A Map of Staple Food Crops of the World

Next week is Geography Awareness Week. The future of food is the theme of this year's Geography Awareness Week. National Geographic has created a collection of resources about the theme of the future of food. One of the resources in that collection is a map of the staple food crops of the world. The map depicts where in the world ten staple crops were produced and the quantities produced. All of the layers of the map can be used in National Geographic's MapMaker Interactive.

Applications for Education
MapMaker Interactive is a good tool to use to introduce concepts of map creation to elementary school and middle school students. You could have students use the staple food crops map layers in conjunction with other layers to have formulate ideas about why a particular country or region produces a type of staple crop.

How to Get Started Using Feedly to Subscribe to Blogs

I subscribe to roughly 300 blogs and websites. For years I used Google Reader to keep up with them. When Google shuttered Reader, I switched to Feedly and have now used it for the last two years. Feedly's interface is simple. Simple interfaces appeal to me. The service works in essentially the same way in my browser as it does on my phone. In the video embedded below I demonstrate the basics of getting started with Feedly.


Applications for Education
If you have students creating and maintaining their own blogs, you could use Feedly to keep track of their blogs.

Subscribing to blogs through Feedly is a great way to keep up with new ideas and trends in your field. Following just one dozen blogs is a good way to get started.

Three Places to Find and Download Public Domain Video Footage

This afternoon I received an email from a reader who was looking for some places that her students could download free videos to re-use in their own video projects. These are the sources that I recommended as a starting place.

The Internet Archive is the first place that comes to mind when I am asked for a source of Public Domain media. The Moving Image Archive within the Internet Archive is an index of more than 1.7 million video clips. Most of what you will find in the Moving Image Archive can be downloaded in a variety of file formats. You can search the archive by keyword or browse through the many categories and thematic collections in the archive.

The Public Domain Review is a website that features collections of images, books, essays, audio recordings, and films that are in the public domain. Choose any of the collections to search for materials according to date, style, genre, and rights. Directions for downloading and saving media is included along with each collection of media.

The National Parks Service offers a b-roll video gallery. The videos in the galleries are in the public domain. The b-roll video gallery can be searched by park, monument, building, or person. All of the videos can be downloaded. Some of the files are quite large so keep that in mind if your school has bandwidth limitations and you plan to have all of your students searching for videos at the same time.

Poetica Introduces Groups for Editing Online as if You Were Writing on Paper

Back in April I wrote about a neat service called Poetica that you can use to edit documents almost as if you were writing on paper. This month Poetica is introducing groups. Groups will allow you to share drafts of documents with reader that you invite to your group. You can register for access to groups by completing the form here.

Editing writing in Poetica is very similar to the manner in which we have written edits on papers for years. When you read a document in Poetica you can click on any word or space between words to insert a line drawn to the margin where you then write your comments. Clicking on a word or space also allows you to simply insert a suggested word above a line in the document you're editing. If you want to suggest a change for an entire sentence you can highlight it and insert a drawn line to the margins where you can write your suggestions. Your suggestions are written in blue while your corrections are written in red.

Applications for Education
Poetica supports importing Word files, PDFs, and Rich Text documents. If your school doesn't use Google Drive, Poetica could be a great tool for editing your students' written work. The visual connections between your markings and the comments could make it easier for your students to match your suggestions to specific portions of their documents.

MasteryConnect's State Core Apps Make It Easy to Identify Standards

Disclosure: MasteryConnect is an advertiser on this blog.

A couple of years ago MasteryConnect released a free iOS and Android app that made it easy for teachers to quickly identify and access Common Core standards. That app has been downloaded by more than one million people. But if you work in a state that hasn't adopted Common Core standards or is phasing them in slowly, MasteryConnect's Common Core app didn't do much for you. That has changed with the latest release from MasteryConnect.

This fall MasteryConnect launched State Core Reference Apps for every state. These apps are designed to help teachers identify the standards (and the language of the standards) for the grades and subjects that they teach. Each app is different for each of the 50 states. For example, if you work in a state that doesn't use Common Core standards, your states' standards are featured in the app. MasteryConnect's State Core Reference Apps are available for Android and iOS. Find your state on this map and you will be taken to the app that you need.

Applications for Education
MasteryConnect's State Core Reference Apps probably won't change the way that you teach, but they could save you time and frustration of looking up standards on a poorly-designed state website or booklet.