The series that I did with Rushton is going on hiatus until August, but Rushton will be continuing his series of Activities Across Grade Levels with Susan Stewart. Their next free webinar is this Thursday at 5pm ET/ 2pm PT. The webinar will be about simple video editing tools. You can register here. All of the previous installments in the series can be watched here.
Sodaphonic is a free online audio recording and editing tool. It's easy to use and can be used without creating an account on the site.
To create a recording on Sodaphonic simply head to the site and click on "start new project." As soon as you do that you'll be in the Sodaphonic audio editor where you can click the record button to start recording yourself talking, singing, or banging a drum. When you're done recording you can then use the editing tools to cut and trim sections of your recording. The editing tools also include a couple of effects for fading and otherwise adjusting the volume of your audio track.
Completed Sodaphonic recordings can be saved directly on your computer as MP3 files or saved to a Dropbox account.
Applications for Education Sodaphonic is a tool that I'll add to my list of registration-free audio recording tools. Students and teachers could use Sodaphonic to create short recordings to include in slideshows or to publish as short podcasts.
Twice today I hosted webinars in which the topic of copyright in the classroom came up. Since the webinars weren't specifically about copyright, I referred people to the recording of a webinar that Dr. Beth Holland and I hosted a couple of years ago in which we addressed a whole bunch of nuanced questions pertaining to copyright in the classroom. While the webinar is now a few years old, everything that we talked about is still relevant today.
The recording of Copyright for Teachers - A Webinar With Beth Holland and Richard Byrne can be watched here or as embedded below.
The slides used in the webinar can be seen here or as embedded below.
Creating a storyboard is an excellent way to outline and plan videos, presentations, and written stories. In the old days this was done with paper and pencil. Today, storyboards can be created with a variety of digital tools. Here are five ways to create storyboards with digital tools.
Canva, which recently launched a new desktop app, offers a lot of templates for creating storyboards. Students can use Canva's library of clip art and pictures to illustrate the main points of their stories in the storyboard templates. Completed storyboards can be downloaded as PDFs and as image files.
Milanote is a tool that I described a couple of weeks ago as being part bookmarking tool and part storyboarding tool offers easy-to-use templates for making multimedia storyboards. Here's a short video of how it works.
One of the many "hidden" features of Google Slides is the option to change the layout of your slide print pages. You can use that option to create a simple, printable storyboard. Watch the video below to see how to do that.
Just like Google Slides, PowerPoint has lots of hidden features that people often overlook including the ability to design a simple printable storyboard. Watch the following video to see how to do that.
Pixton EDU can be used for a lot of purposes in your classroom. One of those is creating storyboards. Pixton EDU offers lots of pre-made templates and art work that you can use as-is or customize to create your storyboard. I like the idea of using Pixton EDU to design a storyboard to pitch a product or make a proposal.
Disclosure: Pixton EDU is an advertiser on this blog.
Summer is here (in the northern hemisphere) and after a break from school you might start thinking about next year and what you need to do to be ready for it. Many people have been asking me questions like, "what can I do to be ready in case we have to switch back to online teaching next year?" One of the things that you can do is spend some time learning more about the features of your school's learning management system (Google Classroom, Microsoft Teams, Schoology, Canvas). Another thing that I've been recommending is creating a website to organize handouts, resource links, videos, and more.
There are many free tools for building websites. Google Sites is one of the best options for teachers who have Google accounts (either school-issued or personal accounts). Here are some tutorials to get you started on the process of creating a great website with Google Sites.
