Maple Syrup Sunday! And Maple Syrup Sundaes

Today is Maple Syrup Sunday here in Maine. It's a day when many maple syrup producers open their operations to visitors. All of them offer some type of educational program about the production of maple syrup. Many of them will have samples of their products. My favorite one has maple syrup ice cream sundaes! 

A couple of weeks ago I shared some resources for learning about how maple syrup is produced and why it happens at this time of year. Since then SciShow Kids released a new video about how maple syrup is produced. It's a great explanation for students in Kindergarten through third grade. You can watch the video here on the SciShow Kids YouTube channel or as embedded below. If you click through to the YouTube version you can then find a list of all of the NGSS Standards the video covers. 

Chronicling America - A Great Place to Find Historic Newspapers

Chronicling America is digitized newspaper archive hosted by the Library of Congress. The Chronicling America collection contains millions of copies of newspaper pages printed in the United States between 1789 and 1963. You can search through the collection according to date, state in which the newspaper was published, and keyword. You can read, download, and print copies of any page that you find in the Chronicling America collection. In this short video I provide a demonstration of how to find newspapers in the Chronicling America collection. 

The U.S. News Map is based on the Chronicling America newspaper collection hosted by the Library of Congress. When you search on the U.S. News Map the results of your search will be displayed on an interactive map. Clicking on a placemark the map will take you to a list of articles from newspapers in the area around the placemark. You can then select an article from the list and read it on the Chronicling America website where you can also download a copy of the article. The U.S. News Map will let you search for articles published between 1789 and 1964.

In this short video I provide a demonstration of how to use the U.S. News Map to find historical newspaper articles.



The Library of Congress hosted an online conference for teachers in the fall of 2016. One of the featured presentations of that conference was Teaching With Historical Newspapers. Chronicling America was featured in the presentation. You can watch the recording embedded below to learn how to navigate the Chronicling America collection and pick up some tips for incorporating the newspapers into your practice.

Games, Teams, and Mud - The Week in Review

Good morning from Maine where sunny weather has returned after a couple of days of sleet, snow, and rain. That sleet, snow, and rain is part of what makes this time of year Mud Season! How muddy? This week a school bus in our area got stuck in the mud while taking kids home from school. 

This week I hosted a webinar titled How to Create & Sell Your Own Digital Products. If you missed it, the recording is now available to access here. Get the recording this weekend and you'll be able to join me for a live Q&A follow-up session next week. 

We're going to enjoy the relatively nice weather today and play outside while doing some light yard work. I hope that you have something fun to do today too. Before doing that, I have this week's list of the most popular posts. 

These were the week's most popular posts:
1. Stop Printing the Internet
2. Plays.org - Educational Games Your Students Will Love to Play
3. New Whiteboard Features in Microsoft Teams and New Excel Formulas
4. Take Your Students on the American Ideals Virtual Field Trip Hosted by Discovery Education
5. Five Chrome Settings You Need to Know
6. Readlee - Know How Your Students Read Online Assignments
7. Kikori App - Social Emotional Learning Activities for All Ages

Thank you for your support!
Your registrations in Practical Ed Tech courses and purchases of 50 Tech Tuesday Tips help me keep Free Technology for Teachers going. Purchase ten or more copies of my ebook and I'll host a free one-hour webinar for your school or organization. 

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 40,000 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 Icons Daily and Daily Dose. Featured image captured by Richard Byrne.

Try This New Google Chrome Feature

Those of you who subscribe to my YouTube channel might have seen me share this yesterday. There's a handy new feature in Chrome that appears when update to the latest version. The new feature is a side panel reading list that could prove to be very helpful to those of us who tend to have a lot of browser tabs open at once. 

The new side panel feature in Chrome lets you create a list of your current tabs, view the list, visit the tabs, and keep track of which ones you have and haven't read. It's kind of like a more streamlined version of "traditional" browser bookmarking. Watch this short video to see how it works. 

How to Edit Your Videos in YouTube Studio

A couple of days ago a reader emailed me to ask for help cropping a video. Specifically, he wanted to know what I thought would be the simplest online tool for cropping the recording of a livestream. My suggestion was to use the editing tools that are built right into YouTube Studio (the place where you upload videos in your YouTube account). 

Answering that reader's question prompted me to record this video overview of the basics of using the editing tools that are built into YouTube Studio. Watch the video to learn how to:

• Upload videos to YouTube
• Use hashtags in your video's description. 
• Crop videos in YouTube studio. 
• Blur faces and objects in your videos. 
• Use YouTube's library of music in your videos.