124 Recordings of Famous Poets Reading Some of Their Poems

At the beginning of this month I shared five good resources for National Poetry Month. The Library of Congress recently released a new online archive about poetry.

The Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature contains 124 recordings of writers reading some of their poems and other works. Many of the recordings are long (one hour+) interviews with the writers during which they read some of their works. The audio can be heard on the LOC website and or embedded into blog posts as I've done here. Below you will find the recordings of Ray Bradbury and Robert Frost.






H/T to Open Culture.

Color Uncovered - An iPad App About the Science of Color

Parts of this post originally appeared on one of my other blogs, iPadApps4School.com

Earlier today I shared the TED-Ed lesson Eye vs. Camera which explains how our eyes perceive light and color. Exploratorium’s Color Uncovered iPad app provides a good introduction or follow-up to the TED-Ed lesson Eye vs. Camera.

Exploratorium’s Color Uncovered iPad app is essentially a seventeen part ebook with some nice interactive activities and videos built into it to support the articles. In Color Uncovered students will why we sometimes see colors that aren’t really there, how light influences the colors we see, and why dogs would have trouble with traffic lights if they drove. One of the interactive features on Color Uncovered that I particularly like is the “Colors Add Up” activity. In “Colors Add Up” students use a clear CD case (I’m sure any other clear piece of plastic will work too) to mix colors projected from their iPads. The app also gives students a couple of short lessons on how and why artificial colors are added to foods like salmon, candy, cheese, and fruit.

Applications for Education
Color Uncovered could be a nice app for use in art lessons and science lessons. Or combine the two topics into one lesson in which students learn about the science of light and how colors blend together.

Google Classroom Now Supports Teacher Collaboration and Announcement Drafts

Today, a couple of frequently requested features were added to Google Classroom. Those features are teacher collaboration in a Google Classroom course and saving announcement drafts.

To add a teacher to one of your courses you simply have to go to your course's "About" page and select "invite teacher." The teacher(s) that you invite can do almost everything that you can do. Invited teachers can post comments, post announcements, post assignments, and even grade assignments.

Image courtesy of Google Apps for Edu marketing team.

If you work like I do, you probably try to knock out a bunch of similar tasks in one block of time. If those tasks include creating announcements and assignments for the week, Google Classroom now makes that a little easier. You can now save announcements and assignments as drafts then publish them at a later time.

Image courtesy of Google Apps for Edu marketing team.

100 Practical Ed Tech Tips Videos

On a cold winter night four or five months ago I started to organize the screencast videos that I've made over the years. I called the list Practical Ed Tech Tips. Since I started that list I've made an effort to add one or two new screencasts to it every week. Yesterday, I added the 100th video to the Practical Ed Tech Tips playlist.

In the playlist you will find videos about tools for flipping your classroom, videos on managing workflow, social media tips, search strategies, and media production. The entire playlist is embedded below.

Why Your Eye Sees Things Differently Than a Camera - A TED-Ed Lesson

Eye vs. Camera is a fascinating TED-Ed lesson. In the lesson we learn why our eyes don't always see things the same way that they're captured with a camera. Through the lesson we learn how our eyes perceive and focus on colors compared to a camera. We also learn fun facts like why we can't watch our own eyes shift from side to side in a mirror. The full lesson can be found here. The video is embedded below.


TED-Ed offers some resources to extend the lesson. Optical Illusions and Phenomena will show students more examples of how eyes perceive light and color differently than is captured by a camera. Exploring the Anatomy of Your Own Eye is an activity set extracted from The American Biology Teacher. It contains some examples and explanations of how the human eye works.