Best of 2022 - Overlooked Google Docs Features

As I do at this time every year, I'm taking the week off to ski and play with my kids, shovel snow, and generally not think about work. I have some of the most popular posts of the year scheduled to republish this week. New posts will resume in the new year.

As Google Docs has improved and added more features over the years some of those features get forgotten or just plain overlooked. Just because those features don't jump out, doesn't mean they're not helpful to students and teachers. In this new video I highlight ten of my favorite "overlooked" Google Docs features for students and teachers. 

Tables.

• These are great for organizing group notes.

Special Characters.

• These provide an easy way to add accent marks, math symbols, arrows, and emojis to documents.

Checklists.

• This relatively new feature is great for group project management.

Task lists.

• These are different from checklists and are accessible regardless of which Google Doc you're currently viewing in your account.

Changing Default Text.

• Tired of the standard 11 point Arial font? Change the default font to anything you like.

Table of Contents.

• This is a great way to link and jump to sections of long documents. The table of contents works even if you export the document to PDF.

Substitutions.

• Change the default substitution settings so your name is never misspelled again. Or change the settings to disable some of the automatic features in Google Docs.

Dictionary

• Teach kids where this is so they can find definitions and synonyms without leaving Google Docs.

Camera

• Students can use the built-in camera option to add pictures of handwritten work to their Google Docs.

Watermarks

• Mark a document as confidential or draft.

Are you a tech coach or media specialist looking for some new ideas to share with your colleagues? If so, 50 Tech Tuesday Tips is an eBook you need. You can get it right here.

Best of 2022 - Five Good Resources for Learning About Airplanes and Airlines

As I do at this time every year, I'm taking the week off to ski and play with my kids, shovel snow, and generally not think about work. I have some of the most popular posts of the year scheduled to republish this week. New posts will resume in the new year.

We're planning a little trip this fall to visit some family that we haven't seen since before the start of the pandemic. When we told our daughters that we're going to fly they got very excited about it. We've now been answering questions about flying seemingly nonstop for a few days. Those conversations prompted me to compile this list of resources for teaching and learning about the science of flight. 

Turbulence: One of the Great Unsolved Mysteries of Physics is a TED-Ed lesson that explains what turbulence is and the forces that create it. The lesson explains that even though we typically associate turbulence with flying in airplanes, turbulence exists in many other places including oceans.

The Wright Brothers - The Invention of the Aerial Age offers timelines for teaching about the developments made by the Wright Brothers. Dig into the Interactive Experiments section of the timeline and you'll find Engineering the Wright Way. Engineering the Wright Way offers interactive simulations in which students learn about wing design by joining the Wright Brothers for test flights in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

How Things Fly hosted by the Smithsonian features an interactive module in which students design their own airplanes. The activity starts with a simple and slow airplane that students have to modify until it reaches a target speed and altitude. As students modify the wings, fuselage, and engines of their airplanes they are given instant feedback on the effects of those modifications. In some cases the feedback includes the airplane crashing and the students having to start over again.

TED-Ed offers a lesson about breaking the sound barrier. The lesson is called The Sonic Boom Problem and it explains how a sonic boom is created and how math is used to predict the path of a sonic boom in the atmosphere. 

Here's some archival footage of Yeager's flight in the Bell X-1.

If you have ever wondered why airlines sell more tickets than they have seats on an airplane, the TED-Ed lesson Why Do Airlines Sell Too Many Tickets? is for you. In Why Do Airlines Sell Too Many Tickets? you can learn about the mathematics that airlines use to maximize the revenue that they can generate from each flight. That math includes calculating the probability that everyone who holds a ticket for a flight will actually show up for the flight. The way that probability is calculated is explained in the video. Finally, the lesson asks students to consider the ethics of overbooking flights. Watch the video below or go here to see the entire lesson.

Best of 2022 - Free and Customizable Clip Art

As I do at this time every year, I'm taking the week off to ski and play with my kids, shovel snow, and generally not think about work. I have some of the most popular posts of the year scheduled to republish this week. New posts will resume in the new year.

CoCoMaterial is an online library of almost 2,500 drawings that you can download and re-use for free. I've been using it for about a month and I really like the style of the artwork found on CoCoMaterial. It has been a hit with the folks participating in my Animated Explanations course this month. This week one of those people, Sarah G, pointed out that the drawings in CoCoMaterial can be customized before you download them. I'm not sure if this is a new development or just something that I've been overlooking. Either way, it's awesome!

In this brief video I demonstrate how you can use CoCoMaterial to find, customize, and download free clip art to use in your multimedia projects. 

Applications for Education
The drawings that are available on CocoMaterial are clean, simple, and easy to see. They could be great for use in classroom projects like simple web design, infographic design, or to just brighten-up the newsletters that you send home to parents.

Best of 2022 - My Favorite Chrome Extensions

As I do at this time every year, I'm taking the week off to ski and play with my kids, shovel snow, and generally not think about work. I have some of the most popular posts of the year scheduled to republish this week. New posts will resume in the new year.

After seeing my browser in one of my tutorial videos or one of my presentations, people often ask me about the extensions that I have installed. Here are five Chrome extensions that teachers should try.

1. Nimbus screenshot - I use this to create annotated screenshots. It can also be used to make screencast videos, but I only use it for that when I'm working on a Chromebook because I prefer to use Screencast-o-matic for my desktop screencast videos.

2. Screencastify - Screencastify is great for creating screencast videos. The feature that keeps it in my web browser though is the option to add must-answer questions into your screencasts. 

3. Mote - I like using Mote to add voice comments to Google Docs and Slides. Here's a demo of how it works. 

4. Google Keep - This has been my preferred bookmarking and note-taking tool for many years.

5. OneNote Web Clipper - I use OneNote's web clipper whenever I want to save a clean, clutter-free copy of a webpage.

Best of 2022 - The Science of Winter Olympic Sports

As I do at this time every year, I'm taking the week off to ski and play with my kids, shovel snow, and generally not think about work. I have some of the most popular posts of the year scheduled to republish this week. New posts will resume in the new year.

The 2022 Winter Olympics are scheduled to start in a little less than one month from now. I'm looking forward to sitting on my couch and drinking some hot chocolate while watching the world's best in alpine and Nordic skiing. I also enjoy watching curling even though I don't always understand all of the rules of that game. There's a whole lot of science behind all of the Winter Olympics events that we see on our screens. If you have students who are interested in the events, capitalize on that interest and share these Olympics-based science lessons with them. 

The National Science Foundation offers a YouTube playlist of sixteen videos on the science of Winter Olympics events. These short videos teach lessons on the physics and engineering behind the events we see on television. The videos are a decade old, but the science concepts covered are just as relevant to these Olympic games as they were to previous Winter Olympics.

 

It's hard to host skiing and snowboarding events without a lot of snow. That's why a lot of the snow we'll see on television during the Winter Olympics is human-made snow. How to Make Snow (If You're Not Elsa) is a short video produced by SciShow that explains how snow is made at ski resorts by using cooled water and compressed air.


 

In the United States NBC owns the rights to nearly all Olympics-related footage and logos which is why it's a little disappointing that they don't offer more student-focused resources than this PDF guide to the Winter Olympics and some YouTube videos that aren't well organized beyond this playlist. I went through the NBC News Learn channel and highlighted a few favorites and included them below.  

Science of the Winter Olympics: Building Faster & Safer Bobsleds



Science of the Winter Olympics: Banking On Bobsled Speed



Sliding Down At 90 MPH: The Science Behind The Fastest Sport On Ice



Science of the Winter Olympics: The Science Friction of Curling



Science of the Winter Olympics: Figuring Out Figure Skating



Science of the Winter Olympics: The Science of Snowboarding