Clipart, Maps, and Food - The Week in Review

Good morning from Maine where it feels like winter is here to stay. A couple of the local ski mountains are open, a thin coat of ice appears on a lot of the ponds around my house, and I have to wear a lot more layers to ride my bike outside. Like many of you, I've had the last few days off to relax and spend with family. That will continue this weekend as we head outside for a hike and to find our Christmas tree. I hope that you have an equally enjoyable weekend. 

If you're interested in supporting my work here on FreeTech4Teachers.com and PracticalEdTech.com my eBook, 50 Tech Tuesday Tips is 20% off for the rest of the month when you use this link.

These were the week's most popular posts:
1. Two Good Ways to Create Simple and Focused Websites
2. More Than 70,000 Pieces of ClipArt and Pictures for Students
3. How to Add Descriptions to Google Drive Folders
4. Watch Out for This Email Scam Pretending to Be From YouTube Support
5. Maps and Videos About Where Thanksgiving Foods Come From
6. Two Cool Mapping Tools in the Felt Mapping Platform
7. A Thanksgiving Leftovers Search Lesson and Bookmarking Tip

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.

Clipart & Drawings for Classroom Projects

Earlier this week I shared ClipArt ETC and Clippix ETC as good resources for locating free clipart and pictures to use in classroom projects. That was the third post this fall that I've published to feature a good place for teachers and students to find free drawings. To summarize all three of those posts I recorded a short video about all three of them. 

In this new video I demonstrate how to use the following places to find free clipart and drawings for classroom projects:

• CocoMaterial
• Openverse
• ClipArt ETC

Applications for Education
ClipArt ETC and CocoMaterial only host clipart and drawings. Openverse also hosts images so it's important to teach students how to use the filters on Openverse if they want to find drawings. It's also best to limit Openverse to high school age or older.

Check the license terms before using any of the images from ClipArt ETC or Openverse. ClipArt ETC is strictly for classroom use. Openverse has a mix of license terms ranging from public domain to strict citation requirements.

An Encyclopedia of Comic Artists

Peanuts drawn by Charles Schulz, Calvin and Hobbes drawn by Bill Watterson, and The Family Circus drawn by Bil Keane were the comics that I was drawn to as a kid. By the time I became a high school teacher my students didn't recognize any of those comics and I didn't know the ones that they were reading. In short, my knowledge of comics and their artists was limited to what appeared in the Sunday newspaper when I was a kid. Does that sound like you? If so, you may also be interested in looking at Lambiek's Comiclopedia. 

Lambiek's Comiclopedia is an online cyclopedia of more than 14,000 comic artists. You can search the Comiclopedia by name, you can browse through it in alphabetical order, or simply click through the random artists featured on the homepage on the day that you visit it. Every listing includes a biography of the artist, some background on their comics, and some examples of their work. 

Applications for Education
Comiclopedia could be a good resource for people who want to get to know a little bit about the comics that their students are reading. And it just might inspire you try making comics in your classroom. If that turns out to be the case, you'll want to check out MOMA's four part series about creating comics.

H/T to Open Culture.

A Thanksgiving Leftovers Search Lesson and Bookmarking Tip

One of my favorite things about Thanksgiving is eating the leftovers the next day. I enjoy a good turkey sandwich almost as much as Ross, but I do like to mix it up a bit and try other ways to use leftovers. In fact, I was doing that earlier this week (yes, I was planning for Thanksgiving leftovers) when I got super annoyed by all of the pop-up and scrolling ads on various recipe websites. That's when I implemented one of my favorite search tips, searching by file type. 

To the end of my search term "turkey shepherd's pie" I added filetype:pdf. I did that in order to only find links to PDFs containing recipes for turkey shepherd's pie. There aren't annoying pop-ups and scrolling ads on PDFs to get in the way of reading a recipe. 

The other trick that I often use when looking for recipes online is to use the OneNote web clipper to save articles instead of just bookmarking the links. The web clipper will let you view the article without having to actually go back to the original web page. 

Both of these tips for finding and reading Thanksgiving leftovers recipes can be employed whenever you're searching online. I used the file type search method earlier this fall to help someone identify a piece of old archery equipment and I used it just a week ago to find a copy of the owner's manual for the portable generator in my garage. 

Watch this short video for a demonstration of searching by file type and a demonstration of the OneNote web clipper. 

Searching by file type is one of just many search strategies that students need to know. That strategy and many more are taught in my online course, Search Strategies Students Need to Know. The course is on sale this week for 33% off when you use the code THANKSGIVING22 during registration. Register here and take the course at your own pace. 

This Time With Four Part Harmony and Feeling...

It's Thanksgiving Day here in the U.S. And although the pandemic ended my annual tradition of watching the road race in my hometown my tradition of posting and listening to Alice's Restaurant continues. If you'd like to join me in this tradition, here's Arlo Guthrie performing Alice's Restaurant. 

Happy listening! Happy Thanksgiving!

(Did you notice that this was posted exactly at noon?)

Fun fact! If you search for the song on Wolfram Alpha you will find a chart of Wikipedia traffic for the search term "Alice's Restaurant." So the question/ cultural history lesson for students is "why do people search for that term around Thanksgiving?"