The Joy of Search is the title of Dan Russell's forthcoming book about search strategies. I pre-ordered my copy from Amazon about six weeks ago and am eagerly anticipating its arrival this fall. Dan Russell's official title is Senior Research Scientist for Search Quality and User Happiness at Google. What he does that you, I, and students should care about is craft really interesting lessons on employing a wide variety of search strategies. You can find many of those lessons in his regular series of search challenges on his blog SearchReSearch. And if you get a chance to hear him speak at a conference, take it!
Back to the book, The Joy of Search will be available this fall. In the book you'll find stories used to explain how to employ various search strategies. To get a sense of what the book is about, you can get a free chapter of the book right now from Dan's blog. The chapter that is available is titled Finding a Mysterious Location Somewhere in the World: How to
Use Multiple Information Sources to Zero In on a Resource. In the chapter you'll learn about one of my favorite techniques for getting students to look at all of the information that is available to them in order to form a good search strategy and employ good search terms.
Purely coincidentally, last week I posted this pair of pictures on Instagram with the caption, "can you use the clues to figure out where I am?" Read the free chapter of The Joy of Search then look at my pictures and see if you can figure out where I was when I took those pictures.
National Geographic recently published a new video titled A Brief History of Yellowstone. The video hits almost all of the key points in the history of Yellowstone becoming the first national park in the U.S. Unfortunately, the video isn't terribly interesting to watch. That's a statement coming from a person who will watch PBS documentaries for hours (if my kids are sleeping). My point in this post isn't to criticize National Geographic's video, but rather to point out that your students could make a better video of their own on this or any number of similar topics using the free Adobe Spark video tool.
A Brief History of Yellowstone suffers from two things. First, the narration is flat and the background music is almost inaudible. Second, the transitions between scenes are almost nonexistent. One of these problems can be addressed by using Adobe Spark to create a video. Adobe Spark offers a lot of templates that include excellent transitions and on-screen text placement.
The issue of flat narration is bit harder to resolve. One thing that I recommend students do when creating a video in this style is to practice the voiceover until they know it from memory or at least until they only need minimal notes in front of them. Otherwise, the narration does sound like it is being read straight from the script.
Here's my tutorial on how to get started using Adobe Spark to create a video.
While ISTE's annual conference is the place that all of the big ed tech companies showcase their new developments for the coming year, AASL's annual conference is featuring best apps and websites for teaching and learning. The American Association of School Librarians annual conference was held over the weekend and that's when they revealed their lists of best apps and best websites for teaching and learning in 2019.
Many of the apps and websites on AASL's best of 2019 lists are apps and sites that I've previously reviewed and or created tutorials about. The apps and sites that I've reviewed that made the AASL's lists are featured below. You can find AASL's full list of best apps here and best websites here.
Best Apps for Teaching & Learning ChatterPix Kids is a free app (Android version here, iPad version here) that students can use to create talking pictures. Students open the app, snap a picture or import a picture, draw a face on the picture, and then record themselves talking for up to thirty seconds. I've used this app with students as young as first grade, but my favorite example of using ChatterPix Kids is found in this video made by Kindergarten students with a little help from their teacher.
iCell, produced by the Hudson Alpha Institute for Biotechnology, is an app that high school biology teachers and their students should check out. The app provides students with 3D models of plant, animal, and bacteria cells. Each cell model can be viewed in detail by zooming in and rotating the model on your iPad. Students can learn about the parts of the cells by tapping on them to reveal their labels and a brief description of that part’s function. Click here for the iPad version. Click here for the Android version.
Sites in VR is a free Android and iOS app that provides a 1700 virtual reality views of significant landmarks around the world. The app is a good one for those who would like to experience a bit of virtual reality without having to use a virtual reality headset. Sites in VR provides imagery that you can navigate through by moving your phone or tablet in a manner similar to that of using a virtual reality viewer like Google Cardboard.
Stop Motion Studio is a great app for creating stop motion videos. The app is available for iOS, Android, Windows, and Mac operating systems. The basic (free) version of Stop Motion Studio lets you take as many pictures as you like and string them together in a sequence that plays back at a frame-per-second rate of your choosing. Each frame can be edited individually before you produce the final video. You can also add narration to your video in the basic version of the app. Completed projects can be saved to your device and from there you can share them on YouTube or on your favorite social network.
PBS Kids ScratchJr is a PBS Kids-themed version of the popular ScratchJr app. PBS Kids ScratchJr is available as a free iPad app and as a free Android app. The app is designed to help five to eight year old students learn basic programming concepts through a drag-and-drop interface. Just like the ScratchJr app, on PBS Kids ScratchJr students program a story or game by selecting background settings and characters for each frame of the story. Then in each frame students select the actions that they want their characters to take. Students snap programming pieces together to make characters move and talk in their stories and games.
Tynker made AASL's list of best apps for teaching and learning. It can be used by students to learn programming skills on their iPads. But it is also available to use in your web browser. The web browser version offers far more functions and features. Click here for my overview of Tynker.
Best Websites for Teaching & Learning Anchor.fm is a free podcast recording, editing, and publishing tool. One of the things that I love about Anchor is that you can quickly publish your podcast to all major podcasting platforms with just one click. Anchor removes all of the technical set-up steps that are typically associated with publishing a podcast. Watch my tutorial below to learn how to get started using Anchor.fm to create a podcast.
Brush Ninja was one of my favorite discoveries last summer. Since then I have been showing it off to anyone who will listen. I included it in my best of the web presentation at TXLA and in a recent workshop on formative assessment. Brush Ninja is a free service for creating animated GIFs that you can then include in slides and videos. Last fall I used with 8th grade science students. You can read about that experience here.
Edpuzzle is a free service for creating video-based lessons or "flipped" lessons. It's a service that has been around for many years and continues to grow and improve. Earlier this year I published the following tutorial on how to use Edpuzzle to create video-based lessons with videos that you find online or with videos that you have stored on your computer.
Explore.org is another website that has been around for many years yet still made AASL's list of best sites for teaching and learning. That just goes to show how good Explore.org is as a resource for students. One of the many features of the site is network of live nature webcams. he way that I recommend using Explore.org's webcam streams is to have students pick an animal or animals that they want to watch grow over the course of a few weeks. Have them watch for a few minutes a day and record observations in an online or physical journal. The Google Science Journal app could be a good option for writing those observations.
GeoGuessr is a fun and challenging geography game based on Google’s Street View imagery. The game presents players with imagery of a location in Street View and the player then has to guess where where in the world that place is. Some challenges are easier than others, but none are actually easy. To guess correctly players need to study the imagery for little clues that tip-off the location. I've been using GeoGuessr since 2014 when I wrote about using it to spark inquiry about geography.
Google's VR Tour Creator is one of my favorite new tools of the last year. AASL seems to agree with me because it is on their list of Best Websites for Teaching & Learning 2019. I've made a series of tutorials on how to use Tour Creator. You can watch those tutorials here.
Wakelet has stormed onto the ed tech landscape over the last year. It's quickly become a popular service for bookmarking, sharing bookmarks, and note-taking.
Last week Kahoot released some game creation updates in advance of the ISTE conference. This week Kahoot made an announcement during the conference. That announcement was that you can now share Kahoot games in Microsoft Teams. With this update you will be able to share games for live play in your classroom and share games for play at home or anywhere outside of your classroom.
Sharing for Live Play
To post one of your Kahoot games in Microsoft Teams for live play in your classroom, simply open the game editor then select open the sharing menu. In the sharing menu you will see an option to post your game in Microsoft Teams. Look at my screenshots below to see where to find the sharing menus.
Sharing for At-home Play
Sharing a Kahoot game to Microsoft Teams for at-home play (what Kahoot calls "challenge" play) the process is similar, but slightly different. In this case you will click the Challenge button in your Kahoot game editor. Then select "create" and on the next screen choose the option to share to Microsoft Teams. See my screenshot below for more explanation.
Google Expeditions is probably the most popular virtual reality app for use in classrooms today. One of the things that has kept it out of some classrooms is that it requires the use of a compatible phone or tablet. That is going to change this summer.
Find Out if Google Expeditions Will Work on Your Chromebook
To find out if Google Expeditions will work on your Chromebook or Chrome OS tablet, take a look at the technical requirements here. The Acer Chromebook Tab 10 and the ASUS Chromebook Tablet CT100 are the only devices that fully support both VR and AR Google Expeditions right now. There are Chrome devices that will support VR expeditions while not supporting AR expeditions. Again, both lists will expand in August.
How to Use Google Expeditions
If you haven't tried Google Expeditions, take a look at the following tutorial that I created. The tutorial includes the teacher and student perspectives of Google Expeditions.
Create and Use Your Own Google Expeditions Tours
Thanks to Google VR Tour Creator you can create your virtual reality tours to use in Google Expeditions. Watch my tutorials below to learn how to get started.
