Turn CSV Files Into Heat Maps

Heat Map Tool is a tool for easily creating heat maps or incident maps from a CSV file. To create a heat map all you need to do is upload a CSV file then specify your desired display attributes like scale, colors, and opacity. You can edit the display attributes of your map whenever you like. If you're wondering how to create a CSV file you can do so by exporting from a spreadsheet in Google Documents or exporting from an Excel file. Click here for directions on exporting from Excel. The free version of Heat Map Tool allows you to have up to 100 data points on your map and up to 500 hits per day on your map.

Applications for Education
Heat Map Tool could be a good tool for students to use to create visualizations of geography-related data that they collect. Students could gather and display data about people's habit in their community or throughout the world. For example, you could have students gather data about dialects and display that information on a map.

Google Forms & Sheets for Beginners - Practical Ed Tech Webinar Next Week

From creating and scoring meaningful formative assessments to organizing school events, Google Forms and Google Sheets are powerful tools to help you get things done. But you need to know where to start. That's why next Thursday at 4pm Eastern Time I'm hosting a webinar designed to help you learn how to use and get the most out of Google Forms and Sheets in your classroom.

If you’ve ever read about or seen a neat use of Google Forms or Google Sheets and thought, “I want to do that,” Google Forms and Sheets for Beginners is for you.

When you attend you’ll learn:

• How to create multimedia formative assessments in Google Forms.
• The common mistakes made by new users and how to avoid them.
• How to use Google Sheets to make rubrics and deliver feedback to students.
• Methods for using Google Forms and Sheets to organize school events like field trips, PTA meetings, and extracurricular club meetings.
• How you and your students can use Google Forms and Sheets to gather, organize, and visualize information.

You should register if:

• You’re new to using Google Forms and Google Sheets.
• It has been a while since you last used Google Forms or Google Sheets.
• Have you tried all the new features added in the last six months?

Click here to register!

(It will be recorded for those who register but cannot attend the live presentation)

Discover Primary Sources by Browsing the World Digital Library Maps

The World Digital Library hosts more than 19,000 primary documents and images from dozens of libraries around the world. Hosted by the Library of Congress and sponsored in part by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the mission of the World Digital Library is to promote the study and understanding of cultures.

The WDL can be searched by date, era, country, continent, topic, and type of resource. But my favorite way to explore the WDL is by browsing through the interactive maps that are available when you click on the globe icon in the site's header. The WDL aims to be accessible to as many people as possible by providing search tools and content descriptions in multiple languages.

Applications for Education
The World Digital Library can be a great resource for anyone that teaches history and or cultural studies. The wealth of image based resources along with the document based resources makes the WDL appropriate for use with most age groups. 

How to Include a Flickr Slideshow in Google Sites

This afternoon I spent time working with teachers to develop new websites through Google Sites. One of the things that many wanted to include was a slideshow of pictures from classroom activities and field trip activities. One way to do this is to embed a Google Slides presentation into a page. Another way is to embed a Flickr album into a page. The embedded album will be displayed as a slideshow.

How to embed a Flickr album into Google Sites:

1. In your Flickr account select "albums."
2. Choose the album that you want to display. 
3. Select "share album."
4. Choose "embed" and copy the provided code. 
   
5. In Google Sites select "embed" from the "Insert" menu. Paste the embed code copied from Flickr. 
   

How to Embed Your Slideshows Into Your Blog

Yesterday's post about Speaker Deck prompted a few readers to ask me about other options for embedding slideshows into blog posts. The options are different depending upon which slideshow tool you like to use. Therefore, I'm sharing methods for embedding slideshows made with the three most popular presentation tools.

Google Slides
Follow these steps to embed a Google Slides presentation into a blog post:

1. In the Google Slides editor select "publish to the web" from the "File" drop-down menu. 
2. Select "embed" then choose a display size. 
3. Click "Publish" then copy the provided embed code. 
4. Paste the embed code into your blog post as HTML (don't use "compose" mode in Blogger or "Visual" in WordPress/ EduBlogs). 

PowerPoint

To embed a PowerPoint presentation into your blog follow these steps:

1. Your PPT file must be stored in OneDrive. 
2. Open your PPT from OneDrive in PowerPoint online. 
3. In the upper, right corner of the presentation open the menu for additional options then choose "embed."
   
4. Choose the display size that you want to use then copy the provided embed code. 
   

Keynote
Keynote doesn't provide an embed code the way that Google Slides or the online version of PowerPoint does. That said, you can try following these directions to embed a Keynote presentation into your blog. This method will not work with all blogging platforms. If it doesn't work for you, you can export your Keynote to PowerPoint format and upload to SlideShare which will provide an embed code. Or you can export your Keynote to PDF and then upload it to Speaker Deck.