Kami - Annotate and Collaborate on PDFs

Disclosure: Kami is an advertiser on FreeTech4Teachers.com

Kami is a neat service that makes it easy to annotate and comment on PDFs. The folks at Kami describe their service as a digital pen and paper. That is an accurate description of what the core of the service provides. The core function of Kami provides you with a place to draw, highlight, and type on a PDF. You can share your PDFs in Kami and write notes in the margins for others to see and they can do the same.

Create a free account to start using Kami. Once you have created your account you can import PDFs into Kami from your Google Drive or you can import them from your desktop. Kami can be integrated with Google Classroom to make it easy to share annotated PDFs with your students and for them to share with you.


Kami's core service for drawing, commenting, and annotating PDFs is free for all users. Kami does offer the option to upgrade to a premium account. The premium version includes options for adding voice comments and video comments to your PDFs. The premium version also supports conversion and use of Word documents.

Applications for Education
Kami could be used by students to annotate historical documents that have been scanned and saved as PDFs. For example, many of the featured daily documents from the U.S. National Archives are PDFs.

5 Google Forms Features You Should Know How to Use

Google Forms received a couple of updates that teachers have requested for years. Those new features let you create a custom look for your Forms. The new customization options are just a couple of the built-in features that are handy yet frequently overlooked features in Google Forms. Here are five features that you should know how to use.

Custom Fonts and Backgrounds for Google Forms



Save Time by Setting Default Point Values and Response Requirements



Response Validation


How to Print a Google Form


Provide Automated Feedback to Responses

Soft Fruit, Mold, and Sour Milk - A Lesson on Food Safety

At one time or another we've all opened a milk container and noticed that something wasn't quite right or picked up a piece of fruit that was just a little too soft. Reactions, one of my favorite YouTube channels, has a video that answers whether or not you can eat that soft fruit, moldy bread, or drink that sour milk. Reactions is a channel that is all about applying chemistry and biology concepts to common scenarios. To that end, Can I Still Eat This? explains the science of why fruits get soft, why milk gets sour, and how mold grows and spreads through food.


Applications for Education
Can I Still Eat This? is a good example of a science video to use in flipped lessons. A couple of my go-to tools for making flipped lessons are EDpuzzle and TES Teach. 

Elementary School Rocks

K-5 GeoSource is a great resource produced by the American Geosciences Institute. On K-5 GeoSource you will find free lesson plans, science fair project ideas, links to virtual activities, and resources for professional development. The first time I looked at the site back in 2009 it had a distinct Web 1.0 feel. The site has improved of late to make it easier to find the materials you want. A few of the resources that I looked at were this free chart about types of rocks, a science fair project guide, and a short Geoscientist career guide.

Applications for Education
As I mentioned above, K-5 GeoSource isn't the fanciest site you'll find on the web, if you need to find some ideas to use in your classroom, K-5 GeoSource is definitely worth bookmarking. The most useful aspect of the site might be the science fair project guide that you and your students could work through to plan a hands-on Earth science project.

Create Your Own Search Engine

Last week I saw some folks on Twitter sharing a link to a site called Kidy that advertised itself as an "intellegent, safe search engine for kids." I checked out the site and found that it was just an implementation of a Google Custom Search Engine that anyone can create. The implementation on Kidy was also lacking in the amount of sources it indexed. I tried five varied searches and in each case all of the results appeared to come from a small selection of sources like PBS, National Geographic, Encyclopedia Britannica (no better than using Wikipedia), NASA, and History.com. Anyone could replicate that search engine and or improve upon it by using Google's Custom Search Engine tool.

Take a look at my video and slides below to learn how you can create your own custom search engine.


Slides of the process are embedded below.


Applications for Education
Creating your own search engine can be a good way to help students limit the scope of their searches. For example, when you're teaching younger students about search strategies you might want to have them use a search engine that only indexes a few dozen websites so that you can have some assurance that they won't be landing on pages of questionable content.