Earlier this week I was checking my local weather forecast on NOAA.gov when I noticed a back-to-school announcement. The announcement highlighted some lesson plans and multimedia resources for teaching about things like hurricanes, changing sea levels, and climate resilience. The announcement also drew attention to an updated database of resources for teachers. That database is called NOAA Sea to Sky.
NOAA Sea to Sky currently contains 1239 resources that can be used to teach a wide variety of topics in science to students from Kindergarten through college. You can search and sort the database according to grade level, subject, topic, resource type, and NGSS standard. The results of a search on NOAA Sea to Sky can include full lesson plans published as PDFs, videos, and interactive media.
Yesterday I published a blog post about playing Google Slides on an automatically advancing loop. That blog post prompted a question from a reader about playing videos on a loop within a Google Slides presentation. Specifically, she wanted to know if she could have a video play on a loop. The answer is yes, and it's rather easy to do.
To make a video loop in Google Slides all you have to do is present your slides then right-click on the video. When you right-click on it you'll be able to choose an option to loop the video. Watch my short video to see how it's done.
Applications for Education
Playing a video on a loop in a slide could be useful when you want to play a video to use as a welcome announcement in a virtual meeting or in a physical meeting as students are slowly joining in.
Are you new to the role of tech coach or tech integrator this fall? If so, I have an eBook and webinar for you!
On August 30th at 3pm ET I'm hosting A Framework for Technology Integration. Anyone who purchases a copy of my eBook 50 Tech Tuesday Tips between now and midnight (Eastern Time) on August 29th will get a link to join the webinar. And if you previously purchased a copy and want to join this webinar, just send me a note and I'll register you.
In 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.
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.
I use Canva nearly every day of my work week. When I logged into my account a couple of days ago and saw a new whiteboard template option I had to give it a try. If you log into your Canva account today, you'll probably notice the new whiteboard template options too.
The new whiteboard templates in Canva are intended to be used collaboratively. They can be used for a variety of purposes including hosting brainstorming sessions, designing flowcharts, and making KWL charts. To help you and your collaborators focus on the task at hand, Canva has added a timer option to the whiteboard templates. The timer is found in the bottom, left corner of the templates. You can set the timer of any interval that works for your group.
Mike Tholfsen is a product manager at Microsoft he has early access to features that are rolling-out to users. That means his videos sometimes include overviews of new features before anyone else has used them. If you want to know about what's new in Teams and other Microsoft products Mike's YouTube channel is for you. In one recent video he highlighted ten new Teams features that you might want to try this fall.
Of the ten new features highlighted in the video above, the ones that stood out to me are collaborative annotation, the new rating question type in polls, and speaker coach.