Arts, Culture, and Geography Games to Share in Google Classroom

One of Larry Ferlazzo's recent blog posts about Ideas That Changed the World prompted me to spend time playing around with some of the games on the Google Arts & Culture site this morning. 

Play with Arts & Culture offers more than a dozen interactive games for students to play to test their knowledge and to learn about the connections between art, culture, and geography. The collection of games includes things like jigsaw puzzles to reassemble famous works of art, timeline-based games about cultural events, crosswords, online coloring activities, and location identification games. Some of the games can be played collaboratively and all of the games can be shared directly into Google Classroom as announcements and or assignments. 

Watch Art, Culture, and Geography Games to learn more about how to play the games in Play with Arts & Culture. 

On a related note, it is possible to share any of the stories in Google Arts & Culture with your students through Google Classroom. That process is demonstrated in this short video.

Offline Google Arts & Culture Activities

In addition to all of the online games, Google Arts & Culture offers a PDF of activities for students. This free PDF includes coloring pages, mazes, and connect-the-dots games for students. 

Pictures as Math Problem Prompts

A couple of days ago I read one of Terry Freedman's latest Substack articles. The article is titled A Conversation I Had Which I Still Don't Understand. It's a short dialogue between Terry and the representative of a cab company who can't explain why there's a price difference for two journeys of the same length. 

Reading Terry's story reminded me of a Flickr group that Danny Nicholson created more than a decade ago. That group is called Bad Maths. The Bad Maths Flickr group contains lots of examples of bad math spotted in stores and other public places.

The Bad Maths Flickr group could be a good place to find some images that contain simple mathematics problems for your students to solve. For example, ask students to find the flaw in the math of this grocery store offer or this offer for cat food.

On a similar note to the Bad Maths group, seven years ago I took the picture that you see below. Almost as soon as it appeared in my Facebook feed via Instagram, my friend Kelly commented with, "shouldn't they be more concerned about weight than the number of people?" Kelly is a middle school math teacher so this picture was right in her wheelhouse of math prompts. 

A Great Place to Find Free Sound Effects

This morning I hosted a webinar about creating your own apps in your classroom. In one of the demonstrations that I gave I created an app that played a little dog barking noise when a person tapped "I'm a dog person" on the screen. The sound effect that I used came from one of my favorite sources of free media for classroom projects, Pixabay. 

Pixabay is best known for its library of free images. It also has libraries of free b-roll videos, music, and sound effects that you can download and reuse for free. 

In this short video I demonstrate how to find free sound effects on Pixabay and download them for reuse. 

Openverse is another good place to find free images and music to use in your multimedia projects. I recently featured it in this video. 

How to Move Bookmarks Between Chrome Profiles

I was recently contacted by a teacher who was leaving her current school district and wanted to know what would happen to all of the bookmarks she had stored in her Chrome profile. Her Chrome profile was tied to her school-issued Google account which was going to be closed when she left the school. 

The solution to this problem is to use Google Takeout to download all of the data in your Chrome profile. When you do that you are given an HTML file that includes all of your Chrome bookmarks. You can then take that file and import it into another Chrome profile. All of those steps are demonstrated in this short video that I recorded last night. 

If you find yourself in a situation similar to the person who emailed me last night, watch How to Move Bookmarks from One Chrome Profile to Another. 

Watch How to Use Google Takeout in 2022 to learn more about how Google Takeout works and the data that you can export from your Google account. 

New Text Formatting Options in Google Forms

At the end of June Google added some new text formatting options to Google Forms. Those options enable you customize the fonts used for titles, section headers, and questions within your Google Forms. Last week Google added even more text formatting options to Google Forms. 

The latest update to Google Forms gives you rich text formatting options. That means you can now bold, italicize, underline, and hyperlink any of the text in your form's title, section headers, and questions. In this short video I demonstrate how that works. 

Applications for Education
As I demonstrated in the video above, using the hyperlinking tool when writing a question in Google Forms could be a good way to provide students with a direct link to an online article that they have to read, analyze, and then answer questions about.