Two Good Ways to Create Simple and Focused Websites

Parts of this post originally appeared late last year in an issue  of my Practical Ed Tech weekly newsletter. 

I am often asked for recommendations for simple website builders that teachers and students can use to create small websites. The purpose isn’t to share everything they’ve done and have you grade it. Tools like Seesaw and Spaces are good for that. The purpose of these kinds of sites is to share photography, their resumes, videos they’ve made, or awards and references they’ve received.

Google Sites is fine for making simple sites, but the aesthetics still have a long way to go. Services like WordPress and Wix are great, but they have way more menus and options than what's needed for a quick and simple site. Fortunately, there are some good tools students can use to quickly create simple, good-looking websites to showcase their work and share a bit about themselves. Here are a couple that are worth trying.

Carrd.co is an easy-to-use tool to quickly create good-looking, simple websites. I used to to create a little photography showcase site in less than ten minutes. It looks much better than anything I could have created with Google Sites or WordPress. Watch this short demo to see how you can create a portfolio site with Carrd.co.



Adobe Express (formerly known as Adobe Spark) has a webpage creator that offers a fantastic way to create simple websites in which your students can include images, text, and videos. Consider having your students arrange their pages chronologically so that the top of the page shows their work at the beginning of the year and then as viewers scroll down they see your students' latest work. Click here for a video tutorial on how to use Adobe Express to create a simple website.

STEAM Lessons About the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade

Watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade is a little tradition in my house just like it is in millions of other homes in the United States. For the last few years Macy's has offered some hands-on STEAM lessons related to the parade. 

Parade 101 features four video demonstrations of hands-on activities that students can do at home with their parents or in your classroom. The four activities include inflating balloons through the use of baking soda and vinegar, designing balloons for the parade, making and using sculping dough, and building model floats. All of the videos include lists of needed supplies. 

I like all four of the activities. If I was to recommend one for Thanksgiving day it would be building model floats or designing because they can be done with cardboard, paper, glue, markers, and other common household materials that don't make a mess and don't have to be done in a kitchen. That said, I think the most fun one is the inflating balloons activity. 

In addition to the videos and STEAM projects Parade 101 offers some printable coloring sheets and puzzles. An interactive timeline of the history of the parade is still available to view as well. 

Finally, if you are looking for some history of the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade videos, take a look at the following videos that I've shared in the past. 

History of the Thanksgiving Day Parade.

The History of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade

Elk, Geography, and Art - The Week in Review

Good morning from Maine where I'm home after spending most of the week in western Nebraska. It was there that I took the picture featured in this post. It's a little hard to make it out, but there's a bull elk in the picture. It was one of three that walked right past me early on Monday morning. Those of you who follow me on Instagram might have also seen a video of those same elk earlier this week. 

Now that I'm home this weekend is going to be full of some late autumn chores like putting away my kids' outdoor toy box for the winter and cleaning up the last of leaf piles. There will also be time for fun. I hope that you have a fun weekend!

These were the week's most popular posts:
1. Where I'd Like to Go - A Geography Lesson With Google Drawings
2. An Overview of Five Fun Geography Games for Students
3. Felt - A New Way to Create Multimedia Maps
4. Is This the End of the Google Keep Chrome Extension?
5. A Google Earth Lesson With the "I'm Feeling Lucky" Button
6. Free, Customizable Clip Art
7. 30+ Activity Templates to Use in Google Classroom

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!

Workshops and eBooks

If you'd like to have me speak at your school or conference, please send me an email at richardbyrne (at) freetech4teachers.com or fill out the form on this page. Book me for this school year and I'll include copies of my eBook for all of the teachers in your school. 

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 43,000 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 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.

Five Digital Mapping Tools That Aren't Made by Google

Google Earth and Google's My Maps are great tools for students to use to create multimedia maps. But Google isn't the only game in town when it comes to digital map creation tools. In fact, there are some good ones that are freely available to you and your students outside of what Google offers. Here's a summary of five good ones that are worth trying. 

Scribble Maps is a tool that I've used and recommended for years. As the name implies, you can use it to draw on maps. You can also use it to create multimedia map markers. The best part is that you can use it without creating an account or enter any personal information. In this short video I provide an overview of how to create a multimedia map on Scribble Maps.

ArcGIS Story Maps is a free tool that you can use to create a variety of map-based stories. The basic ArcGIS Story Map lets you combine pictures and locations to playback as a series of slides. The learning curve is a bit steeper than the other tools in this list, but the finished product is quite slick. Here's a good example of an ArcGIS Story Map.

Padlet is one of the most versatile tools you can put in your digital toolbox. Creating multimedia maps is just one of the many things that you can do with Padlet. In the video that is embedded below I demonstrate creating a multimedia map by using Padlet's built-in maps. The video also covers how to share your Padlet maps, how to add collaborators to the map, and settings you need to know before inviting students to be collaborators on your Padlet maps. 

Felt is a new mapping tool that I recently started using. So far I think it's great! Felt offers a lot of easy-to-use tools for creating custom maps. Some of those tools include drawing and highlighting on maps, annotating maps with notes, adding custom placemarks, and overlaying datasets on your maps. Watch this video for an introduction to using the basic tools offered by Felt. 

StoryMap JS is a tool that I've been using and recommending for many years. StoryMap JS enables students to tell stories through a series of slides that appear on a map. Each slide is matched to locations that you choose on your map. Each slide in your story can include images, text, and hyperlinks. In this short video I demonstrate how to create a story map with StoryMap JS.

How to Create a Story Map

StoryMap JS is a tool that I've been using and recommending for many years. It's a free tool that students can use to create a story map in a manner similar to Google's My Maps or the old Google Tour Builder. The difference between those tools and StoryMap JS is that StoryMap JS is much easier for new users to master. 

StoryMap JS enables students to tell stories through a series of slides that appear on a map. Each slide is matched to locations that you choose on your map. Each slide in your story can include images, text, and hyperlinks.

In this short video I demonstrate how to create a story map with StoryMap JS.



Applications for Education
StoryMap JS is a great tool for students to use to map a series of events or a series of thematically connected places. In the video above I gave the example of mapping a series of roadside attractions. Some other ideas for story maps that you could have your students create include biographies, natural landmarks, notable buildings, and cultural centers.