Free Webinar Today at 4pm ET!

Every week Rushton Hurley from Next Vista for Learning and I host a free webinar simply named Two Ed Tech Guys Take Questions & Share Cool Stuff. The next installment is today at 4pm ET! Join Us!

In every episode of Two Ed Tech Guys Take Questions & Share Cool Stuff we feature new tool and resources then answer a half-dozen or more questions from readers like you. If you register for the webinar you'll get an email that contains all of the links and notes that we mention throughout the session.

Watch last week's episode right here.

How to Use TeacherMade to Create & Share Online Assessments

Disclosure: TeacherMade is an advertiser on FreeTech4Teachers.com

Earlier this week I wrote an overview of a great new service called TeacherMade. TeacherMade lets you quickly convert your favorite PDFs, Word documents, and images into online activities and assessments. Last night I created a short video that walks you through the process of creating an activity with TeacherMade.

One of my favorite aspects of TeacherMade is that your students don't need email addresses in order to complete the activities that you create and share with them. That simple process is also featured in the video demonstration that is embedded below.

Video Puppet is Now Narakeet - Still Turns Slides Into Narrated Videos

Back in April I featured a neat service called Video Puppet that turns PowerPoint presentations into narrated videos. This morning I got an email notifying me that Video Puppet has been re-branded as Narakeet (why? I don't know).

Narakeet does all of the same things as Video Puppet. The only change is the name and a few new additional features. Those new features include greater control over the voice-over. You can now have multiple voice-over voices in your video and you can now control pauses in the narration.

Here's the video I made about Video Puppet last spring. The functions in Narakeet are exactly the same.

Whiteboard Chat - Online Whiteboards You Can Share and Monitor

Whiteboard Chat is a free service that you can use to create collaborative whiteboards to use with your students. It is possible to use Whiteboard Chat without an email address which makes it quick and easy to get started.

There are two ways to use Whiteboard Chat. The first is to create one whiteboard that you share with all of your students. The second way to use Whiteboard Chat is the more interesting option. That option is to create individual whiteboards for each student to use that you can also observe.

To get started with Whiteboard Chat simply head to the site and click on the big "Start Drawing" button. Next you have the choice of "start collaborating" or "start teaching." The "start collaborating" option will launch a single whiteboard that you can invite your students to join. The "start teaching" option will launch an instructor whiteboard plus a grid of individual whiteboards that you can share with your students. When you use that option each student has his/her own whiteboard to draw on that you can also observe from your computer. In both cases you invite students to whiteboards through unique invitation URLs that you can post in Google Classroom, Microsoft Teams, or any other place that you typically post links for students.

Applications for Education
Whiteboard Chat could be a great tool for math classes meeting in Google Meet. You could use Whiteboard Chat's teaching mode to give students their own whiteboards to work on that you can also view without having to fumble with screen sharing.

Earlier this year I wrote about similar product called Whiteboard Fi. You can read and watch that overview here. Whiteboard Chat seems to be a more polished version of Whiteboard Fi.

Using a Bicycle as a Generator

This morning I welcomed my new students into my classroom. In talking with one of them I learned that he likes to tinker with old bicycles. As we were talking he mentioned trying to create a power generator with a bicycle. That conversation took us to YouTube where we started looking at videos about using a bicycle to generate electricity. Here are a couple that I thought were worth sharing.

Can You Power a House With a Bicycle?
This is a video produced a few years ago by NPR's Skunk Bear. The answer is no, you can't power a house with a bicycle. The video does a great job of explaining how many bicyclists you would need in order to power an average house for a month.


Homemade Bicycle Generator
This video was produced a few months ago by Backyard Trail Builds (a channel about building bike trails and jumps). What's good about this video is that the producer explained his initial mistakes and how he corrected them. The video is also not so detailed that it doesn't inspire more curiosity about how to improve on the design. When we have time later this year to attempt making a bicycle-powered generator, this will be a video that my students and I reference.