Three Interesting Resources for Students to Learn About Career Fields

One of the benefits of working and living in a small community is that I get to see what many of my former students do after high school and college. Some of my former students have joined the teaching profession themselves. Some bounce around from job-to-job or career path until they find what they really like. The point being that often we don't understand what a particular profession is really like unless we hear from people who are in it themselves. That's why resources like iCould, Next Vista, and What People Don't Get About My Job are excellent to share and discuss with students.

iCould is a UK-based website that features videos of people sharing their career stories. The stories cover people in all types of careers and at all phases of their working careers. One of the the main purposes of iCould is to expose viewers to what different types of jobs really entail. Visitors to iCould can search for stories by job type, life theme, or keyword tags. The teaching resources section of iCould includes some classroom activities that your students can complete to help them learn more about a particular career path, discover their own interests, and learn about what makes people successful in their careers.

What People Don't Get About My Job is an older piece from The Atlantic, but is still worth sharing and discussing with your students. The article is comprised of 26 contributions from readers explaining what most people don't understand about their jobs. There is one job for every letter of the alphabet. In the article you will find jobs like Kindergarten Teacher, IRS employee, zookeeper, and even unemployed.

Next Vista for Learning offers more than one hundred short videos of people talking about their careers. Some of the careers in the video library include librarian, nurse, engineer, musician, and chemist.

Three New Flippity Templates to Try

Flippity is one of my go-to recommendations for anyone looking to make interesting things with Google Sheets. A couple of days ago I published a video about Flippity's new board game template. That's not the only new template recently added to Flippity's catalog of offerings. The other new templates on Flippity are an updated progress tracker, a self assessment quiz template, and a renamed spelling game template. 

Flippity's updated progress tracker template is simply called Leader Board. It replaces the old progress tracker template that Flippity offered. The Leader Board displays names, avatars, and points. You input the progress or scores into your Google Sheet and Flippity will generate the leader board on a stand-alone webpage that you can share.

The self assessment quiz template from Flippity lets you create an online game in which players answer multiple choice questions and are then told something about themselves based on those answers. The example that Flippity provides is a quiz that tells you what kind of Lord of the Rings character you are.

The third new template on Flippity isn't really new. It's actually a rename and slight redesign of their old hangman template. The hangman template is gone and is replaced by a melting snowman template. Players guess the letters in a mystery word. If they answer incorrectly, the snowman melts a little bit. The goal is to spell the mystery word before the snowman completely melts. Try it here.

Three Alternatives to Smore

Over the weekend I answered an email from a reader who was looking for an alternative to using Smore to create online posters and newsletters to share with teachers and parents. Smore is great for some people, but it can get a little too pricey for some people. Here are a few alternatives to using Smore to create online posters and newsletters.

ConvertKit is the service that I use for my Practical Ed Tech Newsletter. ConvertKit offers some nice templates for formatting your emails. I don't use those templates because I prefer to send plain text email, but it's nice to know that I could use those templates. The real reason that I use Convert Kit is because I can easily create different segments within my mailing list to send personalized emails to different groups within my mailing list. That function could be useful to schools who want to send different personalized emails to parents based on the grade that their children are in. ConvertKit has a free plan that allows you to have up to 1,000 people on your mailing list, use all of the templates, and send as many emails as you like.

Canva doesn't offer a mailing list component, but it does offer lots of templates for making online posters and simple webpages to announce events. Once you've published your poster or page, you can email the link to it or post it on your LMS. Here's a video about how to use Canva to create and publish a multimedia poster.


Adobe Spark, like Canva, offers an easy way to design and publish simple webpages to use for announcements and updates to share with your school community. One of the things that I like about Adobe Spark is that you can share your designs directly into Google Classroom. Here's my short video on how to use Adobe Spark to create simple webpages.

How to Create Your Own Online Board Game

Those of you who have followed my blog for a while probably know that Flippity is one of my go-to recommendations for anyone looking to make games, flashcards, and timelines with Google Sheets. Recently, Flippity introduced a new template for making your own online board game through Google Sheets.

With Flippity's new board game template you can create a game that includes up to eight players, has up to three dice to roll, and interactive game squares. You game can also include videos, pictures, Google Drawings, and graphs. And your students can play your game without an email address or having to create any kind of online account. Take a look at my short video below to see how you can create and play your own online board game.


Key points from the video:

• You can customize the player markers and use pictures instead of the default markers. 
• You can include pictures in each game square. 
• You can use up to three dice in your game. 
• You can have each square on the board give a different direction or prompt. 
• Your deck of cards can include videos, pictures, links, and graphs. 

Applications for Education

Flippity's new board game template could be great for developing a fun review activity for your students to play in your online or in-person classroom. If you were to have students use it remotely, I might have one student screenshare it via Google Meet or Zoom and then move the pieces for each player. Since you can link to just about anything in the game cards, I'd put links to digital flashcards where students have to answer a question correctly in order to advance on the game board. 

The Week in Review - The Most Popular Posts

Good morning from Maine where it is a cool and overcast start to the Fourth of July. It has rained almost all week and that's okay because we needed the rain. I also didn't mind the rain because I was inside all week working on a big project. Now that the weekend is here, I plan to relax a bit and I hope that you do too.

Next week I'm hosting the second session of the Practical Ed Tech Virtual Summer Camp. If you'd like to join us, there is still time to register.

These were the most popular posts of the week:
1. 7 New Google Meet Features for Teachers
2. 5 Google Classroom Features You Might Have Overlooked or Forgotten
3. How to Work With PDFs in Google Classroom
4. How to Turn PowerPoint and Google Slides Into Narrated Videos
5. How to Record a Screencast With Flipgrid
6. An Easy Way to Overlay Historical Maps on Google Earth
7. Use Whiteboards in Google Meet Without Screensharing

Two PD Opportunities in July
The Practical Ed Tech Virtual Summer Camp will be held two more times this summer. Register here for the July session of your choice.

In two weeks I'll be hosting Teaching History With Technology. This is a five part course designed to help you develop new ways to create engaging history lessons and projects. Register now and use the discount code THWT2020.

This summer I'm working with a handful of schools and organizations to develop online professional development for teachers. If you'd like to work with me, please send me a note at richardbyrne (at) freetech4teachers.com to learn more about how we can work together.

Thank You for Your Support!

• More than 250 of you have participated in a Practical Ed Tech webinar this year. Thank you!
• University of Maryland, Baltimore County has been supporting this blog for many years.
• Pixton EDU offers a great way to create comics in your classroom. 
• Find cool mugs and other swag in my YouTube store. 

Other Places to Follow My Work

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 it includes my tip of the week and a summary of the week's most popular posts from FreeTech4Teachers.com.
• My YouTube Channel - more than 25,000 people subscribe to my YouTube channel for my regular series of tutorial videos including more than 350 Google tools tutorials.  
• Facebook - The FreeTech4Teachers.com Facebook page has more than 450,000 followers. 
• Twitter - I've been Tweeting away for the last thirteen years at twitter.com/rmbyrne
• Instagram - this is mostly pictures of my kids, my dogs, my bikes, my skis, and fly fishing.