Last Call! - 50 Tech Tuesday Tips and a Webinar

Tomorrow (January 31st) at 4pm ET I'm going to host a webinar just for those who have purchased a copy of 50 Tech Tuesday Tips. If you've already purchased a copy, thank you! You'll be getting an email with webinar information soon if you haven't already gotten it. If you haven't yet purchased a copy, get one by midnight tonight (January 30th) and you'll be able to join us. 

In the webinar, A Framework for Technology Integration, I'll share my framework for helping teachers use technology in meaningful ways in their classrooms. I'll also provide some examples of how I've done it in the past and how you can replicate them in your school. 

About the eBook:

50 Tech Tuesday Tips was curated from more than 400 editions of The Practical Ed Tech Newsletter.  50 Tech Tuesday Tips provides you with ideas for lots of helpful things that you can teach to your colleagues and to students. Throughout the eBook you'll find tutorials and handouts that you can pass along in your school. 

Some of the many things you'll find in 50 Tech Tuesday Tips include:

• What to do when a web app isn't working as you expect.
• Building your own search engine.
• How to create green screen videos.
• Improving instructional videos. 
• Streamlining email management.
• Creating educational games. 
• DIY app creation.
• Podcasting tips for teachers and students. 

Get your copy of 50 Tech Tuesday Tips right here!

No, this ebook isn't free but the tools that feature within it is free to use. Creating something like this takes many, many hours but reading it can save you many, many hours. Purchases of 50 Tech Tuesday Tips make it possible for me to create other free resources like The Practical Ed Tech Handbook that I update and give away to thousands of teachers every year.

Wordle, Puzzles, and Snow - The Week in Review

Good morning from Maine where we're looking forward to a big snowstorm today. Depending on which forecast you believe we're going to get anywhere from ten inches to ten feet of snow today! I'll be happy either amount as will my daughters who want to make snowmen, sled, and ski this weekend. So that's what I'm doing this weekend. I hope that you're also doing something fun this weekend.  

These were the week's most popular posts:
1. Five Tools for Making Wordle Word Clouds
2. Ten Cool Things You (And Your Students) Can Do With Lumio
3. Create a Teacher Report Card With Google Forms
4. Roles in Group Video Projects
5. Create an Educational Puzzle Game With TinyTap
6. 50 Tech Tech Tuesday Tips and a Webinar
7. Good Resources for Remote Math & Science Lessons

Thank you for your support!
Your registrations in Practical Ed Tech courses (listed below) and purchases of my ebook help me keep Free Technology for Teachers going.

On-demand Professional Development

• 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 39,000 subscribers watching my short tutorial videos on a wide array of educational technology tools. 
• I've been Tweeting as @rmbyrne for fifteen years. 
• The Free Technology for Teachers Facebook page features new and old posts from this blog throughout the week. 
• 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.

How to Create QR Codes for Audio Files in Google Drive

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. 

I shared a bunch of other ideas for using QR codes in classrooms in this post on Practical Ed Tech. 

The USGS Multimedia Gallery Offers Excellent Public Domain Images and Videos

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.

How to Copy Images from Google Docs to Slides and Back

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. 

Watch this short video to see how to copy images from Google Docs to Google Slides and back. 

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.