Every year Edublogs hosts a couple of student blogging challenges. The next one begins on March 15th. The challenge is open to all K-12 classrooms. Your classroom blog or student blogs don't have to be hosted on Edublogs in order to participate.
The 2020 Edublogs Student Blogging Challenge provides eight weekly blogging suggestions suitable for K-12 students. Every week students complete the challenge then you can submit the URL of your students' posts to be included in a larger Student Blogging Challenge form that other participating classes can see. By submitting the URLs of your students' work, you're providing them with an opportunity to get feedback from other students and teachers who are participating the challenge.
Applications for Education
Blogging can be a great way to get students interested in writing and publishing their work for an audience. The challenges of classroom blogging have always been coming up with things for kids to write about and building an audience for your students' work. The Edublogs Student Blogging Challenge addresses both of those challenges.
Mixkit is a website that offers hundreds of free music files and videos that you can download to use in your multimedia projects. The licensing terms for assets on Mixkit are clear. You can download videos and audio files from Mixkit to re-use and remix. You don't have to credit Mixkit, but they will appreciate it if you do.
To find videos and music tracks on Mixkit you can search by keyword, click on the content tags, or simply browse through the galleries. The videos that you find on Mixkit could be described as b-roll footage. In other words, you're not going to find videos from your favorite television shows or YouTube channels. Similarly, the music on Mixkit is largely instrumental music.
Applications for Education
Mixkit could be a good resource to bookmark and share with your students when they need music or videos to use in their own video projects, podcasts, or other multimedia presentations. If you're worried about your students wasting time browsing through the Mixkit galleries, create a shared Google Drive folder that you add a collection of Mixkit files to for your students to use.
Over the years I've tried dozens of online geography games for students of all ages. Many have come and gone over the years but the following geography games are still going strong.
WikiWhere is a neat map-based trivia game. The goal of the game is to identify cities based on their descriptions. The descriptions come from Wikipedia entries. You can get up to three clues before you have to answer by clicking on the map to identify the city that you think is described by the excerpts. When you click on the map you'll be shown the correct answer and how far away you were from the correct answer.
The browser-based version of Google Earth has a bunch of geography games for students to play including a few versions of Where In the World is Carmen San Diego? If you go into the Voyager mode in Google Earth you will find other games and quizzes to try. The quizzes are neat because when you answer a question correctly you automatically zoom to the Street View imagery of the location. Check it out in my video below.
GameOn World is a multiplayer geography game developed by a high school teacher and his student in Portland, Maine. The game is similar in structure to that of Kahoot. In GameOn World the teacher selects a game category (cities, places, and timeline are three of the nine categories) and starts the game. The students join the game by going to GameOn.World and entering a game pin. In the location and timeline games, students answer the questions by moving a placemark on a map or selecting a date on a timeline. In some of the other games students answer by choosing a number on a sliding scale.
GeoGuessr shows you a Google Street View image and a clue to try to guess where in the world the imagery was captured. Playing GeoGuessr is a fun way to get students to look at all of the visual and text clues they have in order to form a good guess as to where in the world they think the imagery came from. This used to be completely free, but it moved to a freemium model in 2020 which limits how many games you can play for free.
Quizzity is an online geography game that uses a familiar concept. Quizzity presents you with the name of a city and you have to click on the map where you think that city is in the world. Quizzity quizzes you on cities all over the world. To increase the accuracy of your guesses you should zoom-in on a region before clicking the map. Each round of Quizzity presents you with six city names. Points are awarded for accuracy and speed.
City-Guesser is a challenging map-based game. The game shows you a section of a map centered over a city. The labels are removed from the map so you have to guess the city's name based on other clues like bodies of water and orientation. City-Guesser gives you four answer choices to choose from. If you choose correctly, you move to the next level. If you choose incorrectly, the game is over and you have to start again from the beginning.
Capital Toss is a free geography game from ABCya. The game has a state capitals mode and a country capitals mode. In both modes of the game works the same way. The name of a state or country appears at the bottom of the screen and three rows of capital names scroll across the top. When the correct capital name appears players virtually toss a ball at it. After ten correct answers players can choose a new ball. Three consecutive incorrect answers ends the game.
Spacehopper is a game based on Google Maps Street View imagery. Spacehopper shows you a Street View image and you have to guess where in the world the image was captured. You can click the clue button to have the country identified before making a guess. After three incorrect guesses the correct answer will be revealed to you. You can play Spacehopper on a global level or you can specify that you only want to see images from a particular continent.
How Many European Cities Can You Name? and How Many US Cities Can You Name? are game developed by Ian Fisher who is a software engineer at Google. Both of the games are played the same way. Simply open the game map and start typing the names of cities. When you enter a city it will appear on the map. The object is to name as many cities as you can without stopping. When you're done you'll see a list of the cities that you named and the populations of the five biggest cities and the five smallest cities that you named.
Bonus: Make Your Own Game! Mission Map Quest is a free tool for creating geography games. The concept is simple, you create a series of clues that your students need to follow to identify places around the world. You can add as few or as many clues to your Map Quest as you like. When you're ready to have students try your Quest just give them the web address of the challenge or have them scan the QR code assigned to your Quest. Watch my video below to see how to make your own Mission Map Quest game.
Last week I published 5 Ways to Create Social Videos. In that post I included a neat tool called Lumen5 that can be used to turn blog posts or any other written text that you own into a video.
In the video below you'll see that Lumen5 takes the text of your article and breaks into small chunks to be displayed on slides. Lumen5 then automatically detects keywords in those chunks of text and adds corresponding images to the slides. Finally, music is added to the video. You can override any of the automatic selections that Lumen5 makes.
Applications for Education
Lumen5 could be useful for taking your written school announcements and having them quickly turned into a video to distribute on your school's website and or social media accounts.
Lumen5 might also be a neat tool for students to use to see a visualization of the short stories or persuasive essays that they write.
Oshi is a free file sharing service that doesn't require you to create an account in order to host and share small files. What makes Oshi interesting is that you can set an expiration date for the files that you share through the service. You can set files to expire after an hour, a day, three days, seven days, thirty days, or ninety days. You can also set your file sharing link to expire after someone has downloaded your file.
While Oshi is designed for temporary hosting and sharing of your files, it is possible to extend the life of a hosted file. If you do need to extend the life of your hosted file, you can do that by hitting the manage button on your files.
A little quirk of Oshi that I noticed in my testing is that it works better in the latest version of Firefox than in it does in the latest version of Chrome.
Applications for Education Oshi could be useful for sharing things like pictures from a school event that you want to make available to parents but don't want to put online indefinitely.
