How to Create, Share, and Collaborate on YouTube Playlists

As the school year begins you might find yourself looking through a lot of YouTube videos that you'll share with your students throughout the coming months. Creating playlists on is a great way to organize those videos and share them with your students. Once you've created a playlist you can continue to update it to share more videos with your students. You can also invite a colleague to collaborate and contribute your playlist. All of those functions are demonstrated in the following short video.

The Week in Review - The Most Popular Posts

Good morning from Maine where our recent heatwave has broken and it's going to be a great weekend to enjoy the great outdoors. I'm planning to have a little backyard camping adventure with my toddlers. I hope that you also have something fun on your weekend schedule.

This week I hosted Get Organized With Google Classroom, Meet, and Calendar. That was the first of a few webinars that I'm running this month to help people develop new skills and brush-up on old ones as we embark on the new school year (mine begins in nine days). The next one is Monday at 4pm ET and it's a crash course on making and teaching with videos. You can register here.

These were the week's most popular posts:
1. New Google Classroom and Google Meet Updates to Note
2. How to Make a Whiteboard Video in Flipgrid
3. All About Zoom Breakout Rooms
4. Seven Zoom Tutorials to Watch Before School Starts
5. Two Ways to Quickly Create Transcripts of YouTube Videos
6. What You Need to Know About the Latest Version of Flipgrid
7. DIY Smithsonian Mini Exhibits

Online Back to School PD Opportunities
As mentioned above, this week I hosted Get Organized With Google Classroom, Meet, and Calendar. You can access the recording an associated materials here. On Monday I'm hosting A Crash Course in Making & Teaching With Video. Register here.

Thank You for Your Support!

• Hundreds 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. 
• Cloud Stop Motion provides a great way to make stop motion videos. 
• 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 27,000 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.

How to Direct Students to Videos Based on Answer Choices in Google Forms

This morning I answered an email from a reader who wanted to know if there was an easy way to direct students to videos based on how they answered her quiz questions. My answer was to make the quiz in Google Forms and use the built-in answer feedback option to include videos. I made the following short video to show how that works.



On a related note, you can do a similar thing in Google Forms without making a quiz. The process is a bit longer, but it does provide more options. That process is detailed in this video that I published back in April.

Journey Into the Deep Sea - Neat Nat Geo VR Experience

Earlier this year I featured National Geographic's fantastic playlist of 360 degree immersive videos that can be experienced with or without a virtual reality viewer. Recently, National Geographic added another excellent video to that collection. That video is Journey Into the Deep Sea.

Journey Into the Deep Sea is a nine minute underwater tour of the coral reefs around Palau. In addition to the fantastic imagery of fish, sharks, and manta rays the video includes little "pop-up" facts windows throughout the video. You can view the video in a VR viewer like Google Cardboard or simply watch it in your web browser. If you watch in the web browser on your computer you can click on the video to pan and zoom through it. When you watch the video in a VR viewer your movements will reveal different aspects of the video.

Seven Zoom Tutorials to Watch Before School Starts

As the new school year approaches I've been getting a lot questions about Zoom. I have published some tutorials on my YouTube channel that address most of those questions. Until this morning I haven't put them all together in one place. Here are my Zoom tutorial videos.

The Basics of Hosting a Zoom Meeting


Zoom from a Student's Perspective (desktop version)



Zoom from a Student's Perspective (mobile version)


Zoom Virtual Background and Green Screen



How to Create a Whiteboard Video in Zoom


How to Flip the Camera in Zoom


5 Things You Should Never Do In a Zoom Meeting (Fun)