The Science of Kissing and The Odds of Finding Love

With Valentine's Day just around the corner this is a good time to take a look at the science of kissing. The following video from It's Okay To Be Smart (produced by PBS Digital Studios) explains why humans kiss, the history of symbols associated with kissing, and some cultural views of kissing. When I saw this video I immediately thought of my friend Jeni who teaches high school health.


The following fun video, also from It's Okay to Smart, attempts to use math to determine the odds of a 25 year old woman finding love in New York. (Remember, the video is just for fun).

Create Valentine's Day Video Greetings With Animoto's Sweetheart Video Themes

Valentine's Day is less than 48 hours away. If you need a quick way to send for your kids or students to send Valentine's Day greetings to family members, take a look at the Valentine's Day themes offered by Animoto. Have the kids grab a handful of family pictures and put them together with some cute text to form a video greeting that can be emailed to family members.

Applications for Education
In addition to being helpful in bailing me out on Valentine's Day in the past (that's a story for another time) I've always liked using Animoto as a way to introduce some basic video creation methods to students and teachers. I often use Animoto at the beginning of my introductory workshops on classroom video projects because it gives first-timers a quick boost of confidence before we delve into more challenging video creation projects.

How to Create a Connect Fours Review Game

Over the weekend I shared the latest educational game creation tool developed by Russel Tarr at Classtools.net. Connect Fours is a game in which that you have to create four sets of four related terms from sixteen terms displayed on the game board. I've received a few emails with questions about how to create a game on Connect Fours. In the video embedded below I demonstrate how to use Connect Fours to create your own review games.

Save Kahoot Quiz Results In Your Google Drive Account

Kahoot is featured at the end of nearly every Best of the Web presentation that I give. Kahoot provides a fun way to gather feedback from a group through their phones, iPads, Chromebooks, or any other device that has a web browser and an Internet connection. You can include pictures and or videos as part of each question that you create and share in a Kahoot activity. Players are awarded points for answering correctly and quickly. Or you can turn off the points system to use Kahoot in a non-competitive environment.

The latest update to Kahoot, one that I failed to share a few weeks ago when it came out, enables you to save the results of a Kahoot in your Google Drive account. When you have completed a Kahoot activity simply go to the results screen and click the Google Drive icon to save the results. You can still download your results as a PDF if you prefer that option.

Best of the Web - Winter 2015 - Slides from #OETC15

This afternoon at the Ohio Educational Technology Conference I presented my latest version of Best of the Web (and various app stores). This version contains some of the sites and apps that were in my fall 2014 version of the same slides. Those that have been included again either released some notable updates or are so good that I think they're worth including again. This version is also different because for the first time I included slides to denote sections of the presentation. Many people asked for the slides so I'm sharing them below as a Google Slides presentation. You can also click here to open a copy.


If you would like to make a copy of these slides follow the directions listed here.

To learn more about the ins and outs of Google Drive, consider joining my online class Getting Going With GAFE.