Free Technology for Teachers

Sunday, December 4, 2022

A Free Smithsonian Webinar Tomorrow

Some of my high school history students often took a while to understand the idea that just because a document is an old primary source it doesn't automatically mean that source is infallible or even an accurate representation of events. They still needed to account for context and the potential for an author's bias among other factors that could impact the value of a primary source. Tomorrow at 4pm ET Smithsonian Education is hosting a free webinar for teachers who want to help their students become better at evaluating primary sources.

The webinar is titled Critical Questions to Build Primary Source Literacy. It will be streamed live on YouTube and recorded for those who cannot attend the live broadcast. The collection of primary sources to be featured during the webinar can be seen here.

On a related note, here's a collection of Smithsonian Learning Lab tutorials.

You may also be interested a National Archives resource called Understanding Perspectives in Primary Sources.

How to Find and Download Your Old Canva Projects

Last week a reader emailed me to ask for help with Canva. Specifically, he wanted to know where all of his videos had gone. He wasn't the first person to send me that question so I decided to make a short video to show three ways to find your old Canva projects and then download those projects. The video is embedded below.

Video - How to Find and Download Your Old Canva Projects

This is the 51st video in my playlist of Canva tutorials. Some of the most popular ones from that collection include How to Make a Video in Canva and How to Create and Publish Comics With Canva.

Two EdTech Guys Take Questions - The Grand Finale!

Since the start of the pandemic in 2020 Rushton Hurley and I have held a regular series of live Q&A sessions. This week we're wrapping it up with one last live session of Two Ed Tech Guys Take Questions & Share Cool Stuff. We'd love to have you join us as we answer your questions about all things education, technology, and life :) Register here!

The final live episode of Two Ed Tech Guys Take Questions & Share Cool Stuff will be held at 8pm ET/ 5pm PT on December 6th. Grab a cup of tea or a cup of hot cocoa and join us for a fun half hour of sharing and learning. We'll answer questions that are emailed to us in advance and we'll answer questions that are given to us during the live broadcast. Register here!

Is this really the end?

Kind of. It's the end of our live webinars, but we do plan to continue with a series of recorded events. Whether that series is in video or podcast format or both is still to be determined. But if you really can't get enough of our smiling faces, you can head to this page on Next Vista for Learning to watch recordings of all of the episodes we've ever hosted.

Saturday, December 3, 2022

Posters, Pictures, and Leftovers - The Week in Review

Good morning from Maine where yesterday it felt like winter and today it feels like spring. My family is supposed to go see the Christmas lights display at the Boothbay Botanical Gardens this evening, but the rain might dampen our plans. So we might end up spending the day making Christmas cookies. Either way, we're going to have a fun weekend and I hope that you do too.

This week marked the 15th anniversary of Free Technology for Teachers. On Monday I published some thoughts about what's happened in the world of edtech, blogging, and social media over those years. That post also included a list of the ten most popular posts of all time on this blog. You can read it all here.

On the same day that I marked the anniversary of this blog I also scheduled a workshop for an organization that reached out to me. If you'd like to have me run a workshop for your school, library, or organization in 2023 please get touch with me soon.

These were the week's most popular posts:
1. C-SPAN Offers a Free Electoral College Poster
2. More Than 70,000 Pieces of ClipArt and Pictures for Students
3. Three YouTube Features Every Teacher Should Know How to Use
4. How to Add Descriptions to Google Drive Folders
5. Two Good Ways to Create Simple and Focused Websites
6. A Thanksgiving Leftovers Search Lesson and Bookmarking Tip
7. In Memory of Ed Webster - Resources for Teaching and Learning About Mount Everest

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.

50 Canva Tutorials for Teachers

Other than Google Workspace tools, Canva is the tool that I've published the most tutorials about on my YouTube channel. In fact, with the publication of my latest Canva tutorial video I've now published 50 tutorials about using Canva's many features for making videos, presentations, timelines, posters, greeting cards, worksheets, and many other graphics. All of those videos are available in one playlist that you can find and bookmark right here on my YouTube channel.

You can view my updated Canva tutorials playlist right here. A handful of highlights from the playlist have been embedded below.