Track Santa and Learn About Christmas Traditions Around the World

If your family celebrates Christmas and you're looking for a nice activity to do with young kids at home, take a look Google's annual Santa Tracker website. The site lets kids see when and where Santa is traveling from his home at the North Pole. The Santa Tracker site shows you where Santa is in relation to your location at any given time. One of the neat educational tie-ins is that you can click on Santa's current location to learn more about the Christmas traditions in that place.

The Santa Tracker site also has a little geography quiz based on Santa's travels around the globe.

Explore Maps of Historical Sites in Every U.S. State

The Traveling Salesman Problem is a website developed by William Cook at the University of Waterloo. The site features interactive maps that chart the short distance between a series of places. One of those maps is of all of the places in the United States National Register of Historic Places, all 49,603 of them.You can view the whole country in one map or visit each state's individual map.

Naturally, I jumped to the map of Maine's historic places to see how many I was familiar with. One that's close to my home is this old cattle pound that I often stop at while riding my bike in the summer. I clicked on the image on the map and was able to click through to the asset detail provided by the National Parks service. The asset detail includes when the site was added to the national registry and why it is significant.

Applications for Education
These maps of the National Register of Historic Places could be useful assets for teachers developing lessons on state history. You might ask students to look at the images and try to determine the significance of the sites before looking at the site asset details.

Free World and U.S. Map Puzzles for iPads & Android Tablets

Digital Gene offers a variety of educational apps for iPads and for Android tablets. Two of the Digital Gene apps that could be useful for elementary school geography review are Enjoy Learning World Map Puzzle and Enjoy Learning U.S. Map Puzzle. Both of these free iPad apps have the same basic types of puzzle activities.

In Enjoy Learning U.S. Map students have to drag and drop the states into their proper places on the map. The app has three levels of difficulty beginning with state names and borders drawn out for students and progressing to a blank map that doesn’t have any border or state name hints. The map in Enjoy Learning U.S. Map places Hawaii and Alaska in their geographically correct locations instead of off the coast of Mexico.

Enjoy Learning World Map uses the same drag and drop puzzle concept as Enjoy Learning U.S. Map. Enjoy Learning World Map allows students to study the regions of the world one at a time or the whole world at once.

More Than 300 Ed Tech Tutorial Videos

Throughout the year I offer webinars on a variety of educational technology topics. But I also publish a tutorial or two on my YouTube channel every week. That playlist now contains more than 300 tutorials on everything from graphics editing to podcasting to tips for new Chromebook users. The entire playlist can be found here or viewed as embedded below.

Twelve Posts from One Topic

One of the most frequently cited reasons for discontinuing a blog that I hear is "I don't have anything to write about." Said another way, "I've run out of ideas." Keeping your blog fresh does require coming up with a lot of blog posts topics.

A method that I regularly use to develop blog post topics is making lists on pieces of paper. I take one topic and try to write as many sub-topics as I can below it. Doing this often leads to the generation of ten or twelve blog posts related to one overarching topic.

The biggest source of topic ideas still remains to be my email inbox. Questions from colleagues, students, and parents are often great fodder for blog posts. I'll take the main idea from a question and split it into many sub-topics to turn into blog posts. Doing this just once a week can give you enough content to keep a classroom, library, or school blog fresh for month.

In Blogs & Social Media for Teachers & School Leaders I explain in more depth how to make your blog relevant to students and parents.