Three Thanksgiving Activities You Can Do Today!

It's Thanksgiving Eve here in the U.S. If you have school today and you're still looking for some Thanksgiving-themed activities to do today, I have three suggestions for you.

1. Build a thankfulness Padlet wall with your students. 
Create a Padlet wall and have students share text and picture notes in which they share the things that they are thankful for this year. If you're not familiar with Padlet, I have some tutorial videos here.

2. Create a Thanksgiving traditions Flipgrid. 
Flipgrid makes it easy to have students record and share quick video responses to a teacher's prompts. Create a Flipgrid and ask your students to share their favorite Thanksgiving traditions. If you have time, consider posting your Flipgrid on Twitter and asking other teachers to have their students respond too.

3. Contribute to The Great Thanksgiving Listen 2017.
StoryCorps is once again hosting The Great Thanksgiving Listen. This is an initiative designed to get people to talk with family members and record stories about Thanksgiving. Learn more here.

Intro to U.S. Involvement in WWI - And What Kids Say About Tom Richey's Videos

Tom Richey recently released a new video for students in U.S. history courses. The United States in World War I is a video in which Tom provides students with an overview of why the United States got involved in the war, why U.S. involvement was significant, and Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points. It's hard to provide depth in a ten minute, but Tom does a great job of providing students with an overview of U.S. involvement in WWI. Watch the video as embedded below.


Tom has more than 87,000 followers on YouTube. Most of them are students. Here are some recent comments from students:

"I already passed AP US History last year, but I still watch your videos."

"I love your videos, always helping me out before a quiz!"

"Thank you! I have a APUSH DBQ tomorrow and this video definitely helped me get an idea of what a good dbq should be."

"I’m not even in AP EURO anymore but I love these videos so much!"

How does Tom make videos that get comments like these? Find out next week in How To Teach With Video.

Practical Ed Tech Live - Episode #20

Yesterday, I hosted the twentieth episode of Practical Ed Tech Live. If you missed it, you can now watch the recording as embedded below. The questions that I answered in the video can be seen here.


Information about the webinars that I mentioned in the video can be found here.

Use Google Earth & Maps for More Than Social Studies

Last week was Geography Awareness Week. All across social media there were lots of references made to ways to use Google Earth and Google Maps to teach geography. That makes perfect sense. But Google Earth and Google Maps can be used for much more than just geography lessons. That's a large part of what I will cover in my upcoming Practical Ed Tech course To Geography and Beyond With Google Earth & Maps.

In addition to social studies Google Maps and Google Earth can be used in physical education, mathematics, science, and language arts lessons. Google Maps and Google Earth can be used to tell stories, to analyze data, and to discover new information. Of course, you can also use it find your way to that new coffee shop in town. You'll learn all of those things and more in this course beginning on November 30th. Register here. 

In addition to three live webinars, the course includes handouts containing detailed tutorials, a discussion forum, and professional development certificate for completion. Register here! The cost of this Practical Ed Tech course is $97.

Course highlights:
1. How to create multimedia maps.

2. How to build virtual tours.

3. How to collaboratively create multimedia maps.

4. How to map data and use maps to analyze data.

5. How mapping strengthens recall.

The cost of this course is $97.

Register here!

Can't make it to the live webinars? Don't worry because the recording of each session will be emailed to you the next day and you can still participate in all of the Q&A in the discussion forum.

A note about fees for webinars:
Whenever I advertise a Practical Ed Tech webinar I am asked why they aren't free. There are two reasons. One, hosting professional development events is one of the ways that I am able to keep the lights on at Free Technology for Teachers. Two, while all of the tools featured in my webinars are free to use, my time for teaching about them is not free.

93 Years of Parades

Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade turns 93 this year. For many Americans watching the parade is as much of Thanksgiving tradition as eating Turkey is. The parade has change quite a bit over the years. You can view those changes through Macy's Parade History which offers an interactive timeline of the parade's history. You can select any decade on the timeline to view 360 interactive images of the parade. Each decade on the timeline also includes some video clips. Scroll through the decades and you'll see that the parade reflects the popular culture of each decade.

History offers the following short video about the history of Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.


Looking for some last-minute ideas for Thanksgiving lessons? Take a look at the suggestions shared here.