How to Create Posters and Embed Them Into Your Google Site

Canva has been my go-to tool for making posters, infographics, video covers, and social media graphics for most of the last eight years. Over the years it has steadily added more and more features including options to publish your designs as stand-alone webpages and to embed your designs as dynamically updating graphics in other websites like those you might make with Google Sites. So when a reader emailed me earlier this week asking for a suggestion on how to include flyers in a website my thoughts immediately turned to Canva. 

In this short video I demonstrate how to use Canva's poster templates and then embed your poster into a page in a Google Site. 

I've made more than a dozen other tutorials about using Canva's many features. Anyone interested in learning more about how to use Canva to create a poster and then print it with a standard printer should watch this video.



This video will show you how to make a video with Canva.

How to Use Pictures in Flippity Templates

Flippity is a free service for making games, flashcards, and timelines with Google Sheets. I've been using and recommending it for years. In fact, my posts about using it to make board games and memory games were two of the most popular posts in all of 2020. That's probably why I get a lot of questions about using Flippity. Yesterday, I answer questions from two readers who were looking for help using images in Flippity templates. To help them, I made this short video. 

The important thing to know about using images in Flippity templates is that the images must be publicly available at URLs ending in PNG or JPG. It's because of that requirement that using images stored in a Google Drive folder or a private Flickr album won't work (a public Flickr image can work, however). In this short video I give the examples of using Pixabay and Wikipedia as the sources of images to use Flippity game templates. 

How to Share Videos in Google Classroom Without Using YouTube

Earlier this week a friend asked me for some help sharing videos in Google Classroom. He wanted to share videos without having to upload them to YouTube. There are four options for doing that in Google Classroom. I've outlined all four in this short video. 

As a reminder, if you're sharing videos that you found on YouTube, the process is just a simple copy and paste of the link to the video. And if you're sharing videos that you uploaded to YouTube, the process is a simple copy and paste of the link to your uploaded video. But if you want to share a video that you made and you don't want to upload it to YouTube then watch this video to learn how to do that. 

There are four options for sharing videos in Google Classroom without using YouTube. They all work in essentially the same manner but each option does have some small differences from the others. All four options are demonstrated in this video. The options are:

• Attach video file to an announcement in Google Classroom.
• Attach video file to a material in the Classwork section of your Google Classroom. 
• Attach video file to a question in the Classwork section of your Google Classroom.
• Attach video file to an assignment in the Classwork section of your Google Classroom.

Coverr - Free B-roll Video Clips

Coverr is a relatively new website that is offering free B-roll video clips that you can download and reuse in your own projects. Most of the videos are silent and are short clips of less than a minute. Downloading them takes just one click. Registration is not required in order to download from Coverr and, according to Coverr's terms of service, attribution is not required although it is appreciated. 

You can search for videos on Coverr by entering simple keywords like "dog" and "cat." The other option for discovering videos on Coverr is to simply browse through the thematic collections of stock video clips. 

Coverr's user interface does have one element that might cause some confusion for students. Coverr appears to generate revenue through Shutter Stock's affiliate program. That's why there is a row of Shutter Stock video clips on the top of every page and another a little lower on each page. It would be fairly easy for someone to overlook the Shutter Stock label and end up clicking on one of the videos that isn't available for free. 

Applications for Education

Pixabay has been my go-to resource for free B-roll video clips for years. Coverr probably isn't going to supplant Pixabay as a my go-to, but it does represent an alternative source for free video clips that teachers and students can use without worrying about copyright infringement. 

GeoQuiz - How Many Countries Can You Identify?

GeoQuiz is a new geography game website that was featured on Product Hunt a couple of days ago. GeoQuiz is a simple game that just asks you to try to name as many countries as you can in fifteen minutes. As soon as you enter a country's name the globe on the screen spins to center on that country. If you misspell a country the globe doesn't spin and your entry doesn't count. 

You can play GeoQuiz on your own or you can compete against other players in online rooms. Either way, you don't need to register or enter any personal information in order to play GeoQuiz. To play against others you can join an existing room or create your own and invite people to join it. To have others join your room all you have to do is pick a name for your room and tell people to join it in the "online mode" on the GeoQuiz homepage. 

Applications for Education
Does the Internet need another geography quiz game like GeoQuiz? Probably not. Is it nice to have another option that doesn't require registration in order to play? Yes, it is. Games like these provide a fun way for students to test their won knowledge of world geography. It's the kind of thing that I like to add to section of my website or LMS called "educational things to do with extra time."