Internet Archive Scholar - An Academic Version of the Internet Archive

The Internet Archive warehouses all kinds of fantastic materials (and some not-so-fantastic) that can be useful to teachers and students. The trouble with it is the organization is a little clunky for research purposes. Even if you limit the scope of your search to webpages and text you can still spend a lot of time weeding out material that isn't academic in nature. That could be changing now that Internet Archive Scholar is on the horizon. 

Internet Archive Scholar is a new project from the Internet Archive. It is focused on providing access to academic articles and journals from the 18th Century through today. Internet Archive Scholar is very new. It's so new that it's labeled as being "in alpha" and when you visit it there is a message warning you that there may be several bugs and that it has not been "officially announced." None-the-less, I gave it a try and made a video about it. Here's my video overview of Internet Archive Scholar. 

Applications for Education

As I mentioned in the video above, Internet Archive Scholar has the potential to be a good alternative and or complement to Google Scholar. Like Google Scholar, Internet Archive Scholar could provide high school and college students with some good resources to consult that they would not find through a Google or Bing search. 

How to Use Microsoft Forms for a Classroom Sign-in/ Sign-out Sheet

A couple of weeks ago I published a video about how to create a sign-in/ sign-out sheet to use in Google Classroom. A few people have since emailed me to ask if it's possible to do the same thing in a Microsoft environment. It is possible to do that with Microsoft Forms. 

In this new video I demonstrate how to create a sign-in/ sign-out sheet with Microsoft Forms. In the video I also explain variations on the form and how students complete the form. 

"Whoa!" - This Is Why We Should Review Search Strategies Every Year

 

During last week's episode of Two Ed Tech Guys Take Questions and Share Cool Stuff I shared a little story from earlier that day in my classroom. The story provides a good reminder of why we should review search strategies every fall even if we think our students "have done it before." 

Here's the story, one of my comp sci students was looking for an image to use in a little project that he's working on. I told the class to use Pixabay or Unsplash to find the images they needed. Unfortunately for this student there really wasn't an image that met his needs available on either of those sites. So I told him he could look on Google Images if he refined the search according to usage rights. Seeing how that could be done was his first "whoa!" moment. The second "whoa!" came a few minutes later when I showed him that he could refine the search according to file type to find PNG files without having to manually look through the results. His third "whoa!" was let out when he realized that he could search by file type to find PowerPoint presentations. 

This particular student is new to my classroom, but is not new to the school district as he is a junior this year. So while I'm sure he was taught how to search by file type and usage rights in the past, he clearly benefitted from a refresher last week. The lesson here is to review search strategies with students even if you think they've heard it before. 

For more information on teaching search strategies to students of all ages, take a look at my online course Ten Search Strategies Students Need to Know. 

Think Like a Coder - The Final Episode!

Last spring my freshmen class enjoyed TED-Ed's Think Like a Coder series of videos. The final episode of the series was released a few days ago. The last installment is called The World Machine. 

The World Machine follows the same format as the previous nine installments of Think Like a Coder. The episode features Ethic and Hedge using logic to solve some programming puzzles to unlock and collect artifacts. During the episode there are calls-to-action for students to try to apply their knowledge to the problems that Ethic and Hedge face. Watch the full episode right here. 

As I wrote last spring, my freshmen in Intro to Computer Science class loved these videos. I didn't think that they would so I didn't plan to show them. Then we had a day that wrapped up a little early so I put one on just to see how they'd react, they really liked them and ended up calling out how they would have solved the problems in the episodes. I plan to use these videos again a little later this year with my new group of freshmen.

MoocNote - Add Quizzes to Existing Videos

MoocNote is a free service that I've written about a few times in the past as a tool for collaborative note-taking while watching a video. It is a good service for doing that. Recently, MoocNote expanded to offer tools for adding quiz questions to videos. You can now use MoocNote to add multiple choice, true/false, multiple selection, and fill-in-the-blank questions to the timeline of any video that you find on YouTube (premium users can import their own videos as well). 

Adding questions into the timeline of a video in MoocNote is fairly straight-forward once you know where to find the question icon (see this video for an explanation). You can add as many questions as you like to the timeline of a video. One nice feature is that you can have your questions be active or inactive and toggle between the two settings. That could be nice if you want to show the video without interruptions to one class but then use it with a different class in which students will be required to answer questions online. 

The other recent update to MoocNote that some teachers will appreciate is that it is now possible to share MoocNote lessons with students who don't have email addresses. You can now give students a link to the lesson and a pin that they have to enter to access the lesson. See this video for an explanation. 

The obvious comparison for MoocNote is EDpuzzle. MoocNote doesn't have as many reporting functions as EDpuzzle. On the other hand, the initial set-up for using MoocNote is a little simpler and getting students into it is easy.