Knowmia Was Acquired by TechSmith - What That Means for You

Over the last couple of years I have featured Knowmia in nearly a dozen blog posts. Knowmia is a website and an iPad app for creating, sharing, and viewing video lessons. Today, I received a notification from Knowmia that they have been acquired by TechSmith. According to the email that I received from Knowmia, you will continue to have free access to your online content and to Knowmia's free iPad and web-based tools. From here forward TechSmith will assume responsibility for the future of Knowmia and will handle support inquiries.

Applications for Education
Knowmia's Assignment Wizard and iPad app provide an excellent way to create and distribute flipped lessons. The free iPad app allows you to make your own instructional videos to use in the Assignment Wizard. If you don't have time to create your own videos to use in your lessons the Assignment Wizard will let you import videos from YouTube.

And if you're not using the flipped model, Knowmia can be a good place to find educational videos that your students can use to review or get "on demand" help when they cannot connect with you.

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.