How to Create Strong Passwords

When was the last time you changed your email password, your Facebook password, or your online banking password? Hopefully, you're not using the same password for all of your accounts. If it has been a while since you changed your passwords, think about doing so as part of digital spring cleaning. The videos below provide some guidance on creating strong passwords.

Here's a set of three videos to get you started. The first video is a fun look at the ten most commonly used passwords, don't use these.


Here's a video from Mozilla about password security.




Here's Secure Passwords Explained by Common Craft.

Draft - Focused, Collaborative Writing

Draft is a collaborative writing tool that makes you focus on writing and revising by giving users a simple interface. In Draft you won't find options for inserting images or messing around with font types. In Draft you just write. When you're ready to get feedback about your writing, you can invite someone to read your document by entering that person's email address. The person that reads your document can suggest edits. When the person reading your document is done you can accept or reject the suggested edits.

Applications for Education
For students who don't have Google Documents, Draft could be a nice tool for peer editing online.

All of My NCTIES Slides - #NCTIES17

If you have been following my blog or Twitter this week, you probably know that I have been in North Carolina for the NCTIES conference. Earlier in the week I facilitated pre-conference workshops. On Thursday and Friday I gave a few presentations. The slides from those presentations can be seen here or as embedded below.

How to Search For Public Google Docs

This morning at the NCTIES conference I shared with people how to search for publicly shared Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides. Doing that can be a great way to find templates for lesson plans and other resources to use in your classroom (with attribution, of course). In the video embedded below I demonstrate how to search for publicly shared Google Docs.


Once you find a publicly shared Google Doc, you might want to make a copy of it in your Google Drive account. In the video below I demonstrate how to do that.

Brainstorming Warm-Up Exercises

On Wednesday morning I facilitated a workshop about blogging. One of the activities that we did was in that workshop was to brainstorm purposes and topics for blog posts. Doing that activity was based in part on a series of brainstorming warm-up activities that I learned about from an Ethos 3 presentation many years ago. That presentation is embedded below.

Wake Up Brain! from Ethos3 | Presentation Design and Training

An explanation of the activities in the presentation above can be found here.

A comparison of online brainstorming tools can be found here.