Earlier this week a reader reached out to me for advice about creating QR codes for audio recordings made by her students. Her students had made recordings using Vocaroo and then used Vocaroo's built-in QR code generator to share the recordings. The problem they ran into is that Vocaroo deletes the recordings after a few weeks thereby rendering the QR codes useless. They needed a solution that would allow the recordings and QR codes to be useful for much longer periods of time.
My suggestion to the problem was to still use Vocaroo to record but then download the recordings as MP3 files instead of relying on Vocaroo for hosting. Then after downloading the MP3 upload it to Google Drive and set the permissions to "anyone with the link can view." Then use that link to create a QR code in a QR code generator like QRCode Monkey. The whole process is demonstrated this short video.
The USGS Multimedia Gallery contains large collections of educational videos, animations, audio recordings, pictures, and slideshows. As you might expect, you'll also find lots of maps in the USGS multimedia gallery. You can browse and search the gallery according to media type, year of publication, and keyword. In addition to the videos in the USGS Multimedia Gallery you can find many videos on the official USGS YouTube channel.
Here's a short video from the USGS YouTube channel about what a volcanologist does.
Applications for Education
If you need images or videos to help you deliver a lesson to your Earth Science students, the USGS Multimedia Gallery should be one of the first places you visit. Likewise students developing multimedia presentations for their Earth Science classes would be well-served to visit the USGS Multimedia Gallery.
When you upload an image and insert it into a Google Document, it should then also be available through Google Drive to insert into future documents and into Google Slides. However, in practice it's rarely that quick and simple. There is an easier option if you want to copy an image from a Google Document to another one or into Google Slides. That option is to simply right-click on the image, select copy, and then go to the slide that you want to use the image in and paste it in. The process also works in reverse to copy an image from Google Slides to Google Documents.
Applications for Education
Copying images from Google Docs to Google Slides or the reverse of that process can be helpful to students who are creating presentations about reports that they have compiled. For example, this could be helpful to a student whose report includes a graph or diagram that he or she plans to also talk about during a slideshow presentation.
On Sunday evening I got an email from someone who had seen my videos about Mote and wondered if there was something similar for adding video comments to Google Docs. One of my suggestions was to try the e-Comments Chrome extension which I reviewed last spring. Another option is to use a combination of Screencastify and Google Keep to build a bank of video comments that you can insert into the comments of Google Documents or Google Slides.
The process of using Screencastify and Google Keep to create a video comment bank for Google Docs is fairly straight-forward. First, record your short video comments or short lesson with Screencastify. Second, get the "share" link from Screencastify. Third, create a note in Google Keep that contains the link to the video (I recommend giving the notes easy-to-remember names and labels). Finally, whenever you need the video link just open Google Keep in the sidebar of the Google Doc you're viewing and copy the video link from the Google Keep into your comment.
In this video I demonstrate how to use Screencastify and Google Keep to create a bank of video comments that you can insert into the comments of your students' Google Docs and Slides.
Last week Rushton Hurley and I resumed our Two EdTech Guys Take Questions webinar series. If you missed it, you can watch the recording right here or as embedded below. Rushton does a great job of sharing links to all of the resources that we mention in the webinar. That list of resources can along with the slides from the webinar can found right here on the Next Vista website.
The next live edition of Two EdTech Guys Take Questions will be on February 10th at 4pm ET. Register here to join us for the fun.
