Loop - A Nice System for Gathering Feedback from Students

There is no shortage of online tools for gathering feedback from students. I featured a selection of them in the latest version of The Practical Ed Tech Handbook. Loop is the latest one to come across my desk. 

Loop lets you create an online classroom to post questions for your students to respond to with emojis, with words, or by selecting an answer choice. You can let your students respond anonymously or require them to identify themselves. Those features alone don't make Loop different from lots of similar services. What Loop offers that is somewhat unique is the option to respond directly to individual students even when they were responding to a group survey. The purpose of that feature is to make it easy to ask follow-up questions or to give encouragement to students based on their responses to a question posed to the whole group.

Loop can be used in the web browser on your laptop or you can use their free Android or iPhone apps.

Applications for Education
Loop fits in a gap between tools like Kahoot and Google Classroom. For that reason it could be a good tool for engaging students in discussions about assignments, course topics, or the general feeling of the class.

5 Video Projects for Almost Every Classroom - Webinar on Thursday

Every month I host at least one Practical Ed Tech professional development webinar. This month's webinar is an updated version of my popular 5 Video Projects for Almost Every Classroom.

5 Video Projects for Almost Every Classroom will be held this Thursday at 4pm Eastern Time. In the webinar you'll learn how you and your students can create animated videos, green screen videos, documentary-style videos, stop-motion videos, and instructional videos. The webinar will also address concerns about privacy and copyright.


The webinar will be recorded for those who register but cannot attend the live session.

Register here!

Ruff Ruffman Presents Lessons on Search and Advertising for K-2 Students

Ruff Ruffman is the "star" of a PBS Kids series. Yesterday, one of my high school students asked me if my kids watch the show. My daughters are still a little too young for it. But the question did remind me of a couple of little PBS Kids lessons about web search and online advertising that feature Ruff Ruffman "Humble Media Genius."

Ruff Ruffman's Find What You Want features a short video about the basic concepts of web search and a short video about the basics of online advertising. After each of the three minute videos kids can take a self-paced quiz. If you would rather not show the videos, PBS Kids does provide storyboard of both Find What You Want videos that you can show to your students.

Applications for Education
Ruff Ruffman's Find What You Want videos and quizzes aren't going to be a replacement for comprehensive lessons on how to conduct internet searches. That said, the videos and quizzes could make for engaging introduction to the concepts for K-2 students.

How to Create a Transcript of Any YouTube Video

Last week I published a short blog post about a neat tool called SnackVids. That post has proven to be quite popular so I decided to make a little video about it. In the following video you can see how to use SnackVids to create a searchable transcript of videos that you find on YouTube. As you'll see in the video, the transcript is not only searchable but all of the keywords are hyperlinked to timestamps in the video.

7 Styles of Classroom Video Projects - Tools and Tips for Making Them

In the 2019-20 Practical Ed Tech Handbook I included a section all about student video projects. In that section I outlined seven styles of classroom video projects along with tools and tips for making each style of video in your classroom. That section is excerpted and embedded below as a PDF that you can view here or download via the Box.com widget that is embedded below.