Easily Add Charts to Infographics With Easelly

Easel.ly is an online tool for creating infographics. I've reviewed a couple of times in the past on this blog. The latest update to Easelly introduced a tool for creating charts to incorporate into your infographics. The chart creation tool is a drag-and-drop option that can be found in the Easelly toolbar.

Easel.ly provides a canvas on which you can build your own infographic by dragging and dropping pre-made design elements. You can use a blank canvas or build upon one of Easel.ly's themes. In addition to using the built-in creation tools you can upload your own graphics to include in your infographic. Your completed infographic can be exported and saved as PNG, JPG, PDG, and SVG files.


infographics from easel.ly on Vimeo.

Applications for Education
Using Easel.ly could be a good way for students to create visual representations of what they learned through a research assignment. I've also seen infographic assignments used in place of traditional book report assignments.

The Most Popular Posts of September

It's the last day of the month and as I do every month I've compiled a list of the most popular posts of the month. This month FreeTech4Teachers.com received more than 1,000,000 pageviews for the first time. That is amazing! Thank you to all of you who have shared posts through Tweets, Pins, Facebook, and other means. Your support keeps this blog going.



Here are the most popular posts of the month:
1. Powtoon Is Giving Away Free Accounts to Teachers - Create Animated Videos Online
2. Socratic Smackdown - A Game for Learning and Practicing Discussion Strategies
3. Engage Students in History With Fake Facebook and Fake SMS
4. 12 Good Tools for Gathering Real-time Feedback from Students
5. Frequently Overlooked Google Search Tools and Strategies
6. How to Use the Random Name Selection Tools on Classtools.net
7. How to Create Trading Cards for Historical and Fictional People, Places, and Events
8. Sources of Free Sound Effects and Music for Multimedia Projects
9. MyStorybook - A Good Platform for Creating Picture Books
10. Turn a Set of Spreadsheet Cells Into Easy to Read Documents

Would you like to have me speak at your school or conference? Click here to learn about my keynote and workshop offerings. 

Please visit the official advertisers that help keep this blog going.
Practical Ed Tech is the brand through which I offer PD webinars.
IXL offers a huge assortment of mathematics lesson activities.
Typing Club offers free typing lessons for students.
Discovery Education & Wilkes University offer online courses for earning Master's degrees in Instructional Media.
MasteryConnect provides a network for teachers to share and discover Common Core assessments.
ABCya.com is a provider of free educational games for K-5.
The University of Maryland Baltimore County offers graduate programs for teachers.
Boise State University offers a 100% online program in educational technology.
EdTechTeacher is offers professional development workshops in Boston, Chicago, and Atlanta.
StoryBoard That is a great tool for creating comics and more.
BoomWriter and WordWriter are fantastic tools that help students develop their writing skills.
GoSocialStudiesGo is an online textbook for social studies students.

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Explore Planet Nutshell's Teacher Library for Great Educational Videos

I became a big fan of Planet Nutshell the first time that I saw their series of videos on Internet Safety. They've also produced great videos on Financial Aid, Climate Science, Health, Mathematics, and Physics. This morning I was exploring the Planet Nutshell website and notice that all of the education videos are now available in one section of the site labeled Teacher Library.


NetSafe Episode 1: What is the Internet? (Grades K-3) from Planet Nutshell on Vimeo.

ClipPod - Shared Notes and Attachments for Google Calendars

Update: October 2019. This tool no longer exists. 

ClipPod is a neat Google Calendar add-on that allows you to share notes and attachments through Google Calendar events. By adding ClipPod to your Google Calendar you can have conversations with your collaborators about your calendar events. While Google Calendar already allows you to add attachments to event details, ClipPod's attachments option allows you and your collaborators to exchange notes about your shared attachments.

Applications for Education
ClipPod could be a handy add-on to use when you are trying to schedule and plan a meeting with colleagues. Rather than a string of emails or a collaborative document, you can have all of your notes and files connected directly to a date and time on a calendar.

To get the most benefit from using ClipPod all of your calendar collaborators will need to have ClipPod installed.

How to Format Block Quotes in Google Documents

A couple of days ago a reader emailed me to ask for directions on formatting block quotes in Google Documents. This morning I created a video to answer that question. In the video below I explain and demonstrate how to format block quotes in Google Documents.