Owl Eyes - Guide Students Through Classic Literature

Owl Eyes is a free tool that provides teachers with a good way to provide students with guidance while they are reading classic literature. Owl Eyes provides teachers with tools to insert annotations and questions into classic literature. Students can see the annotations and questions that their teachers add to the digital text. Teachers have the option to create online classrooms through which they can monitor their students' progress through a text and view their students' annotations and answers to questions. The texts available through Owl Eyes are mostly classic works that are in the public domain.

The short videos embedded below will help you get started with Owl Eyes. I highly recommend watching them in order to save yourself from some frustrating clicking without results.





Applications for Education
Owl Eyes could be a good tool for guiding students through some difficult classic literature. I would like to see its library expanded to include more texts that are accessible to younger students.

I couldn't find an option to upload my own texts on Owl Eyes. Until then, I will probably continue to use Google Docs to help students as they read difficult primary source documents. That process is outlined here.

Three Places to Find Public Domain Video Clips

On Wednesday I published suggestions for places to find public domain images. Then yesterday I received an email from a reader who was wondering about public domain video options. These are the three resources that I suggested to her.

The Internet Archive is the first place that comes to mind when I am asked for a source of Public Domain media. The Moving Image Archive within the Internet Archive is an index of more than 1.7 million video clips. Most of what you will find in the Moving Image Archive can be downloaded in a variety of file formats. You can search the archive by keyword or browse through the many categories and thematic collections in the archive. One important thing to note about the Internet Archive is that you probably don't want students to search it without supervision. In fact, I'd probably just create a folder of footage from archive that I share with my students.

The Public Domain Review is a website that features collections of images, books, essays, audio recordings, and films that are in the public domain. Choose any of the collections to search for materials according to date, style, genre, and rights. Directions for downloading and saving media is included along with each collection of media.

The National Parks Service offers more than 4,000 videos that are in the public domain. You can search for videos according to National Park or National Forest. All of the public domain videos can be downloaded. Some of the files are quite large so keep that in mind if your school has bandwidth limitations and you plan to have all of your students searching for videos at the same time.

How to Move from Google Drive to OneDrive

Earlier this week I shared information about moving your data from G Suite account to another. But what if you're leaving a school district that uses G Suite to join one that is uses Microsoft's cloud products? In that case you will want to move your Google Drive files into OneDrive. In the following video I demonstrate how you can move your Google Drive files to OneDrive.

Backup and Sync Will Automatically Save Your Desktop Files

Backup and Sync is a new service coming soon from Google. On June 28th you will be able to install Backup and Sync on your Mac or Windows computer. The service will let you have your desktop files or other folder files automatically backed up to your Google Drive account. You've always been able to quickly move files from your desktop to Google Drive through Drive desktop clients, but Backup and Sync will let you streamline that process.

It's important to note that Backup and Sync will be available to Gmail users and is not recommended for G Suite for Education users. A new Drive File Stream system is coming soon for G Suite for Education and G Suite for Business users.

Applications for Education
I envision Backup and Sync being useful for teachers and students who have files on their home/ personal laptops that they want to be sure to be able to access through Google Drive when they are using a school-issued computer.

How to Create Stop Motion Videos on a Chromebook

Last night I published an article about the Stop Motion Animator Chrome app. To clarify some of the nuances of using that app, in particular the handling of .webm files, I created the following short video demonstration.



Come to the Practical Ed Tech Chromebook Camp to learn more about making videos on Chromebooks.