Summer, Icons, and Animations - The Week in Review

Good morning from Maine where we've just woken up from our first backyard camping adventure! Overall, it went about as well as could be hoped for with a three-year-old and a four-year-old in a tent. I think my three-year-old now wants to live in the tent with her stuffed animals and books. 

Happy Father's Day to all the dads reading my blog this weekend. I hope that it's a great day for you. 

This week I wrapped-up my school year. I took yesterday off and next week I'll host the first session of the Practical Ed Tech Virtual Summer Camp. The first webinar is at 10am ET on Monday. You can still register this weekend to join us. 

These were the week's most popular posts:
1. Three Good Options for Annotating PDFs
2. Four Important Padlet Updates to Note
3. Five Sources of Summer Math Activities for Elementary School Students
4. Sharing vs. Publishing Google Documents
5. Icons8 - Easily Add Icons to Google Docs, Slides, and Sheets
6. Wick Editor - A Nice Tool for Creating Animations
7. Expeditions Pro - A Replacement for Google's VR Tour Creator

On-demand Professional Development

• Ten Search Strategies Students Need to Know
• A Crash Course in Making & Teaching With Video
• A Crash Course in Google Earth & Maps for Social Studies

Other Places to Follow Me:

• The Practical Ed Tech Newsletter comes out every Sunday evening/ Monday morning. It features my favorite tip of the week and the week's most popular posts from Free Technology for Teachers.
• My YouTube channel has more than 36,000 subscribers watching my short tutorial videos on a wide array of educational technology tools. 
• I've been Tweeting as @rmbyrne for fourteen years. 
• The Free Technology for Teachers Facebook page features new and old posts from this blog throughout the week. 
• And if you're curious about my life outside of education, you can follow me on Instagram or Strava.

This post originally appeared on FreeTech4Teachers.com. If you see it elsewhere, it has been used without permission. Sites that steal my (Richard Byrne's) work include CloudComputin and WayBetterSite. Featured image captured by Richard Byrne.

Wick Editor - A Nice Tool for Creating Animations

Wick Editor is a free tool for creating animations in your web browser. It was recently mentioned in Rushton Hurley's Next Vista for Learning newsletter and I immediately bookmarked it when I read about it. This morning I finally got a chance to give it a try. 

Wick Editor doesn't require you to register or sign into any kind of account in order to use it. Simply head to the website and click "launch web editor" to get started. The editor itself doesn't have a lot of text or menus to tell you what exactly the features are or where they're found. You kind of have to just click and try things. That said, watching this tutorial video found on the Wick Editor homepage will show you everything you need to get started. I highly recommend taking five minutes to watch that tutorial video before using Wick Editor.  

Once I watched the Wick Editor tutorial video Wick Editor was easy to use. I made a simple animation of a stick figure running across the screen. To make the animation I used the pencil tool and the onion-skinning tool in the editor. The pencil tool is exactly what you think it is, a pencil for drawing on the screen. The onion-skinning tool allows you to a slightly faded version of your previous frame while drawing on your new frame. That allows you to properly place your drawings in sequence so that they don't overlap unless you want them to. In short, onion-skinning in Wick Editor is like having a sketch pad open so that you can see your previous sketch on your left while creating your new sketch on the right.

When you're happy with your animation drawings you can tinker with the speed at which the frames are played back. After you've set the playback speed you can add audio if you want to include it. Finished animations can be saved as MP4 files or as GIF files.

Applications for Education
Wick Editor reminds me of a slightly more advanced version of Brush Ninja which I've used and recommended for years. Wick Editor, like Brush Ninja, could be used by students to create animations to illustrate science concepts. Here's an article that I published a few years ago describing the process that I used with eighth grade students to have them create animations illustrating forms of energy.

This post originally appeared on FreeTech4Teachers.com. If you see it elsewhere, it has been used without permission. Sites that steal my (Richard Byrne's) work include CloudComputin and WayBetterSite. Featured image created by Richard Byrne using Wick Editor.

Icons8 - Easily Add Icons to Google Docs, Slides, and Sheets

Icons8 is a new Google Docs, Slides, and Sheets add-on that offers a large gallery of free icons that you can easily insert into your documents, slides, and spreadsheets. Within the Icons8 gallery you'll find thirty-five categories of icons. All of the icons are available in a variety of sizes from as small as 50x50 pixels to as large as 500x500 pixels. And once you've added an icon to your document or slide you can still use Google's built-in image editing tools to further alter the size and transparency of the icon. 

To use Icons8 simply install the add-on from the Google Workspace Marketplace. Once it is installed you'll find it listed in the add-ons drop-down menu in Docs, Slides, and Sheets. Open it from the drop-down menu and the gallery of icons will appear on the righthand side of your document, slide, or spreadsheet. From there you just need to click on an icon for it to appear in your document, slide, or spreadsheet. It should be noted that the icon will appear wherever your cursor is in your document at the time that you select an icon. Of course, you can always move the icon by just clicking and dragging it to a new part of your document. 

In this short video I demonstrate how to use Icons8 in Google Documents. 

Applications for Education
Icons8 provides an easy way for teachers to add icons to documents. Those icons can be useful in creating activities that utilize visual prompts for students to respond to. For example, I might use the house icon in a document in which I want students to spell the words "house" and "home." Icons8 could also be handy for students who are looking to add some "hand-drawn" images to Google Slides presentations.

This post originally appeared on FreeTech4Teachers.com. If you see it elsewhere, it has been used without permission. Sites that steal my (Richard Byrne's) work include CloudComputin and WayBetterSite. Featured image created by Richard Byrne using Canva.

Sharing vs. Publishing Google Documents

A couple of days ago I Tweeted my video about how to find public Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Forms. That Tweet prompted a couple of people to ask me about publishing Google Docs compared to sharing Google Docs and why you'd use one option versus another. To answer those questions I made this short video. 

The Difference

• The key difference is that publishing a document creates a simple webpage that is devoid of any of the Google Docs editing or sharing menus while a shared Google Document displays those menus.

Which one should you use?

• I'll use the option to share Google Document when I have a document like a syllabus or permission slip that I want students and or parents to be able to easily print and or save in their Google accounts.
  
  
• I'll use the "publish to the web option" when I have a document that is a newsletter or similar that I don't need or want students and or parents to make copies or save in their Google accounts. 

It's Sea Turtle Week - Five Short Lessons

Earlier this week when I was checking the weather forecast on NOAA.gov I noticed a banner announcing that this week is Sea Turtle Week. Prior to that I didn't know that there is a Sea Turtle Week. None-the-less it reminded me of the time that I witnessed sea turtles nesting in Costa Rica and it prompted me to look at some resources for teaching and learning about sea turtles. Here's what I found.

Sea Turtles 101
Sea Turtles 101 is a video from National Geographic's 101 series. As you might expect, the video covers the basics of the life and evolution of sea turtles, the number and kind of sea turtles, reproduction of sea turtles, and the environmental challenges facing sea turtles today. While not terribly engaging, the video is short and informative.



Turtle Travel Tips
Turtle Travel Tips is a cute SciShow Kids video about how leatherback sea turtles navigate thousands of miles of ocean to return to nesting sites.



Google Arts and Culture Turtle Stories
Google Arts and Culture offers this collection of imagery and videos about five different types of sea turtles found off the coast of Brazil. The imagery is nice but the collection is a little light on information.

7 Sea Turtle Facts
7 Sea Turtle Facts is an informative page published by NOAA. The page includes a couple of videos about sea turtle habitat, life, and environmental challenges facing sea turtles.

Traveling Turtles
Traveling Turtles is an ESRI Story Map, produced by NOAA, about three types of sea turtles found in the waters around Cape Cod and how people work to rescue cold-stunned sea turtles on the beaches of Cape Cod.