preparation activities. PrepFactory focuses on helping students develop good test-taking strategies while also not boring them with dozens of continuous rote exercises. But before students even dive into the practice activities they can work through in-depth strategy review activities. To help students know what strategy to review or which practice assessment to take, PrepFactory has students complete diagnostics activities.
Vocabulist
This is a site that was developed by a high school student (who is now a Harvard student). Vocabulist enables students to upload a document and have it extract words and definitions from it. Each word in the document is matched to a definition. If the definition rendered isn't exactly right, students can modify it within Vocabulist. Once the list of words and definitions is set students can download the list as a PDF or export the list to Quizlet where it will then be turned into a set of digital flashcards. (Students must have a Quizlet account).
New Tab Quizlet New Tab Quizlet is a Chrome extension that will display a flashcard from your Quizlet sets whenever you open a new tab. If you have questions on your cards, you'll see the question and answer. If you have vocabulary words on your cards, you'll see the word and definition.
VocabAhead
VocabAhead offers videos and flashcards that are designed to help students learn new vocabulary words. The website hosts animated videos that explain what words mean in context. Next to each video there is a set of corresponding flashcards.
Disclosure: PrepFactory is currently an advertiser on FreeTech4Teachers.com
Over the last ten years I've had the good fortune to run workshops and give presentations at hundreds of schools and conferences. I'm frequently asked what I cover in my workshops and keynotes. Some of the outlines and slides from those presentations have appeared in blog posts in the past. But my list of workshops and keynote topics is always evolving with the times and technologies available to schools. That said, here are the ten most popular workshops that I'm currently offering to schools for your next professional development day.
A combination of any of the following can be done. Just fill out the form below and I'll be in touch ASAP.
Teaching History With Technology
Getting Going With G Suite
AR, VR, and Mixed Reality in Education
DIY App Creation
Teaching Search Strategies Students Need to Know
Fast & Fun Formative Assessments
Making & Teaching With Video
To Geography and Beyond With Google Earth & Maps
Blending Technology Into Outdoor Learning
Keeping Track With Google Keep, Calendar, and Classroom
All of these workshops can be modified according to grade level (elementary, middle, high), the technology available to teachers and students, and to time allotted for professional development.
If you're interested in having me run a professional development workshop at your school, please get in touch with me at richardbyrne (at) freetech4teachers.com or complete the short form below.
Throughout the year I host live professional development webinars over on PracticalEdTech.com. Join the Practical Ed Tech newsletter to be notified when those webinars are scheduled.
On Thursday morning I shared a TED Talk given by Dr. Judson Brewer. The talk was about using mindfulness practices to break a bad habit. This morning I came across a Chrome extension that employs that same concept to help people break or curtail the habit of wasting time mindlessly browsing the Internet.
Mindful Internet Use is a Chrome extension that instead of blocking you from viewing time-wasting websites it reminds of the time you're wasting viewing those websites. You can set Mindful Internet Use to display a motivational quote, a reminder, or a question at preset time intervals. For example, I set it to display the question, "are you doing something meaningful or are you wasting your time?" every fifteen minutes across all of the social media sites on which I have accounts. You can also set the extension to display quotes or questions on every site that you visit.
Applications for Education Mindful Internet Use could be a great extension for any high school or college student who is prone to wasting time when he or she should be working on a research project or studying. I find that it's while working on a research task that students are prone to falling into the trap of saying "I'll just check this social media site for a minute" and before they know it they've wasted twenty minutes.
Yesterday afternoon I hosted the latest broadcast of Practical Ed Tech Live. If you missed it, you can now watch the video or listen to it as a podcast.
All episodes of the Practical Ed Tech Podcast are available on this Anchor.fm page. All episodes are also available on Spotify, Google Podcasts, Radio Public, Pocket Casts, and Breaker. Just search for my name or Practical Ed Tech to find the podcast on any of those platforms.
The show notes including the questions that I answered from readers can be found in this Google Document.
A couple of weeks ago I showed you how you can quickly send a webpage from your desktop to your phone without using a bookmarking service. Today, I have directions for doing the reverse of that process. If you use Google Chrome on your phone as well as on your laptop or desktop you can quickly transfer pages between those devices.
To send a page from your phone to your desktop simply open the sharing menu in Chrome and then tap "my devices." That will show you a list of all of the devices that you're signed into Chrome on. Select a device and send the page. This will work even if you are not anywhere near the your desktop or laptop. Watch my video below to see how this process works.
Applications for Education
Our students today are more likely to browse and search the web on their phones than they are on their laptop or desktop computers. But many schools ban the use of cell phones during the day (that's another debate for another blog). By using this little trick students can quickly transfer the pages they need from their phones to the laptops or desktops that they have to use during the school day.
My big take-away from Dr. Brewer's talk was the idea of thinking about why we engage in a bad habit while we're doing as a means to breaking that habit. For example, my bad habit is eating potato and tortilla chips when I'm stressed out. Brewer's suggestion is to think about why I'm doing that when I do it and I'll be less likely to do it again. I actually watched this talk back in January and started to employ that technique of using mindfulness to break my stress-snacking habit. It has worked...most of the time. I've lost over 30 pounds this year. I'm now using that strategy to curtail my Facebook habit too.
Applications for Education
The concepts and examples that Brewer shares in the talk are ones that high school students can relate to. For that reason, with the exception of one “PG word” in the talk, you could use this video to create a mindfulness lesson in a high school classroom.
One of the ways that I have been able to keep Free Technology for Teachers running for the last twelve years is through offering professional development services in the forms of in-person workshops and online courses sold through Practical Ed Tech.
The most popular Practical Ed Tech course that I've hosted over the last six years is Getting Going With G Suite. I've offered that course in live formats and on-demand formats for years. This week I released an updated version of the on-demand Getting Going With G Suite course.
Getting Going With G Suite is a course that was designed for teachers who are new to using the powerful the tools within G Suite for Education. In this course you’ll learn everything you need to know to feel comfortable using all of the core G Suite tools with your students. This course is more than just a series of “how to” videos. You’ll be provided with examples of activities that you can use and adapt to use in your classroom.
Course Highlights:
Streamlining your workflow through Google Classroom.
Taking control of your inbox with Gmail hacks.
Creating self-grading assessments in Google Forms.
Developing a classroom website with Google Sites.
Using Google Sheets to send personalized emails in bulk.
Organizing meetings with Google Calendar.
Keeping track of bookmarks and notes with Google Keep.
Using Jamboard and Drawings to create diagrams.
Making beautiful presentations in Google Slides.
Creating guided reading activities in Google Docs.
Getting Going With G Suite is on sale until next Friday. Register in the next eight days and you'll save $30 off the regular price of $97. You can register now and start the course whenever it is convenient for you.
Finally, a huge thank you to all of you who have invited me to your schools or participated in one of the Practical Ed Tech courses over the last decade. I couldn't do it without you!
September is a popular month for schools to have open house nights or back-to-school nights for parents. Those are great opportunities for parents to see how the first weeks of school are going and what's happening in your classroom and school. At open house night parents often end up with collection of papers that they may or may not save for reference throughout the school year. This year try using QR codes to put the odds in your favor of the information in those papers being saved. You can create QR codes and paste them on the door to your classroom, on a bulletin board, or right at the bottom of the papers you're distributing.
I use QR Droid's free QR code generator to create QR codes that lead to all kinds of valuable information. In the video embedded below I provide a short demonstration of how to create a QR code that contains your contact information.
Google Calendar is a great tool for scheduling appointments with students, friends, and colleagues. I use it all the time. Despite my regular use of Google Calendar I've made an annoying mistake with it twice in the last week.
I'm using Google Calendar to schedule times to record episodes of a new podcast. I have a bunch of guests lined-up to be on the podcast. The guests are all appearing virtually so I'm using Zoom.us to have them call in and we record through Zoom.
The annoying mistake that I've made twice in the last week is forgetting to remove the default Google Hangout link that is generated in the Google Calendar invitation and replace it with the Zoom link. Because of that mistake both of my guests this week have been sitting in an empty Google Hangout waiting for me while I was sitting in an empty Zoom meeting waiting for them.
In the following video I demonstrate how to remove the default Google Hangout/ Meeting link that appears Google Calendar invitations.
Learn more about Google Calendar and all aspects of G Suite for Education in my self-paced Getting Going With G Suite course. The course is on sale now.
Knoword is a site that I first reviewed more than eight years ago. Over the years the it has evolved but one thing has remained the same, it offers a fun and challenging way for students to test their vocabulary and spelling skills.
The latest iteration of Knoword has three levels for students to play. The game is played the same way across all three levels. To play the game simply pick a level and then hit "Begin." Once you begin you have 90 seconds to correctly spell as many words as possible. The catch is that you have guess what words to spell based on the definitions that are provided. It's a bit like Jeopardy in that way. You can earn more time to keep the game going by getting streaks of five correct words in row.
Applications for Education Knoword offers a fun way for students to test their spelling and vocabulary skills. Students can play the game without signing up for a Knoword account. But they can sign up for an account if they want to keep track of their scores.
Last week I featured a couple of videos about making stop motion movies. One was about the big concepts of making a stop motion movie. Those concepts can be applied to any app or software that you use to create stop motion movie. Stop Motion Studio is one of those apps that your students can use to create a stop motion video.
If your students have have iPads, iPhones, Android phones, or Android tablets they can use the freemium Stop Motion Studio app. The free version of the app doesn't require students to create accounts in order to be able to use the app and save their videos on their iPads or Android tablets. In the following video I demonstrate how to use the Stop Motion Studio app.
You can get the Android version of Stop Motion Studio here and the iPad version here.
Tomorrow afternoon at 3pm ET I'm recording the next episode of my Practical Ed Tech Live series in which I answer batches of questions that readers like you send to me throughout the week. This school year I'm opening each broadcast with a recap of some ed tech news that you might have missed in the previous week.
I'll be broadcasting this live on my YouTube channel. (subscribe to my channel to be notified when I go live). You can ask me questions during the broadcast or submit them in advance to ensure that I'll see your question. You can submit questions through the form that is embedded below.
At the end of every month I like to take a look back at the most popular posts of the previous thirty days. I'm a couple of days late this time.
I make these lists to get some insights into what readers want to see more or less of. I also do this as a way to provide you with a quick way to catch up on some highlights of the last month in the field of educational technology.
Besides FreeTech4Teachers.com and the daily email digest, there are other ways to keep up with what I'm publishing.
Practical Ed Tech Newsletter - This comes out once per week (Sunday night/ Monday morning) and includes my tip of the week and a summary of the week's most popular posts from FreeTech4Teachers.com.
My YouTube Channel - More than 15,000 are subscribed to my YouTube channel for my regular series of tutorial videos including more than 300 Google tools tutorials.
National Geographic's YouTube channel has a great series called 101 Videos. The series contains 115 videos that provide five minute introductions to a wide variety of science topics. Fossils 101 is one of the recent additions to the series.
Fossils 101 explains to viewers what fossils are, fossil types, how fossils are formed, and what fossils can reveal to scientists about the past.
On a related note, a few years ago TED-Ed published a lesson titled How Do We Know What Color Dinosaurs Were? The video explains how scientists examine the melanosomes of fossilized feathers to determine the colors of some dinosaurs. The video then goes on to explain how the physics of light and color eventually lead scientists to their conclusions.
Pause Prompts are timestamped questions that you add to video clips in ClassHook. When you're showing a video to your class, the questions you've written as Pause Prompts will automatically pop-up at the timestamp you've specified. The video will stop and the question will appear full-screen in its place. You can then have a discussion with your students about the prompt.
Live Discussions builds upon Pause Prompts by incorporating an online response element for your students. Now when a Pause Prompt is reached you can have your students respond online as well as by speaking in class. Live Discussions generates a link and QR code for students to follow to land on a response page where they can answer the questions in the Pause Prompts. You'll be able to see their responses in your ClassHook teacher account.
Applications for Education
ClassHook's Live Discussions offers a great middle ground between a completely online response system and a completely voice-based, in-class discussion. You might not have time for ever student to respond to Pause Prompt aloud in your classroom so using the Live Discussion feature will give every student the opportunity to respond to the prompt.
Today is Labor Day in the U.S. This is the traditional "end of summer" in the minds of many of us. After this weekend nearly all students and teachers will be back in school. If you're already back in school, you and your students should have enjoyed the three day weekend. Tomorrow you may have some students asking why Labor Day is a holiday. The following videos explain the origins of Labor Day.
Good morning from Maine where it is a beautiful start to Labor Day weekend. We have family visiting for the weekend so I'm going to quickly write this week's week-in-review before they everyone wakes up.
This week I had the privilege to work with teachers in Saint John's High School in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts. We worked through a progression of learning experiences that I chose based on their needs and wants. If you'd like to have me do the same at your school, please get in touch.
A New On-demand Professional Development Course
This week I hosted the fourth Practical Ed Tech webinar of the month. I won't be hosting any more live webinars until the end of September. But I will have a new on-demand course available next week.
Thank You for Your Support!
More than 375 of you have participated in a Practical Ed Tech webinar this year. Thank you!
Pixton is a fantastic tool for students to use to create digital stories. Get started by using their free "Truth or Lie" lesson plan.
PrepFactory offers free, personalized SAT and ACT prep.
Besides FreeTech4Teachers.com and the daily email digest, there are other ways to keep up with what I'm publishing.
Practical Ed Tech Newsletter - This comes out once per week (Sunday night/ Monday morning) and includes my tip of the week and a summary of the week's most popular posts from FreeTech4Teachers.com.
My YouTube Channel - More than 15,000 are subscribed to my YouTube channel for my regular series of tutorial videos including more than 300 Google tools tutorials.
