A Flipgrid Feature That is Often Overlooked

Earlier this week I was leading a workshop about making videos with students. The first part of the workshop included using Flipgrid. One of the features of Flipgrid that I always show is the sticky notes feature for students. Even though this feature is in plain view many people say to me, "I never tried that."

I always show teachers and students the sticky note feature in Flipgrid because it is a good one for students to use to write out a few bullet points before they record their Flipgrid videos. The sticky notes are present to students while they record so they could use it to include an entire script. The notes don't appear in the video. Watch my video to learn how to use Flipgrid's sticky note feature.


You can find twelve more Flipgrid tutorial videos in my complete guide to using Flipgrid.

Two New Options in Google Classroom's Classwork Page

This week Google added a couple of frequently-requested features to Google Classroom. Those features are automatically placing the latest work at the top of the Classwork page and filtering the Classwork page by topic. Both of these features should be available to you as soon as you open your Classwork page. You can read more about both of them here.

Filtering the Classwork page according to topic comes at just the right time for end-of-year review. filtering by topic should help you and your students quickly find materials and assignments according to topic. And automatically putting new work at the top of the page should be helpful to students in not missing important and new items.

How to Use Google's Dataset Search Tool

Yesterday, I wrote an overview of Google's relatively new Dataset Search tool. It is a tool that is designed to help users locate publicly available datasets. As I explain in the following video, datasets aren't limited to CSV or Excel files. Through the Dataset Search tool you will find datasets in the forms of Google Earth files, zip files of images, and collections of documents. Learn more about how to use Google's Dataset Search tool in my new video that is embedded below.


I'll be talking more about search and search strategies in next week's Practical Ed Tech webinar, Search Strategies Students Need to Know. 

How to Measure Distances & Share Google Earth Views

Thanks to YouTube's "on this day" feature last night I was reminded that two years ago I published a video overview of what was then the new browser-based version of Google Earth. As I shared on my YouTube channel last night, Google has added a couple of features to Google Earth since I published my original video. Two of those features are the ability to measure distances in multiple units and the ability to share a specific view to Google Classroom. Both of those features are demonstrated in the new video that I published this morning. Watch it on my YouTube channel or as embedded below.

Edublogs Explains How to Handle Student Blogs at the End of the Year

The end of the school year will be here before too long. For many of you it's only about six weeks away. If you and your students have been blogging along this year, you might be wondering what you should do with those blogs when the year ends. Do you leave them floundering in the Internet winds? Do you delete all of the posts? Do you password protect all of the content? Or should you download the content and turn it into a physical artifact? Edublogs answers those questions and more in their new guide on how to deal with student and class blogs at the end of the year.

In How to Deal With Student and Class Blogs at the End of the Year Edublogs provides directions for archiving blogs, hiding content, deleting blogs, and transferring ownership and administration of blogs. The guide also includes step-by-step directions for exporting the content of a blog and then turning it into a PDF through a service called Blog Booker.

I've used Blog Booker in the past to turn Blogger blogs into PDFs and ebooks. Watch this video to see how that process is done.