Last year I published a 30 page document that I called The Practical Ed Tech Handbook. This week I spent some time revising that document and updating it the 2016-17 school year. The Practical Ed Tech Handbook isn't just a list of my favorite resources. I've included ideas for using these resources and in many cases I've included links to video tutorials about my favorite resources.
In The Practical Ed Tech Handbook you will find resources arranged in seven categories; communication with students & parents, web search strategies, digital citizenship, video creation, audio production, backchannels & informal assessment, and digital portfolios.
The link and the embed above are both hosted by Box.com. If you cannot see the embedded document or you cannot access the link, check with your domain administrator to see if you're allowed to access Box.com at school.
One of last month's most popular posts featured five frequently overlooked Google Slides features. Last week I featured a video about making comics in Google Slides. There are still more features of Google Slides that students and teachers frequently overlook. Those features include customizing charts, importing slides from previous presentations, creating a personal dictionary, and some image editing features. All of those features are demonstrated in my new video that is embedded below.
You can learn more about how to use these Google Slides features in your classroom in my upcoming course, Getting Going With GAFE.
TurboNote is a great Chrome extension that lets you take time-stamped notes while watching videos on YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, and many other video sharing sites. I was immediately impressed by TurboNote when I reviewed it last month. This week TurboNote released two great updates. Those updates feature transcript search and synced viewing.
In the updated version of TurboNote you can invite other TurboNote users to take notes with you in real-time. To do this you create a TurboNote "event" (a nice name for a chat room) then invite others to join by sending them the link to your event. Once people have joined your TurboNote event you can can sync the video time to watch videos at the same pace. You can then chat about the video in real-time.
The transcript search feature in TurboNote is a beta feature that currently works only on YouTube videos that have captions enabled. On those videos TurboNote can be used to search the transcript of the captions to find specific points in the videos according to keywords.
Applications for Education
The new synced viewing option in TurboNote could be a good option for students to use to take notes together while watching a short video lecture like a TED Talk. The transcript search function could be helpful in locating a key point in that same TED Talk video.
Earlier this year ClassDojo launched a new video series that they called Big Ideas. The first videos in the series were all about growth mindset. The videos proved to be extremely popular as they were all viewed hundreds of thousands of times.
Next week ClassDojo is releasing some new videos in their Big Ideas series. The next set of videos will be all about empathy. The videos were created by ClassDojo in conjunction with Making Caring Common, a project of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Applications for Education
Like the other videos in the Big Ideas series, the empathy videos will be accompanied by discussion guides that are suitable for K-6 students. When you download the discussion guide (PDF) you will also download a sheet of "tear away" questions that you can send home with your students to discuss with their parents.
Last week I wrote about how students can use Google Scholar to track product developments and innovations over time. In the video embedded below I provide more details on how students can use Google Scholar and Google Patents to trace the history of a product's development.
