The Week in Review - So Many Webinars

Good morning from Maine where I'm sitting on my back porch drinking coffee and watching the fog clear out of the valley below me. The scene reminds me of the old saying, "fog in the hollow, good weather to follow."

This week I wrapped up the third session of the Practical Ed Tech Virtual Summer Camp. In all nearly 200 people participated in June and July. Thank you! And combined with webinars that I hosted for other groups, I've conducted 35 webinars in the last three weeks. Next week, I'm not hosting any as I'll be spending most of the week doing fun things with my daughters. The first of those fun things is today as we head to the lake to play. I hope that you also have something fun planned for the weekend.

These were the week's most popular posts:
1. Use Whiteboards in Google Meet Without Screensharing
2. Convert Handwritten Notes Into Google Documents
3. Quickly Create Online Whiteboards for Your Students
4. Create Talking Pictures of Famous People
5. How to Create Labeling Activities With Google Drawings and Classroom
6. 5 Alternatives to Traditional Book Report Projects
7. 5 Ways to Make Whiteboard Instructional Videos in Your Web Browser

Back to School PD Opportunities
This week I received a bunch of requests to host PD webinars for the start of the school year. If you'd like to have me host a PD session for your school, 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 350 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 26,000 people subscribe to my YouTube channel for my regular series of tutorial videos including more than 400 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.

A Challenging Battles and Heritage Map Game

Geoquiz History Edition is a fun and challenging history game for history buffs. The game works like similar geography games in which you're given the name of a place and have to place a marker on a blank outline map as close as possible to the actual location.

In Geoquiz History Edition you're given the name of a battle or the name of historically significant landmark. The War Battle edition of the game lists battles from wars all over the world throughout history. The Heritage edition of the game lists historically significant places in the heritage of a country or culture.

Geoquiz History Edition is played without the need to register or sign into any kind of account. Each round of the game contains ten prompts. You're given immediate feedback as to how accurate your guess was. That feedback comes in the form of a line drawn from your placemarker to the correct placemarker.

Applications for Education
Geoquiz History Edition doesn't have categories so all prompts are completely random from locations all over the globe. For that reason the game is probably best used as a way to spark interest in learning more about the places that appear in the game.

H/T to Maps Mania. 

Searching the National Register of Historic Places

This morning I went down an Internet rabbit hole of looking for lesser-known historic places in Maine. That process started because I was looking for some geocaching activities to do in a coastal community about 60 miles from where I live. Before I knew it I was on the National Register of Historic Places hosted by the National Park Service.

The National Register of Historic Places is a great place to discover lesser-known historic places within each state in the United States. Within the listings you'll find pictures and the documents submitted for inclusion in the register. To help others discover this interesting resource I recorded the following short video.


Applications for Education
The National Register of Historic Places could be a good resource to use as the inspiration for local history projects for middle school and high school students. I'd have students go into the register, browse for places within their state and or county, and then conduct a short research activity to learn more about a chosen place.

Scribble Maps - Create Multimedia Maps - No Account Required

Earlier this week I presented a webinar about using Google Maps and Earth for more than just social studies lessons. A follow-up email that I received came from a teacher who wanted to know if there was a way for her students to create multimedia maps without needing to sign into a Google account. My answer was to try Scribble Maps. Scribble Maps can be used by students to create multimedia maps without having to sign-up or sign-into any kind of account.

Scribble Maps is a free tool for creating custom, multimedia maps online. Scribble Maps provides a variety of base layer maps on which you can draw freehand, add placemarks, add image overlays, and type across the map. Scribble Maps will work in the web browser on your laptop, Chromebook, iPad, or Android tablet. In the video embedded below I provide an overview of how to use Scribble Maps.


Applications for Education
Scribble Maps is a good mapping tool to use in social studies classes when you want students to identify natural and man-made landmarks. They can use the drawing tools to circle the landmarks then use the placemark tools to write about the landmarks. For example, you could give students a list of ten landmarks to identify then have them use the numbered placemark icons to identify and write about those landmarks. The drawing tools will help students make their placemarks standout.

Three Time-saving G Suite Features for Teachers

This afternoon I hosted a webinar in which I shared some time-saving tips for teachers using G Suite for Education. I shared them in the context of talking about providing feedback to students as quickly as possible in asynchronous online learning environments. Aside from that context, these I don't know any teacher who wouldn't like to tackle administrative tasks more quickly and get on with other things. So without wasting any more time, here are three time-saving tips for teachers using G Suite for Education.

Use a Comment Bank in Google Classroom
If you use Google Classroom to give Google Docs, Slides, or Sheets assignments to your students, create and use a comment bank to speed up the process of giving feedback to your students. Watch my video below to learn how to do this.



Use Google Keep to Add Comments to Students' Work
Google Classroom is great for giving feedback on final drafts of students' work. But if you don't use Google Classroom or you want to give students feedback on early drafts of their work, then the following method of using Google Keep to add comments to your students' Docs, Slides, and Sheets can be a time-saver.



Use Canned Responses in Your Email
Do you find yourself answering the same emailed questions over and over again? If so, you need to try using canned responses in your email. Canned responses allow you to draft messages that you can save and insert into responses over and over again. Watch my video to learn how to enable canned responses in Gmail (G Suite for Edu mail).