Slides from Colonial Tech Conference #techcsd #delachat

Today, I had the privilege of speaking to an enthusiastic group of nearly 300 educators at the Colonial Tech Conference in New Castle, Delaware. If you live in that area, put the conference on your PD schedule for next fall.  A bunch of people asked me to share the slides that I used in a couple of my presentations. Those slides are embedded below.

How to Add Annotations to YouTube Videos

This morning at the Colonial Tech Conference in New Castle, Delaware I gave a short presentation on video projects for students. Judging by the audience's feedback, one of the most popular elements of the presentation was a demonstration on how to use YouTube's video annotation tool to create a choose-your-own-adventure series of videos. In the video embedded below I provide a demonstration of how to do that.


The following videos provide a great example of using annotations to create a choose-your-own-adventure video story for students.

What Causes Chapped Lips - A Short Science Lesson

The temperature is supposed to dip well below freezing at my house tonight. There is even the possibility of snow flurries in the forecast. I welcome the cold and snow because I like to ski. I'm not so crazy about the chapped lips that I get every winter. Perhaps you and your students feel the same way.

What causes chapped lips? What can you do to prevent your lips from chapping, besides using lip balm? The answers to those questions and more are found in a new Brain Stuff video titled What Causes Chapped Lips? The video is embedded below.


Applications for Education
I appreciate videos like this one because they address questions that many students are naturally curious about. This video can be brought into part of a larger health lesson on the importance of hydration.

Create a Thematic Picture Story On Thematic

Thematic is a simple service designed for creating and sharing picture stories. Thematic allows you to display up to twenty pictures organized around a theme of your choosing. You can add a line or two of text to each image in your story. Your completed story is displayed in a vertically scrolling format with each of your images occupying all of the available space in your browser. Completed stories can be shared publicly or kept private. Each public story can be shared via Twitter, Facebook, email, or embedding into a webpage. In the video embedded below I provide a demonstration of how to create a story on Thematic.


Applications for Education
Thematic could be a good service to use to tell a story about the highlights of a field trip, a research assignment, or a school event. It could also be useful for creating assignments in which students put together a visual timeline of events. Ask students to find pictures related to an event or theme, organize the pictures chronologically, then label them as needed. Students could also use Thematic to create a short biography as I did in the story embedded below.

Mysteries of Vernacular - An Interesting TED-Ed Series

Mysteries of Vernacular is a series of 26 TED-Ed video lessons. Each lesson is focused on one word that often used by English speakers. A history of the word's origins and evolution of its use is featured in each video lesson. The entire playlist is embedded below beginning with the word "yankee."


Applications for Education
Mysteries of Vernacular could be an instructive model for your own lessons combining history and language arts. Have your students pick a word or two that they think is common and research it. Then have them create their own short videos in which they explain the history of those words. You might even have them research the dialect of the areas in which they live.