Create Online Art Galleries With Wakelet, Padlet, and Google Sites

In last week's episode of The Practical Ed Tech Podcast I answered a question from a reader who was looking for a way for students to be able to submit examples of their artwork and have them displayed in a public gallery. The suggestion that I made on the podcast was to try using Wakelet or Padlet to gather and display examples. I made a couple of videos to show how both of those services can be used to create online art galleries. Both services let you embed your galleries into Google Sites and other website builders. In the following videos I demonstrate how to use Wakelet and Padlet to create online art galleries.

The advantage of Padlet is that is has more design options than Wakelet does. Padlet also has more content moderation options than Wakelet does. The advantage of Wakelet is that you can make as many collections as you like for free whereas Padlet limits you to three for free.

Free Webinar Tomorrow - Strategies for Remote Instructional Technology Support - Take 2!

Yesterday afternoon I hosted a webinar titled Three Strategies for Remote Instructional Technology Support. The software that I used to host the webinar did not work as planned and practiced. And the recording did not come out well either. Therefore, tomorrow at 1pm ET I'm going to host the webinar again, but this time it will be back on old, reliable GoToWebinar.

If you were in Three Strategies for Remote Instructional Technology Support, thank you for putting up with the clunkiness and the screen sharing not working. If you were waiting to see the recording, it came out so poorly that I'm not going to distribute it. I'm going to host Three Strategies for Remote Instructional Technology Support again tomorrow at 1pm ET. It will be run through GoToWebinar. You can register here. A recording will be available afterwards.

A few highlights of tomorrow's webinar will include:

• Keeping IT human.
• Managing & prioritizing requests. 
• Developing self-support resources.

The webinar will include theory as well as step-by-step demonstrations. 

Sometimes It Pays to Pay - Or When a Webinar Crashes to a Halt

Much of my online reputation is built on free technology for teachers. That said, there are services I do pay to use because I've not found other options that are as good. Case in point, I pay $200 per month to license GoToWebinar because I've never found anything to be as reliable. In almost ten years of using it for hundreds of live events, it has only failed me twice. Which is why I feel a little foolish for trying a different service for a free webinar that I hosted yesterday. That other service failed miserably during the webinar that I ran yesterday. I'm going to run the webinar again tomorrow, but it will be back on GoToWebinar where I know all of the functions I need will work reliably.

The last 18 months have been pretty lean around here so I've been looking for ways to cut costs. One of the ways that I thought I could do that was by trying another webinar service. My GoToWebinar subscription and my ConvertKit subscription (the service I use for email mailing lists) are the biggest costs of keeping Free Technology for Teachers and Practical Ed Tech running. The service that I tried yesterday offered a free trial and was 75% cheaper than GoToWebinar on a monthly basis. It even had slick templates for making registration pages! Lesson learned, again, sometimes what looks good and cheap is just cheap.

If you were in yesterday's live webinar, Three Strategies for Remote Instructional Technology Support, thank you for putting up with the clunkiness and the screen sharing not working. If you were waiting to see the recording, it came out so poorly that I'm not going to distribute it. I'm going to host Three Strategies for Remote Instructional Technology Support again tomorrow at 1pm ET. It will be run through GoToWebinar. You can register here. A recording will be available afterwards.

Video Puppet Turns Your PowerPoint Presentations Into Narrated Videos

Video Puppet is a new tool that you can use to quickly turn your PowerPoint presentations into narrated videos. If you have less than twenty slides in your presentation you don't even need to create an account on the site to turn your slides into a narrated video.

To use Video Puppet simply head to the site and click "create a video." You'll have the option to upload a set of PowerPoint slides or upload a written transcript. After you upload your slides you can customize your video by choosing the voice that you want to narrate your video, background music, and the aspect ratio of your video. When your video is done you can download it to post on your favorite video sharing sites or just save it in your favorite cloud storage service.

Applications for Education
Video Puppet could be a good tool to use to quickly create some short instructional videos from your existing PowerPoint slides. Google Slides users, don't forget that you can download your slides as PPT files that you could then use in Video Puppet.

Before you try Video Puppet for the first time you should know that it works best with slides that have speaker notes including in them.

How to Use Google Forms With Students Who Don't Have Email Addresses

This afternoon someone Tweeted at me at to ask how elementary school students who don't have active email addresses can view the results of quizzes that they take in Google Forms. There are three ways that that can be accomplished. I made a new video to demonstrate how those methods work.

In the following video you can see how you can create quizzes in Google Forms and how your students can see their results even if they don't have active email addresses.

Five highlights of the video:

• Quiz settings that let students instantly see their results. 
• Using Flubaroo to distribute quiz grades via Google Drive even if a student doesn't have an active email address. 
• Creating and distributing quizzes through Google Classroom. 
• Returning quiz grades to students via Google Classroom. 
• Student view of their quiz grades in Google Classroom. 

Watch the video below for an overview of Google Forms question types.