Free Technology for Teachers

Wednesday, December 5, 2018

How to Add Videos to Google Slides Without Using YouTube

This morning I received an email from a reader who wanted to know if it was possible for his students to add their personal videos to Google Slides presentations without having to use YouTube. His plan is for students to collaborate to create a Google Slides presentation about a 4-H event and he wants students to include some personal video clips from it. But while his school allows the use of YouTube, he'd prefer to avoid having to make students use it. My suggestion was to have students save their videos in their Google Drive and then insert them directly into their slides. That's what I demonstrate in the following video that I recorded this morning.

If you have questions about Google Slides or other G Suite products, please feel free to send me a note. And if you're new to using G Suite, consider joining my Practical Ed Tech course Getting Going With G Suite.

120 Free Winter-themed Reading Lesson Plans

ReadWorks is an excellent service that provides teachers with free reading lesson plans. ReadWorks offers lesson plans that can be used in classrooms from Kindergarten through 12th grade. All of the lessons are standards-aligned. And if you don't want to use ReadWorks' lesson plans, you can simply use any of their thousands of fiction and non-fiction articles to design your own lessons. You can search through ReadWorks according to topic and grade level. All articles in ReadWorks are listed with a lexile score and suggested grade level.

ReadWorks recently published a selection of articles and lesson plans that have a winter and or holiday theme. The winter/ holiday collection on ReadWorks contains 120 articles for K-12. In the collection there are articles that have connections to topics in science, social studies, and language arts. All articles are accompanied by lists of key vocabulary terms and suggested comprehension and or discussion questions.

Applications for Education
ReadWorks makes it easy to find interesting and engaging articles to use in reading lesson plans. You can use the articles on paper or take advantage of the ReadWorks digital platform to create class rosters and assign articles to your students to read online. For the 2018-19 school year ReadWorks added a Google Classroom integration for distributing articles and comprehension questions to your students.

Coming Soon to PowerPoint - Real-time Captions and Translations

Earlier this year Google added automatic captioning to Google Slides. This week, via The Verge, I learned that Microsoft is adding automatic captioning and translation to PowerPoint starting in January. The automatic captioning will work when you are displaying your slides in presentation mode. You will have a choice of languages in which to display captions.

Applications for Education
One huge advantage of PowerPoint's automatic captioning service over Google Slide's automatic captions is that PowerPoint's support multiple languages and real-time translation display. This could be a fantastic resource for ELL/ESL classrooms. If you can't wait to give PowerPoint's automatic captioning a try, you can still use Microsoft Translator for Education.

Tuesday, December 4, 2018

Ten Resources for Teaching and Learning About Pearl Harbor

This week is the 77th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. That wasn't the first military action of the Japanese during WWII. It's just the event that finally got the U.S. to join the war. If you're looking from some resources to use in lessons about Pearl Harbor, take a look at the following ten items.

DocsTeach offers a couple of primary source based activities about Pearl Harbor. In Analyzing Evidence of the Pearl Harbor Attack students analyze documents used in the Congressional investigation into the attack on Pearl Harbor. In Two Versions of FDR's Infamy Speech students read and compare the initial draft of Roosevelt's speech with the final draft that was broadcast.

The 1941 Project is an interactive map of Pearl Harbor. The map features the stories of survivors of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Click on a person on the map to read his or her story and see accompanying photographs. You can customize the map to display the positions of ships on December 7, 1941. There is also an option to see the map as the Japanese had drawn it prior to the attack. The 1941 Project map does take a long time to load all of features. Remind your students to be patient while the map loads all available features.

Five Things You Don't Know About Pearl Harbor, produced by Military.com, offers five interesting facts about and related to the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

The National Parks Service offers lesson plans about Pearl Harbor and the USS Arizona.

History Animated has a number of animations of military movements in the Pacific during WWII.

My Story: Pearl Harbor is an hour-by-hour account of the attack on Pearl Harbor. The account is told from the perspective of Dale and Johnie Gano who were stationed at Pearl Harbor.

Remembering Pearl Harbor is a CBS Sunday Morning segment that features interviews with Pearl Harbor attack survivors.

The Smithsonian Channel offers audio of the only live news report from Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Images have been added to the audio to create the following video.

One of my favorite online history teachers, Keith Hughes, offers this seven minute lesson about Pearl Harbor.

Finally, it seems fitting this week to include President George H.W. Bush's speech at the Pearl Harbor memorial that he gave in 1991 on the 50th anniversary of the attack.