The Process of Plastic Bottle Recycling

I have t-shirts made from recycled plastic bottles and I bet that your students do too. How did those bottles become the material for t-shirts? Why didn't the recycling company just make more bottles out of the recycled bottles? And why are those numbers on the bottom of the bottle important? Those questions and more are answered in a new Reactions video, How Plastic Recycling Actually Works.

18 Great Cartoons That Teach Cyber Safety Lessons

Planet Nutshell is a video production company that produces short, animated videos to explain products, services, and concepts. Within their education section you will find videos addressing topics in  mathematics, physics, climate science, and cyber safety.

Their series of videos about Internet safety consists of eighteen videos for K-12 students. The series is called NetSafe and it has eighteen episodes covering topics like protecting personal information, responsible posting of pictures, and mobile location privacy. The videos are labeled with grade levels so that students in high school don't watch videos designed for K-3 students. A video for K-3 students and a video for high school students are embedded below.

Find & Read Old Newspapers Through the Google Newspaper Archive

Yesterday's blog post about the Chronicling America collection of digitized newspapers prompted Daniel Bassill to ask me about options for newspapers printed after 1963. My suggestion was to try the Google Newspaper Archive. In that archive you will find hundreds of digitized copies of newspapers printed around the world. In the archive you fill find newspapers published in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. In the following video I provide a demonstration of how to search Google's Newspaper Archive.

How to Collaboratively Create Documents on Canva

Last week Clint Heitz asked me for a suggestion for tools that students can use to make magazines online. He has used Lucid Press and was looking for other options to try. There were two tools that I suggested. One suggestion was to try Book Creator and the other was to try Canva. In the following video I demonstrate how you can use Canva to collaboratively create and publish documents.

An Archive of Historic American Buildings and Landscapes

There was a time when navigating the website of the Library of Congress was a bit of a chore. Collections of digitized artifacts were mixed with collections that simply listed availability of artifacts. Thankfully, in recent years the LOC has made a marked improvement in the ease which you can find digitized artifacts that are available to view and download. The best way to find those artifacts is to head to the Digital Collections section of the LOC. It was there that I found the Chronicling America collection and the Historic American Buildings Collection.

Historic American Buildings is a collection of more than 44,000 pictures, drawings, and documents about buildings in the United States. Within the collection there is subset of artifacts from the Historic American Landscapes Survey. It was in that collection that I found the featured image for this post. The image, View About Five Miles South of Chisana, Alaska, was taken as part of the survey.

You can browse and search the Historic American Buildings collection according to location, subject, format (PDF or image), and contributor.

Applications for Education
This collection could be useful to history students in need of some archival imagery to use in presentations and reports. I can also see this collection being of interest to art teachers looking for images to use illustrate changes in architecture over time and location.