Last week I shared the news that StoryCorps is once again hosting The Great Thanksgiving Listen. This is an annual event intended to encourage people to record family stories during the month of November. StoryCorps offers a free mobile app that you can use to record interviews with family members. That's not the only tool that students can use to record stories during The Great Thanksgiving Listen. Here are some other good options for recording interviews.
Anchor.fm Anchor offers recording and editing tools that you can use in your web browser for free. One of the convenient aspects of Anchor's browser-based tool is that you can combine multiple clips into one final product. That means that you can take breaks during the recording and come back to finish later if you want to. You can also use that feature to combine multiple interviews into one final audio recording. Here's a tutorial to help you get started using Anchor.fm.
Audacity and GarageBand
If you're looking to use a tool that doesn't require constant internet access then you'll want to try Audacity (Windows) or GarageBand (Mac). Both of these tools offer everything you could ever need for a classroom audio production project. Tutorials to help you get started with both tools are embedded below.
Microphones for Audio Recording
You could use the internal microphone on your computer, tablet, or phone. You'll get a better sound quality if you record with an external microphone. There are two microphones that I use and recommend. The first is the Snowball ICE Microphone from Blue Designs. For a much cheaper option I use and recommend this three pack of lapel microphones for $7.
This webinar will go beyond the typical Kahoot and Gimkit type of games that are probably already prevalent in your school. In this webinar you will learn how to use free tech tools to create and conduct fun, engaging, and informative formative assessments. Whether you teach elementary school, middle school, or high school, you will come away from this webinar with fun formative assessment activities that you can do tomorrow.
Five Things You Can Learn In This Webinar:
1. What makes a formative assessment valuable to you while also fun for students.
2. How to create fun formative assessments for classrooms that aren’t 1:1.
3. Why you should leverage students’ picture-taking habits for formative assessment.
4. Development of engaging formative assessment activities that use a variety of question formats.
5. How to include students in the creation of formative assessments.
Earlier this year I published a rundown of my five favorite Google Slides add-ons. Since then a couple of those add-ons have gone the way of the 5.25" floppy disk. Fortunately, I've recently discovered a couple of new Google Slides add-ons that I really like. Here's the updated list of my five favorite Google Slides add-ons.
Slido Polls Slido is a polling service that offers a free Google Slides add-on and companion Chrome extension. The combination of the two tools makes it easy for anyone who uses Google Slides to quickly create and launch polls directly within the Google Slides editor. The thing that I like about Slido is that you can see your students' responses without having to toggle between presentation and editing modes in Google Slides. Your students' responses pop-up on the screen in realtime. Your students respond to your Slido poll or survey by simply going to Slido.com on their laptops or phones and then entering the code that appears on your polling slide. Watch my short video below to see how easy it is to create, run, and respond to a poll made with Slido in Google Slides.
Grackle Grackle is a service that will check your Google Documents, Slides, and Sheets for accessibility. It is available as an Add-on for Google Docs, for Google Slides, and for Google Sheets. When you run Grackle's accessibility checker it will identify places where your slide doesn't meet accessibility standards. It makes suggestions for improvement on the areas in which your document, slide, or sheet doesn't meet accessibility standards. Some of the suggestions can be implemented with just a click from the Grackle Add-on menu while others are changes that you will have to make yourself.
Slides Randomizer Slides Randomizer is a Google Slides add-on that will randomly shuffle a set of Google Slides. It's easy to use the Slides Randomizer add-on. Once you've installed the add-on simply select Slides Randomizer from the add-ons drop-down menu while viewing your slides then click on "randomize presentation." Right before the slides shuffle you'll be asked if you want to include the title slide in the shuffle or leave it at the beginning of the presentation. You can always undo the shuffling of your presentation by reverting to the previous version in the "version history" menu found in the "File" drop-down menu.
Unsplash Photos for Google Slides
Unsplash Photos Google Slides add-on gives you instant access to Unsplash's collection of free, royalty-free photographs. In the following video I demonstrate how to add the Add-on to your Google Slides, how to use Unsplash Photos, and I explain the licensing of Unsplash Photos.
Easy Accents
This add-on appeared in my list of recommended Google Docs add-ons. I recommend the Google Slides version of it too. Easy Accents for Google Slides is easy to use. When you have it installed you can launch it on any slide. Type as you normally would until you need to add an accent mark that isn't easy to create on your keyboard. Then just insert the letter and accent mark that you need from the Easy Accents keyboard. After inserting the letter and accent mark you can go back to typing on your physical keyboard. Easy Accents for Google Slides currently supports more than twenty languages.
Good evening from Maine where the sun has set on the first Saturday in November. Tomorrow the sun will set an hour earlier after we turn our clocks back tonight for the end of Daylight Saving Time. On that note, here are three short lessons about Daylight Saving Time.
My kids, dogs, and I had lots of time outside today. We're all happiest when we can play outside. I hope that you got to do whatever makes you happiest this weekend too.
I'll come to your school in 2020!
I'm already booking my 2020 workshop and conference schedule. This will be my tenth year of speaking at schools and conferences. Send me an email at richardbyrne (at) freetech4teachers.com to learn more. On-demand PD
On PracticalEdTech.com I have seven professional development webinars available to view whenever you like.
Thank You for Your Support!
More than 400 of you have participated in a Practical Ed Tech webinar this year. Thank you!
Besides FreeTech4Teachers.com and the daily email digest, there are other ways to keep up with what I'm publishing.
Practical Ed Tech Newsletter - This comes out once per week (Sunday night/ Monday morning) and includes my tip of the week and a summary of the week's most popular posts from FreeTech4Teachers.com.
My YouTube Channel - More than 16,000 are subscribed to my YouTube channel for my regular series of tutorial videos including more than 300 Google tools tutorials.
October has come and gone. As I do at the end of every month I have looked through my Google Analytics account to find the most read posts of the last month. The most popular posts in October centered around Google Slides tricks and tips, making educational games, and a source of historical maps. Take a look at the list and see if there is something interesting that you missed in the last month.
I'll come to your school in 2020!
I'm already booking my 2020 workshop and conference schedule. This will be my tenth year of speaking at schools and conferences. Send me an email at richard (at) freetech4teachers.com to learn more. On-demand PD
On PracticalEdTech.com I have seven professional development webinars available to view whenever you like.
Thank You for Your Support!
More than 400 of you have participated in a Practical Ed Tech webinar this year. Thank you!
Besides FreeTech4Teachers.com and the daily email digest, there are other ways to keep up with what I'm publishing.
Practical Ed Tech Newsletter - This comes out once per week (Sunday night/ Monday morning) and includes my tip of the week and a summary of the week's most popular posts from FreeTech4Teachers.com.
My YouTube Channel - More than 16,000 are subscribed to my YouTube channel for my regular series of tutorial videos including more than 300 Google tools tutorials.
