Create a Portfolio With Carrd.co

I often get asked for recommendations for simple website builders that teachers and students can use to create small websites. Google Sites is fine, but the aesthetics still have a long way to go. Services like WordPress and Weebly are great, but have way more menus and options than what's needed for a quick and simple site. Carrd.co is a new service that just might fill the need for an easy-to-use tool to quickly create good-looking, simple websites. 

I gave Carrd.co a try this afternoon. In ten minutes I created a little photography portfolio site that looks way better than anything I could have created with Google Sites or WordPress. Watch this short demo video to see how you can create a portfolio site with Carrd.co.

Applications for Education
Carrd.co could be a good little tool for high school or college students to use to create simple websites to share information about themselves and their work. They can create sites that are useful to have and share when applying for an internship, a scholarship, or a job.

A Helpful New Feature for Formatting Google Docs

Google Docs users who regularly create multiple page documents will be happy to learn that Google is adding a new page break feature to Google Docs. The new page break option will let you insert a page break before any new paragraph. This means that you'll no longer have to manually insert spaces to create a page break. Likewise, your formatting of the page break will be preserved if you have to later add more text or images to a page within your document. 

Applications for Education
This new page break will be welcomed by anyone who uses Google Docs to create long documents like worksheets that incorporate a lot of images, charts, or special text formatting. The new page break option should make it easier to preserve the formatting of pages without having to manually insert or delete spaces.

Google Adds More Audio and Video Controls to Google Meet

This week Google announced a new feature that will be welcomed by any teacher who regularly uses Google Meet to host online classes. That feature is the ability to selectively mute participant audio and video. For quite a while you've been able to mute all participants and turn off their webcams. The new feature prevents participants from unmuting themselves after you've muted them.

Those who have access to breakout rooms in Google Meet will find that the participant audio and video settings will also apply to breakout rooms. 

It should be noted that if your students are joining from an Android device or iOS device, they will need to be updated to the latest version of the Google Meet apps. If they don't use the updated apps, they won't be able to join your meeting if you have the audio and video locks enabled in your call. 

Applications for Education
I can think of at least a few times in the last 18 months that this new feature would have been helpful to me. I've muted students who wanted to interupt and had them unmute themselves. It then became kind of an annoying game of "mute, unmute" that distracted the class.

Like almost all Google Workspace updates, this one will take a couple of weeks to appear in all users' accounts. 

An Interactive Land Use Map

WorldCover Viewer is a new interactive land use map produced by the European Space Agency. The map lets visitors see how land is used worldwide and in specific places. Visitors can pan and zoom to see land use for an area or use the statistics explorer tools built into the map to see land use statistics for a country, state, or province. Views of the map and associated data can be downloaded from the WorldCover Viewer. 

The map represents ten categories of land use. Those categories are:

• Tree Cover
• Shrubland
• Grassland
• Cropland
• Built-up
• Bare/ Sparse Vegetation
• Snow and Ice
• Permanent Water Bodies
• Herbaceous wetland
• Mangroves
• Moss and Lichen

As you'll see in my video overview of WorldCover Viewer, it include a tool for measuring areas of land use. In my video overview I also demonstrate how to enable different layers on the map. 

Applications for Education
WorldCover Viewer could be a great resource for students to use to learn about how land is used in the area around them and globally. Students might be surprised to learn how much land is or isn't built-up in their home state or province. I can see using WorldCover Viewer as the starting place for student research into environmental challenges and concerns about land use.

H/T to Maps Mania for sharing WorldCover Viewer. 

Reminder - Old Google Sites are Going Away!

After five years of warnings, Google is finally ending support for the old version of Google Sites on December 1st. If you've been clinging to the hope that Google wouldn't force you to transition to the current version of Google Sites, it's time to give up that hope and convert your old site to the current version of Google Sites. Otherwise, on December 1st you'll no longer be able to edit your site or do anything else with it. 

In the following video I demonstrate how to convert your old Google Sites websites to the current version. Fortunately, the process is very simple and quick. Just head to sites.google.com then click on "classic sites manager" in the left margin of the page. Then on the next screen you can select the site(s) that you want to convert. Once you've clicked "convert" Google will handle the rest. If you're not sure which version of Google Sites you are using, watch my video to learn how you can quickly tell which version you're using. 

On a related note, I have a complete playlist of Google Sites tutorials right here. The best video to get started is this one that walks you through everything you need to know to create your first website with Google Sites.