Create Your Own Chatbot for Surveys and Quiz Practice

Acquainted is a free polling tool that has been around for a few years. It recently reappeared on my radar when a reader sent me a question asking for help creating a chatbot for her website.

Acquainted is a conversational polling tool. What that means is that people who take your poll get an instant response from you regarding their selections of poll options. Your responses are written into Acquainted and programmed to appear to poll respondents as they make answer choices. Watch my short demonstration video below and then read on for my ideas about how you might use Acquainted in your practice.



Applications for Education
Acquainted was designed for polling visitors to a website and it would make a great addition to a classroom website. It could be used as a mini tutoring service when added to your classroom website. You could build a series of questions for your students to respond to and get feedback that is programmed by you. You could build responses that provide explanations of why an answer is correct or incorrect. Your responses might even include a link to further explanations.

 
This post originally appeared on FreeTech4Teachers.com. Featured image created by Richard Byrne using Canva.

Get a Free Chapter of My Favorite Book About Search Strategies

The Joy of Search is a book that I've been recommending for a couple of years now. It's all about search strategies and is a must-read for anyone who wants to develop better search strategies or teach search strategies. The book was written by Dan Russell whose title at Google is Senior Research Scientist for Search Quality and User Happiness. What he does that you, I, and students should care about is craft really interesting lessons on employing a wide variety of search strategies. You can find many of those lessons in his regular series of search challenges on his blog SearchReSearch. And if you get a chance to hear him speak at a conference, take it!

Back to the book, in The Joy of Search you'll find stories used to explain how to employ various search strategies. To get a sense of what the book is about, you can get a free chapter of the book right now from Dan's blog. The chapter that is available is titled Finding a Mysterious Location Somewhere in the World: How to Use Multiple Information Sources to Zero In on a Resource. In the chapter you'll learn about one of my favorite techniques for getting students to look at all of the information that is available to them in order to form a good search strategy and employ good search terms.

On a related note, over on Practical Ed Tech I have an on-demand webinar titled Ten Search Strategies Students Need to Know. 

This post originally appeared on FreeTech4Teachers.com. Featured image by Richard Byrne.

ChatterPix Kids - Create Talking Pictures for an Educational Purpose

ChatterPix Kids is one of my favorite digital storytelling apps for elementary school students. 

ChatterPix Kids is a free app that students can use to create talking pictures. To use the app students simply open it on their iPads or Android devices and then take a picture. Once they've taken a picture students draw a mouth on their pictures. With the mouth in place students then record themselves talking for up to thirty seconds. The recording is then added to the picture and saved as a video on the students' iPads or Android devices. Watch my tutorial videos below to learn how to use ChatterPix Kids on Android devices and on iPads.



Applications for Education
My all-time favorite example of students using ChatterPix Kids is found in this Next Vista for Learning video titled A Healthy Meal. To create the video students recording a series of ChatterPix Kids talking pictures and then the talking pictures were combined in a sequence in iMovie.

A couple of years ago I worked with a Kindergarten class in which the students used ChatterPix Kids to create talking pictures of characters from their favorite books including Curious George and Clifford the Big Red Dog.

The first time I ever saw ChatterPix Kids in use was five or six years ago when an elementary school teacher (I'm sorry, I don't remember her name) gave a poster presentation at ISTE in which she shared examples of her students recording short audio biographies of presidents. 

How to Create Interactive Checklists in Google Docs

This week Google announced more than a dozen updates to Google Workspace products. Included in those updates is a new text box feature in Google Documents. The new text box option can be used to create interactive checklists. Those checklists, just like any other Google Document, can be shared with colleagues and students who can then cross off items as they're completed. 

In this short video I demonstrate how you can create interactive checklists in Google Documents. One of the neat things that you'll see in the video is that you can adjust the size and style of the checkboxes by using the font menus in Google Docs.  

Applications for Education
My first thought when seeing the new checklist option in Google Docs was that it could be great for students to use when planning group projects. The group can have their to-do list and all of the details of their plans on the same document instead of having to use a separate task management tool or having to write/re-write comments when a task is completed.

This post originally appeared on FreeTech4Teachers.com. Feature image created by Richard Byrne using Canva. 

Bikes, Slides, and Summer Reading - The Week in Review

Good morning from Maine where the sun is rising on this summer morning. I'm inside instead of sitting on my porch because I'm eagerly anticipating watching the first stage of the Tour de France. After that we'll head outside to ride our own bikes. And tomorrow we're heading to Storyland! I hope that you also have some fun things scheduling for your weekend. 

This week I hosted the first session of the Practical Ed Tech Virtual Summer Camp. Two dozen people joined me throughout the week for ten live webinars. A big thank you to those who attended and participated. For those who missed it, registration is still open for the July and August sessions of the Practical Ed Tech Virtual Summer Camp.

These were the week's most popular posts:
1. Icons8 - Easily Add Icons to Google Docs, Slides, and Sheets
2. Wick Editor - A Nice Tool for Creating Animations
3. How to Create Your Own Online Board Game
4. A Short Overview of Google Sites Publishing and Sharing Settings
5. All About the Tour de France
6. How to Share Google Slides Without Sharing Speaker Notes
7. Summer Reading Suggestions

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.