More Than 8,500 People Get Their Ed Tech Tips This Way

My virtual mentor, Chris Brogan, says that watching and listening is the new reading. He's been saying this for a while which is why I've made an effort to publish a few new videos every week. Chris appears to be right because every week more people subscribe to my YouTube channel. As of Wednesday, more than 8,500 people have subscribed to my YouTube channel for tips, tutorials, and live Q&A sessions. Check it out.

Here's one of my recent tutorials published on YouTube.

Five Uses of Comics In Your Classroom

On Thursday afternoon I hosted a webinar about using comics in the classroom. The recording of the webinar is only available to those who registered, but the slides that I used can be seen as embedded below.

Students Can Discover Careers Through Next Vista for Learning

As many readers of this blog already know, Next Vista for Learning is one of my favorite video sharing sites for students and teachers. Videos hosted on Next Vista are created by teachers and students for the purpose of sharing good news and good lessons with other teachers and students.

The careers section of Next Vista is one that guidance counselors and anyone else helping students learn about careers should bookmark. The careers section of Next Vista contains 110 videos about a wide variety of career fields. Some of the videos are available in Spanish and most of the videos include interviews with people talking about their jobs. Two of the videos are embedded below.

Live Nature Webcams In Google Earth

When the new version of Google Earth was released in April, it signaled the beginning of more things to come for Google Earth on Chromebooks. Since then Google has steadily added new features to Google Earth for Chromebook users. The latest update brings a new Voyage that features live nature webcams from Explore.org.

 The Explore.org Voyage features webcams from Katmai National Park. The Voyage includes five live webcam feeds including one underwater webcam which captures images of salmon and bears fishing for salmon.

Watch my video below to learn more about the browser-based version of Google Earth.


Applications for Education
Depending upon the time or year, the new Explore.org Voyage could provide a nice way for students to see brown bears in their natural element. More importantly, it's a demonstration of what you and your students could create by inserting live webcam feeds into your own Google Earth tours.

How to Use Speech-to-Text in Gmail

In Sunday's Practical Ed Tech Tip of the Week I mentioned a Chrome extension that you can use to dictate messages in Gmail. That extension is called Email Dictation. With the extension installed you can quickly have your spoke words appear as text in a Gmail message. In the video below I give a short demonstration of how to use Email Dictation.