My Favorite Fall Video Project

It's September and here in Maine the leaves on some of the maple trees are already starting to change color. This is my favorite time of year! And it's time that once again I share my favorite fall video project. The project is to create a time-lapse video of autumn. The outline of my time-lapse of autumn project is included below.

The idea is to take one picture every day to document the changes in the foliage as we progress through autumn from the first few orange leaves to full-blown autumn foliage colors to the drab brown we see after in the winter.

Here's how your students could create their own autumn foliage time-lapse videos.

1. Take one picture per day of the same view or of one singular tree. 
Using a cell phone is probably the best tool for this because students rarely go anywhere without one.

2. Upload the pictures to a Google Drive or OneDrive folder. 
It only takes one tap to move photos from a phone to a Google Drive folder labeled "Fall foliage." If This Then That has a recipe for doing this automatically from Android phones and from iPhones. Or simply use Google Photos and then move the photos into a folder at the end of the month. 

3. After four weeks, upload photos to Cloud Stopmotion or Stop Motion Animator and create your time-lapse. 
Cloud Stopmotion is a video editing program that works in your web browser. You can easily adjust the duration of each frame and easily add a soundtrack to your video. Click here for a video about using Cloud Stopmotion. Stop Motion Animator is another free tool for creating stop motion movies. Here's a demo of how it works. 

Two Search Refinement Tips for Every Teacher and Student

A couple of days ago I hosted a webinar for tech coaches. In the webinar I mentioned that teaching teachers just a couple of quick search refinement tips that they can pass on to students can help them stop feeling like their students are going to the same websites over and over. To that end, I shared two search refinement tips that every teacher and student should know. These two strategies will help students get beyond the usual first couple of pages of search results. Both strategies are outlined in this short video.

In the video that is embedded below I demonstrate how to refine search results according to top-level domain and why that is helpful to students. In the video I also demonstrate how to refine a search according to filetype and why that is helpful to students. In the video you'll see how I found a great lesson plan because I used a combination of top-level domain and filetype refinement. 

Write With Emojis in Google Docs

Earlier this week Google added a new emoji option into Google Docs. The new option enables you to type @ followed by an emotion to add an emoji into a sentence in your Google Documents. For example, you can type "@smile" to generate a list of smiley emojis that you can pick from to insert into the sentence you're writing. Of course, you can also do this by simply opening the insert menu in Google Docs and then selecting the emoji option. 

In this short video I demonstrate how to add emojis into your sentences in Google Docs. 

Applications for Education
When I first saw Google's announcement about adding emojis into Google Docs I didn't think much of it. In fact, I thought it was kind of silly or pointless. Then I thought some more about it and realized that writing with emojis could be a fun way to create some creative writing prompts for students. You could even combine emojis with dropdown menus in Google Docs to create some little Mad Libs-like creative writing activities.

Here's a short video about how add dropdown menus into Google Docs.

Back to School - The Month in Review

The sun has set on the last day of August. Nearly every school in my area is now back in session. And those few that aren't in session will be next week. So while calendar says that autumn doesn't start for a few more weeks, it sure feels like fall around here. I hope that you have a great start to the new school year!

As I do at the end of every month, I've compiled a list of the most popular posts of the last month. Take a look and see if there is something interesting that can help you in the new school year. 

These were the most popular posts in August:
1. Ten Popular Back-to-School Tutorials for Teachers
2. Five Good Resources for Learning About Airplanes and Airlines
3. Icebreakers and Exit Tickets - 30 Questions
4. How to Quickly Broadcast Your Screen to Your Students' Screens
5. Google Classroom Now Has Add-ons - For Some Schools
6. Blackbird Provides an Innovative Way for Anyone to Teach Coding
7. Try Canva's New Whiteboard Templates With Timers
8. Worldle Daily - A Street View Game
9. How to Design and Print Classroom Posters Using a Standard Printer
10. Significant Changes to Screencastify's Free Plan

I'll Come You!

If you'd like me to come to your school or conference, please send me an email at richardbyrne (at) freetech4teachers.com or fill out the form on this page. 

50 Tech Tuesday Tips!

50 Tech Tuesday Tips is an eBook that I created with busy tech coaches, tech integrators, and media specialists in mind. In it you'll find 50 ideas and tutorials that you can use as the basis of your own short PD sessions. Get a copy today!

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 42,000 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. Featured image captured by Richard Byrne.

Quizalize Games - Turn Any Quiz Into an Epic Game

Disclosure: Quizalize is an advertiser on FreeTech4Teachers.com.

Quizalize is a great teaching tool that I’ve used and written about since 2015 when it differentiated itself from the market by being the first classroom quiz game tool that offered an option to have your students play your quiz game as an in-classroom group activity or at-home activity. Today, Quizalize launched another new feature that is useful, exciting, and different from what other classroom quiz platforms offer. That new feature is called Quizalize Games. Quizalize Games let you take any of your quizzes and quickly turn them into video games!

Quizalize now offers six games in addition to the standard quiz game format. Those games are The Adventures of Kleo the Koala, Battlerzz, Bearzz, Hoopzz, First to the Flag, and Rockzz. The games follow the format of some classic arcade games like Zelda and Asteroids. You can preview the games here. All of the games are available to all teachers who have a free Quizalize account. By the way, if you haven’t signed into your Quizalize account in a while, you’ll also find an updated icebreaker game available to you.

The new Quizalize games can be played in single player mode, player vs. player mode, team vs. team mode, and classroom vs. computer mode.

Any Quiz Can Become a Quizalize Game
Creating a game in Quizalize has never been easier. The best part is that one quiz can be used to create all of the games. In other words, one quiz can become six different games!

To create a game in Quizalize sign into your free account. Then either choose one of your existing quizzes or create a new one. Once you have chosen a quiz you then assign it as an activity for your class. Finally, just before giving the activity to your students you select the game format that you want to use. See my screenshot below for an example of what you’d see just before giving your students a Quizalize game to play.

After choosing your game you’ll see a game code appear on your screen. Give students that code so that they can join the game. Alternatively, you can use the “magic link” option to give your students a link to click and join the game (that’s a convenient option for joining via Google Classroom, Microsoft Teams, or another LMS).

Watch or Play a Game Preview
You can preview all of the new games by watching the promotional videos on this page. You can also play previews of the games on that same page or by signing into your Quizalize account and clicking on the “play as a student” button that appears below every quiz.



Fun Games and Great Feedback!
The new Quizalize games add an additional element of fun to review activities. And as the games are based on the quizzes that you choose or create in your account, you can get a lot of information about your students’ knowledge and skills. Likewise, you can provide your students with some great feedback about their knowledge and skills.

When setting up a game in Quizalize you have options to give students immediate feedback on more than just whether they answered correctly. You can also provide them with video tutorials, PDFs, and links to websites to help them understand where they went wrong in answering the questions. You can set score ranges that determine which resources students see and whether they even see them at all. For example, if a student scores below 50% you can give them one set of resources while a student who scores between 50% and 75% will see a different set of resources.

Even if your students play the Quizalize games in team mode, you can still see how they did individually. The simplest way to do that is to download the spreadsheet of results that Quizalize provides. Other options include allowing Quizalize to group students according to scores and seeing which questions proved to be the most difficult. You can use that information yourself or turn on the differentiation mode in Quizalize that allows you to assign follow-up tasks to students based on their scores.

Bonus Characters!
If you already have a Quizalize account, you probably went and tried the new games before you got this far in this blog post. But just in case you need a little more incentive to try the games, you can get a bonus character for the new Battlerz game when you share the news about Quizalize games with your friends. Just head here to do that.

Get Started!
All of the existing features of Quizalize are still intact. The new games just build upon those features and provide a new element of fun for students. Watch the demo video below to learn more about the new Quizalize games!