An Overlooked YouTube Feature

YouTube contains many useful features that are frequently overlooked. One of those features is using your YouTube channel to store videos even if you don't make them public. Another overlooked aspect of YouTube is that it can serve as a file conversion tool for some video formats.

When you upload videos to YouTube you don't have to make them public. Since YouTube doesn't limit how many files you can upload, you can use your YouTube channel to simply store your video files for free. When you need the files, you can download them at anytime.

Occasionally, you may have a video file that you need converted to MP4. In that case, upload it to your YouTube channel. Once it has been uploaded and processed, you should be able to download it as an MP4. I recently did this with an AVI file.

Check out the screenshots below to see how to download your files from YouTube. (This only works with videos that you own and are in your YouTube account).

Click image for full size.

Click image for full size. 

I'll be sharing many more tips and tricks like this one in my upcoming workshop at the Ed Tech Teacher Google Jamboree in Medfield, Massachusetts. Please join us, it is going to be fun!

Winter Around the World - A Collaborative Student Project

As we head into winter in the northern hemisphere, Shannon Miller has a launched a global, collaborative project for students. Winter Around the World is an effort to collect stories, pictures, poems, and songs about winter. The submissions will be organized into a Google Slides presentation and then assembled into an ebook. The project is open students of all ages.

Applications for Education
Winter Around the World could provide a great way for students to see a different perspective on winter. My students associate snow and cold with winter while other students might not ever see snow during their winter seasons. Beyond the visual differences, students participating in Winter Around the World could learn about the activities that are popular during winters in different parts of the world.

The deadline for submissions to Winter Around the World is December 1st. If that deadline is too tight for your classroom, consider creating your winter around the world project with the teachers you are connected to through social media.

A Fun App for Learning to Identify Plants and Animals

Earlier this week I shared a couple of apps designed to help you get your students involved in learning about nature by going outside and documenting their observations. It's not always practical to get outside. Your geography will also limit the number of plants and animals students can see on a walking tour of your school grounds and their neighborhoods. Therefore, I want to introduce another app for learning about nature.

Classify It! is a free iPad app designed to help elementary school and middle school students learn to classify plants and animals. In the app students are given a question and shown a selection of plants and animals. Respond to the question students have to correctly identify the plants and animals that answer the question. For example, on the second level of the game students are asked to identify the animals that are mammals and they then have to select the mammals from a gallery of pictures. If students need help understanding the question or prompt on a level, they can tap the question mark icon to receive a bit of clarification.

Creature Cards provide an incentive to students to complete each level of Classify It! with 100% accuracy. When students complete a level with 100% accuracy they receive Creature Cards. Creature Cards are essentially trading cards that feature a plant or animal picture along with some information about it. Students can make as many attempts as they need in order to complete a level with 100% accuracy.

25 Guides to Teaching U.S. History

Disclosure: Storyboard That is an advertiser on FreeTech4Teachers.com.

Over the last couple of years Storyboard That has been steadily expanding their product offerings and their free teacher guides. The teacher guides have been developed by classroom teachers using the Storyboard That services.

The latest set of Storyboard That teacher guides are about U.S. History. A total of 25 U.S. History teacher guides are now available on Storyboard That. The guides are broken into four main eras; pre-Colonial - 1776, Independence to Civil War, Reconstruction to WWII, and post-WWII. You will find units for major events and themes within each era.

Applications for Education
The Storyboard That U.S. History teacher guides make use of the free and premium aspects of Storyboard That. Even if you don't have access to the premium features, you can still glean some good ideas from these guides. For example, the guide to teaching Federalism includes some excellent visuals that could be the basis for creating your own comparison charts. The visuals on the Constitutional Convention provide a good summary of the proposed plans of governance. The essential questions listed with each guide are excellent for facilitating classroom conversations.

Three Ways to Share Bundles of Links With Students

Trying to get all of your students to the same set of websites at the same time can be a frustrating experience for you and for them. Just a mis-typed character or two can create a frustrating experience for everyone in the room. One way to avoid this situation is to post all of your links on one course webpage or in a blog post. Another solution is to use a link bundling service that will group all of your links together into one package. Then instead of sending out a bunch of individual links you can just send one link that will open all of the bundled links for your students. Here are three services that you can use for just that purpose.

LinkBunch is a free service that you can use to quickly send a group of links to your friends, colleagues, and students. To use the service just visit LinkBunch, enter the links that you want to share, and click "Bunch." When you click on "Bunch" you will be given a URL to share with anyone you want to see the links in your bunch. When someone clicks on the URL for your Bunch he or she will be able to open the links you bunched together.

Bitly is one URL shortener that I have been using for years. It's simple to use, especially if you use the bookmarklet, allows you to customize URLs, and it offers good statistics about the use of your links. Bitly offers an option for bundling bookmarks into one package that you can share with just one link. Bitly bundles can be created collaboratively if you invite other Bitly users to bundle links with you. The nice thing about Bitly is that you can view how many times a link has been used. So if you have 25 students and the link has only been used 20 times, you know that at five students aren't where you need them to be.

FatURL is a handy little tool to use when you need to share a group of links to someone. To share a group of links through FatURL just copy and paste or type URLs into the bundle box. You can add comments to each link. After creating your bundle hit the share button to send it.