10 Things You Can Learn at the Practical Ed Tech Summer Camp

Snow and sleet is falling here in Maine, I'm on the second day of a brutal chest cold, and 25% of my students were absent earlier this week. In other words, it's the perfect time to think about summer and all of the good things that come with summer. One of those good things that I'm looking forward to is hosting the Practical Ed Tech Summer Camp.

Tickets went on sale last week. There are still some discounted super-early registration tickets available. If you're thinking about coming this year (this is the seventh time I've hosted it), here is a list of ten things you can learn and then use in your classroom.

Ten Things You Can Learn at the Practical Ed Tech Summer Camp

1. How to create fun and engaging search lessons.

2. How to implement some workflow hacks to free up time to take care of yourself throughout the school year.

3. How to make and use virtual reality and augmented reality experiences in your classroom.

4. How to blend technology into outdoor lessons.

5. How create engaging video projects with your students.

6. How to produce podcasts with students.

7. How to design and publish simple mobile apps.

8. How to use technology to craft meaningful formative assessments (we'll go beyond Kahoot and Gimkit).

9. How to create a plan to make the most of the technology you have in your school.

10. How Arduino electronics and programming work and how you can use it in your classroom. You'll get your own kit to take home!

Register Here! 

Only seven days left to get the lowest price I've ever offered for the Practical Ed Tech Summer Camp!

Adobe Spark Adds a New Way to Manage Your Projects

Last year Adobe finally added a collaboration option to Adobe Spark. That enabled students to remotely work together on video projects and graphic design projects. Today, Adobe added a new feature that students who are working on group projects may benefit from using.

Today, Adobe announced the option to create and manage multiple brands within your Adobe Spark account. While this is clearly designed for business users, other users could benefit from this. With the new brands feature you can design and save graphics for quick re-use across multiple projects. Think of the brands like folders that contain graphics aligned to one theme.

Applications for Education
I see the brands feature being useful to those who are in charge of publishing school newsletters, social media updates, and website updates. You could have a template or graphic saved and ready to re-use whenever you're publishing. This would keep the school's communications looking consistent from update to update.

Google Publishes 15 Favorite Street View Images

Google Maps turned 15 today. To celebrate, Paddy Flynn (Vice President of Geo Data Operations at Google), published Street View's 15 Favorite Street Views. Notably, only one of the fifteen actually has a street in it! The rest are images of interesting places around the world and one is from space. My favorite of the fifteen is Horse around with us at Mongolia’s Lake Khövsgöl Ice Festival.

I've always found letting students explore Street View imagery is a fun way to get them to ask questions about places they've either never heard of and places that they have heard of but don't have a good understanding of.


If you're wondering how to embed Google Street View imagery into a blog post, watch this short video.

Short Lessons on Colds and Flu

Well it's that time of year when classrooms aren't full because kids have a cold or the flu. 25% of my students were out today. I've been running a fever all afternoon. The only upside to this for me is that I am reminded of a few short video lessons about colds and flu.

Colds, the Flu, and You is a video from SciShow Kids that is appropriate for elementary school classrooms.



How is a cold or flu passed from person to person and what exactly is it doing to your body? NPR answers those questions in the following animated video.



Did you get your flu shot this year? This TED-Ed lesson explains why you should get one every year.


Here's one more explanation of the difference between a cold and flu.

Two Ways to Create Your Own Online Memory Games

Last week I was asked if it's possible to use the MIT App Inventor to create a matching game. It certainly is. In fact, I have a student who is working on doing that right now. It's a great exercise through which she's learning about all of the variables and parts of the app that need to be designed. If you're a little more pressed for time than my student is and you just want to quickly generate some matching games for your students to play, there are easier methods than programming your own app.

Educandy is a game builder that I reviewed last fall. Since then a couple of more game templates have been added. One of those is a matching or memory game template. To use the template you simply provide a list of words or terms and Educandy does the rest. Your game will be assigned its own URL that you can distribute to your students.


Matching Game is one of the many Google Sheets templates that Flippity offers. Like all Flippity templates you can make a copy of the template, modify it by adding your own words or terms, and then clicking the activity URL provided by Flippity. Try a sample Flippity Matching Game here and get the template here.