Extreme Planet Makeover

Extreme Planet Makeover is an interactive activity produced by NASA as a part of the Exoplanet Exploration website. Extreme Planet Makeover lets students choose the size of a planet, position relative to the largest and nearest star, and planet age. Students instantly get feedback on the characteristics of the planets they create. For example, if it is too small and too far from a star students will see that they created an iceball planet.

Extreme Planet Makeover is one of four Exoplanet Exploration interactive activities. The other three are Interstellar Trip Planner, Alien Safari (I previously featured these here), and Five Ways to Find a Planet (review coming next week).

Applications for Education
Extreme Planet Makeover is a simple interactive that students could use for a few minutes to see how the relative size and position of planets contribute to their characteristics.

A Blogger Privacy Setting You Might Want to Use

Blogger can be a good choice for many classroom blogs. One of its selling points for schools that use G Suite for Education is that students can log-in by using their school-issued Google Accounts. Another great aspect of Blogger is that you can get a blog started in a manner of minutes. But with that ease of set-up comes some default settings that you might want to change. One of those settings being the privacy settings.

In Blogger you can change a couple of privacy settings. First, it is possible to request that your blog doesn't appear in Blogger's list of published blogs and not to appear in Google search results. Second, you can restrict your blog to viewing only by people who have been invited by email.

Applications for Education
If you use the option to restrict viewing to those who have been invited by email, you're excluding anyone whose email address you don't have. That's not a big problem unless your students have grandparents or other extended family with whom they would like to share their blog posts. A middle ground between having your blog restricted to those invited by email and having your blog completely public is to use the option to remove your blog from public listings and Google search results. This just means that anyone who has the direct URL for your blog can see it, but it won't pop-up in search results.

One last reminder about using Blogger or any other blogging platform with students, always activate comment moderation.

Learn more about blogging with students in my on-demand webinar, Winning Blog Strategies for Teachers. 

Turn a Blog Into a Book

One of the reasons that I continue to encourage teachers to blog with students is that it helps to create a record of what your students have observed, learned, created, and shared throughout the school year. At the end of the year, you may want to take that blog and turn it into a physical item that your students can share with their parents. BlogBooker is a tool that can help you do that.

BlogBooker is a service that allows you to turn your the contents of your Blogger or WordPress blog into a PDF. Using BlogBooker is a fairly straight-forward process. BlogBooker walks you through each step of the process including the first step which is exporting the contents of your blog as an XML file. The second step is entering the URL for your blog. After completing those two steps just sit back and wait as BlogBooker creates a PDF or Word file based on the text and images in your blog posts.

The free version of BlogBooker limits you to three books and one year's worth of blog posts. There are upgrades available that will allow you to include more blog posts and will include higher resolution images.

Want to try blogging with your students this year? Take a look at my on-demand webinar Winning Blog Strategies for Teachers. 

Join Me, Vicki Davis, and Monica Burns for a Free Webinar

Next week I am joining Vicki Davis and Monica Burns on a free webinar organized by Kids Discover. The webinar will be a panel-style discussion of ten ideas for inquiry-based learning. The webinar is happening live at 4:30pm EST on October 3rd. (Use the Time Zone Converter to find your local time).

Some of the ideas that Vicki, Monica, and I will be sharing include why you should include inquiry-based learning in your practice, what inquiry-based learning looks like in practice, how to get started, and how to get administrative support for inquiry-based learning. Join us! Registration is quick, easy, and free.

Three Thoughts About Making Time to Blog

A few years ago I was speaking at a conference in Arizona when I was asked, "what do you say to teachers who say I don't have time for a blog?" I've been asked many variations on that question in the years since. Here's my advice:

First, don't think of blogging as something you have to do on a daily basis. Some of my favorite bloggers only publish once or twice a week. Set a goal of writing one post per week to start. Think of the activity as simply a way to document your reflections on what you tried in your classroom that week or what you're thinking about trying next week. Reflecting on what we're doing should be a part of our lives anyway. I set aside time each week to mind map ideas for future blog posts.

Second, think about a blog as a living document. You don't have to publish complete thoughts in every post. Start a thought and ask readers to join in a conversation. Spelling and grammar don't count as much as think they do. The goal is to publish not practice proof-reading. Of course, if you do see a glaring mistake you can go back and fix it.

Third, think about all of the time that you spend on activities that don't benefit you or anyone else. In a typical one hour television program you will see twelve minutes of commercials. How many television shows are in your weekly "must watch" list? Use those commercial breaks to tap away at a blog post. How much time do you spend waiting in traffic? Use an app like Anchor.fm to create a mini-podcast that you later post on your blog. Or use speech to text function to dictate part of a blog post.

Need help getting a blog started or re-started? Check out my Winning Blog Strategies webinar.