Wednesday, May 24, 2023
Short Video Lessons About Memorial Day
The Meaning of Memorial Day is a two minute video covering the origins of the holiday in the United States. The video is embedded below.
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs offers the following video overview of the history of Memorial Day.
Jocko Willink isn't everyone's cup of tea, but I enjoy his podcast and found this video that he released a few years ago to be quite moving.
To find more resources for teaching about Memorial Day, visit Larry Ferlazzo's list of resources.
Try using EDpuzzle to add questions into these videos and distribute them to your students.
Wednesday, March 15, 2023
Annotate Videos With Text and Pictures
Before you get too involved with Timelinely it's important to note that you'll have to create an account in order to save and share your work. You can create an account by using your Google account, by using your Facebook account, or by signing up with any email address. You can share your annotated version of a video via email and social media.
Applications for Education
One of things that I like about Timelinely is the option to include pictures in your annotations. I can see that feature being used to include an alternate example for students to view when watching a math lesson.
I'm not sure that Timelinely is any better than a handful of similar services, but it is nice to have options
Tuesday, February 28, 2023
Great Art Explained
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
Sunday, February 26, 2023
167 Math In "Real Life" Lessons
The Math in Real Life series of TED-Ed videos, like most TED-Ed videos, could make nice extensions to your classroom instruction.
Friday, February 24, 2023
A Good Series on How Computers Work
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.
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.
Tuesday, February 21, 2023
Stocks, Bonds, Options, and Economics
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.
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.
Sunday, February 19, 2023
A Brief Explanation of Options
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.
Monday, February 13, 2023
Concise Explanations of DNS & IP
If you have never built a website from scratch without the use of a service like Weebly or Google Sites, you may not have ever thought about the role of IP addresses and the domain name system in getting a website online. These videos can help students understand how that process happens and how DNS makes it easy to navigate the web today.
Friday, February 10, 2023
25 YouTube Tips for Teachers
Tuesday, February 7, 2023
Learning About Languages and The Mysteries of Vernacular
The New England-style use of wicked originated is just one of many mysteries of vernacular. For more mysteries of vernacular lessons, take a look at TED-Ed's Mysteries of Vernacular series. Each of the 26 lessons focus on one word that is often used by English speakers. A history of the word's origins and evolution of its use is featured in each video lesson. The entire playlist is embedded below beginning with the word "yankee."
Words of the World. Words of the World is a collection of videos featuring historians and linguists explaining the origins of and history of the use of words in the English language. The videos attempt to put the words into a somewhat modern context. For example this video about the word "guerrilla" makes reference to Che Guevara. The video I've embedded below explains the word "coup."
Sunday, February 5, 2023
How Birds Stay Warm in Winter - And How to Help Them
By watching BirdNerd's How Birds Stay Warm in Winter video my daughter and I learned that some birds can regulate the temperature of their feet separately from the rest of their bodies. Watch the video to learn more about that and other ways that birds stay warm in the winter.
Friday, February 3, 2023
Two Lessons for a Wicked Cold Day
How windchill is calculated:
The windchill is expected to reach -35F tonight at my house. The following video explains how windchill is calculated. The video comes from Presh Talwalkar.
The psychology of extreme weather:
Television news reporters like to use the word "extreme" whenever we have a lot of rain or snow in a short amount of time. Is the weather really "extreme" or is that just our impression of it? The following Minute Earth video takes on the topic of how extreme weather affects our thinking about weather patterns in general. I found the video to be interesting from a psychology perspective. The video is embedded below.
Sunday, January 22, 2023
What Are Carbohydrates and How Do They Impact Your Health?
How Do Carbohydrates Impact Your Health? explains what carbohydrates are, common food sources of carbohydrates, and how are bodies use carbohydrates. The lesson also explains what can happen to our bodies when we consume too many carbohydrates.
Saturday, January 21, 2023
Short Lessons on Stocks and Bonds
Investing for Beginners is a playlist of videos produced by Fidelity Investments. Granted, the videos are from a financial services company, but they do offer a good introduction to the basics about stocks, bonds, and mutual funds.
Thursday, January 12, 2023
BookWidgets Adds a New Video Quiz Option to Use in Google Classroom and Beyond
As the name implies, the video quiz widget in BookWidgets lets you create a video-based quiz to use directly in BookWidgets and or distribute through your favorite LMS including Google Classroom. With the video quiz widget in BookWidgets you can use your own videos or videos that you've found on YouTube to create video-based lessons and quizzes.
When you use the video quiz widget in BookWidgets you can add questions and comments directly into the timeline of a video. For example, if you want to make a clarifying comment 32 seconds into a video, you can do that. And if you want to pose a reflection question to your students three minutes into a video, you can do that. In fact, you can use any of the dozens of BookWidgets question types in the video quiz widget. In other words, you're not limited to asking multiple choice and short answer questions as you are with some other video lesson creation tools.
Later this week I will publish my own BookWidget video quiz tutorial on my YouTube channel. Until then, take a look at this tutorial from Lucie at BookWidgets to learn more about how it works.
Friday, December 30, 2022
Best of 2022 - ViewPure Alternatives
Earlier this week a reader reached out to me with a concern about ViewPure. For many years ViewPure has been a popular tool for teachers to use to hide distracting sidebar and "related" content when playing YouTube videos in their classrooms. There are other tools like it. If you find yourself looking for alternatives to ViewPure, here are some things to try.
Watchkin is a service that provides a few ways to watch YouTube videos without seeing the related video suggestions and comments. You can enter the direct URL of a video into Watchkin to have the sidebar content removed. You can search for videos through Watchkin and have family-friendly results displayed (if a video appears that is not family-friendly Watchkin has a mechanism for flagging it as inappropriate). Watchkin also offers a browser bookmarklet tool that you can click while on YouTube.com to have the related content disappear from the page. Watch this video to learn more about Watchkin.
Wednesday, December 28, 2022
Best of 2022 - Five Good Resources for Learning About Airplanes and Airlines
We're planning a little trip this fall to visit some family that we haven't seen since before the start of the pandemic. When we told our daughters that we're going to fly they got very excited about it. We've now been answering questions about flying seemingly nonstop for a few days. Those conversations prompted me to compile this list of resources for teaching and learning about the science of flight.
Turbulence: One of the Great Unsolved Mysteries of Physics is a TED-Ed lesson that explains what turbulence is and the forces that create it. The lesson explains that even though we typically associate turbulence with flying in airplanes, turbulence exists in many other places including oceans.
Here's some archival footage of Yeager's flight in the Bell X-1.
Tuesday, December 20, 2022
How a Generator Works - And Other Short Lessons About Generating Electricity
The Engineering Mindset is a YouTube channel on which I've found a bunch of great lessons over the years. One of those is AC Electrical Generation Basics. While it doesn't specifically address portable generators like the one you can find in my garage, it does do a great job of clearly explaining how electricity is generated by the parts that you'll find in a portable generator.
Thursday, December 1, 2022
How Airplanes Fly - And Other Good Resources for Learning About Flying
How Airplanes Fly is the latest video that I'm adding to my growing list of resources for teaching and learning about airplanes and airlines. Those resources are included below.
Turbulence: One of the Great Unsolved Mysteries of Physics is a TED-Ed lesson that explains what turbulence is and the forces that create it. The lesson explains that even though we typically associate turbulence with flying in airplanes, turbulence exists in many other places including oceans.Here's some archival footage of Yeager's flight in the Bell X-1.
Image source: SDASM Archives, No restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons
Sunday, November 27, 2022
Three YouTube Features Every Teacher Should Know How to Use
In this new video I highlight the features of YouTube that you should know how to use before showing a video in your classroom. Those features include adjusting the size and color scheme of subtitles, accessing and saving a transcript of videos, and clipping sections of YouTube videos.
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