Slido is a polling tool that has recently launched a Google Slides add-on and a corresponding Chrome extension. With Slido installed you can create polls directly in the Google Slides editor. The poll will appear as a slide in your presentation. The poll slide includes your question and the directions for your audience to respond to your poll.
When your audience responds to your poll their responses will appear on the slide. By using Slido's Google Slides add-on you don't have to toggle between your presentation and a polling website in order to view poll responses.
Watch the following short video to see how Slido works.
The U.S. stock market has been on a historic bull run over the last decade. That has a lot of people asking and a lot of talking heads on CNBC speculating about when the next recession will hit. Fittingly, TED-Ed has a new lesson titled What Causes an Economic Recession?
By watching What Causes an Economic Recession? students can learn about the roles of interest rates, inflation, and employment rates in causing and easing economic recessions. The lesson also indirectly hits on the topic of monetary supply. You can view the video and lesson questions here or watch the video as embedded below.
topoView is a free service that anyone can use to find and download historical topographic maps produced by the USGS since 1880. The process of finding maps through topoView is rather easy. Simply open the map viewer then click on a part of the United States. Once you've selected an area you can use the timeslider to find maps produced during a range of years. Maps that you find through topoView can be downloaded as JPG, KMZ, GeoPDF, and GeoTIFF files. Most students will utilize the JPG or KMZ formats. This video provides an overview of how to use topoView.
Applications for Education
The historical maps found through topoView could be useful in helping students see how the topography of an area has changed over the last 130 years. Students who use Google Earth Pro (the free desktop version of Google Earth) can layer the historical maps over the current view of an area.
topoView could also be useful to students who are writing historical fiction stories to get a better sense of the layout of a place that they might be writing about.
Over the weekend a reader emailed me asking about the possibility of creating folders in Wakelet collections. Wakelet doesn't have a native folders feature. However, it is possible to added folders to Wakelet collections through Google Drive and OneDrive. To add a folder to your Wakelet collection use the sharing option in Google Drive or OneDrive that provides you with a shareable link. Then place that link in your Wakelet collection. The process of sharing folders in Wakelet collections is outlined in my video below.
Watch my other videos about Wakelet to learn how to get started using it and how to create videos within a Wakelet collection.
The Globe of Extremes is an interesting interactive map of the extremes of the Earth. On the map you'll find things like the deepest spot on Earth, the point furthest from any ocean, and the highest permanent settlement in the world. When you open The Globe of Extremes it immediately starts to slowly spin to show you the extreme places of the world. Click on any of the placemarkers on the globe to see images and read about the extreme place.
Applications for Education
The Globe of Extremes is a nice little resource for students to explore to learn some fun geography trivia. More importantly, it's a model of what can be done with digital mapping tools. The Globe of Extremes was built using some advanced ArcGIS tools, but your students could create similar digital maps by using Google Earth.
