The National Archives to Host Online Professional Development This Summer

The National Archives offers many excellent resources for history teachers. For example, they recently published a new guide to understanding perspectives in primary sources. And this summer the National Archives will be hosting free online professional development events for teachers. 

The first event is on July 12th through the 14th. It is the Truman Library Teachers Conference. The theme of the conference is Presidential Character and Decision Making. The conference will include presentations from representatives of ten presidential libraries and museums. 

The second event is a series titled We Rule: Civics for All of US. This series has two sessions for elementary school teachers and two sessions for middle school/ high school teachers. Dates and details for each session are available here. 

The Three Branches Institute is the third of NARA's summer professional development opportunities for teachers. This event will focus on new ideas and resources for teaching about the three branches of government. The event will be held via Zoom on August 2nd through 4th. Registration is free, but you must register by July 17th. The registration form can be found here. 

Ziplet Now Integrates With Microsoft Teams

Ziplet was one of my favorite tools in 2021. Ziplet has a few features that make it an outstanding tool for conducting online exit ticket activities. First, there is a large library of premade exit ticket questions that you can use. Second, students can respond in a variety of ways including with a just an emoji. Third, you can respond to students' responses on an individual basis or group basis. Here's my tutorial on using Ziplet.

Ziplet has long had a Google Classroom integration. This week they announced a Microsoft Teams integration. Now you can import your Microsoft Teams class rosters to use in Ziplet. The complete directions for connecting Microsoft Teams to Ziplet can be seen here. 

Applications for Education
Ziplet fits in a gap between tools like Kahoot and Google Classroom. For that reason it could be a good tool for engaging students in discussions about assignments, course topics, or the general feeling of the class.

A Crash Course in Decisions About College

The folks at Crash Course have developed a new channel and series of courses called Study Hall. One of those courses is called How to College. 

How to College is a great series for high school students and first year college students. The course covers everything from deciding to go to college to picking a college to picking a major and how to pay for it all. It's a series that could be particularly useful to first generation college students who don't have anyone to rely on who has gone through the process before them.

I watched the How to Choose a Major video this morning. And while I can't say that it would have stopped me from changing majors a couple of times, it would have given me more ideas about what could be done with the degrees associated with those other majors I tried before getting a degree in history. 

If you're curious about the picture I selected for this blog post, it represents what drew me to Maine when I was a college student, fly fishing. For someone like me who didn't have the grades or the money to go to an elite university, picking a school based on my hobbies was about as good a selection criteria as any 25 years ago.

Two Easy Ways to Support This Blog

The popularity of my blog has waxed and waned over the years. But for nearly fifteen years I've published new blog posts almost every day. New blog posts even appeared on the days my daughters were born (no, I didn't write blog posts on those days, I just had them scheduled in advance). I've been fortunate to have the support of many great folks over the years. Some of that support has been financial by hiring me to speak at your conferences or to run workshops in your schools. But most of the support has come through folks just sharing my blog posts and videos with their colleagues. 

Creating new blog posts, recording new videos, and answering lots of questions from readers takes a lot of time and, in the case of delivering my newsletters, a lot of money. If you're interested in helping to support my work, there are two easy ways to do that.

Respectfully Share My Work

If you have a friend or colleague who you think could benefit from something I've written or recorded, please share it with that person. Tell them why you're sharing it and let them know where they can find more of my work. 

Grab a Copy of my eBook

50 Tech Tuesday Tips is an eBook that I created by combing through more than 400 editions of my Practical Ed Tech Newsletter. In the eBook you'll find ideas for interesting ways to use technology in your classroom, school, and library. 

How to Use Google Maps and Street View in Canva Presentations

This blog post and video is the result of my failure to get another service, that won't be named, to do what I hoped it would. I was trying to come up with a way for students to create online, interactive atlases. After banging my head against my keyboard for a while I finally said to myself, "hey, see if you can do this in Canva?" So I did and it works!

In this new video I demonstrate how to embed Google Maps and Google Street View imagery into Canva designs. There are a few things that are notable about this. First, you can interact with the map and the Street View imagery directly inside of your Canva design. Second, you can publish and share your design as a website where others can also interact with the map and Street View imagery. Third, the method that I demonstrate in the video works with any Canva design template. 

Applications for Education
Embedding working Google Maps and Street View imagery into a presentation could be a great way for students to build online atlases. It's a good way for you as a teacher to have a set of maps and images ready to go when teaching a lesson. Rather than searching in Google Maps in front of the class, you can have the exact map views that you want to share ready to go in a set of slides.