Podcast and Reflections on Beyond the Textbook

On Monday I was fortunate to participate in Discovery's Beyond the Textbook Forum. After the formal part of the day was complete some of us joined Steve Dembo and Dean Shareski for a podcast of reflections on the day. You can listen to the podcast and find a bunch of links about the day here. The list of participants on the podcast is Hall Davidson, Angela Maiers, David Warlick, Richard Byrne and Kyle Schutt. 

Google Maps for Educators - How to Get Started

This morning I ran a short workshop on Google Maps for educators. As I do for most workshops, I promised to post the how-to slides here. Here are the basic directions to get you started creating placemarks in Google Maps.



By the way, if you're interested in having me run a workshop or give a keynote at your school, please see my work with me page.

Best of the Web - Again

This week I'm at the Teacher 2 Teacher conference in Bow Island, Alberta. I'm giving my best of the web talk twice (once yesterday, once today). This continues to be my most-requested presentation. The slides for it are included below.

Poll Everywhere Introduces Voting on Images

Earlier this week the popular survey service Poll Everywhere released a very nice update, support for images and equations. Now you can put images into your polls and have students vote on the images. Another part of this update is the option to include mathematics equations in polls. The video below provides an overview of the updates.

Image Support for Multiple Choice Options from Poll Everwhere on Vimeo.


Applications for Education
The image voting option could be a good way to create surveys or polls in which you ask students to identify plants, animals, and other objects. The mathematics inclusion option will allow you to create multiple choice polls in which students have to select the correct equation.

InstaGrok - A New Way to Search and Pin Information

instaGrok is a very promising new search service that I learned about from Joyce Valenza during my time at Discovery's Beyond the Textbook forum. At first glance instaGrok appears to be a new version of Google's old Wonder Wheel service. But after investigation you'll see that instaGrok is more than just web of suggested search terms.

You can use instaGrok to search a topic and quickly get lists of facts on that topic, links to information on that topic, videos, images, and quizzes on the topic. If you want to refine or alter your search, just click on another term in the web of search terms. If the results that you are getting are too difficult to comprehend or are too basic, use the difficulty slider to change the results.

When you find materials that are useful for your research you can pin them or add them to your instaGrok journal. You can add notes to those links in your journal as well.

Applications for Education
instaGrok could be a fantastic tool for students who are struggling to refine a research topic. It also appears to be a great way for students to organize the useful information that they find while conducting their research.

Twtbase - A Directory of Twitter Apps

Earlier this week while searching a tool to make word clouds out of Twitter hashtags, I discovered Twtbase. I never did find the tool I was looking for, but I did find a lot of other neat Twitter applications on Twtbase. One of the Twitter applications on Twtbase that I like a lot is Trends Map.

Trends Map is an application that displays trending topics on Twitter according to location. In other words you can visit the map to see what topics are currently the most discussed topics in a city, state, province (yes, I'm in Canada this week so I thought I should list that option), or country. Embedded below is a Screencast of Trends Map that I found on Twtbase.


Applications for Education
If you're looking for way to reuse or analyze information from Twitter, take a look at Twtbase. Trends Map could be a good introduction to a lesson on current global events. Have students investigate why a particular topic is trending in one area but not in another.

Vifinition - Videos Defining Words

Vifinition is a fun site featuring videos that define words. The site matches YouTube videos to words. The videos aren't explanations of words so much as they are demonstrations of the words in context. For example the video for "bend" shows pictures of bent objects. That video is embedded below.


Applications for Education
Vifinition isn't a site that I would send students to on their own because the videos do come from YouTube and the site is crowd-sourced so your students could come across material that isn't suitable for the classroom. Instead, I would use Vifinition as a teacher to locate videos that I could share with my students during a vocabulary lesson.

Vifinition also gave me the idea for a vocabulary lesson in which you have students make videos that demonstrate definitions in context. If you don't the resources or classroom time for creating videos, you could have students search YouTube, Vimeo, Next Vista, and other video sites for videos that do demonstrate the meaning of their vocabulary terms.

3D Buildings and Tours of the Amazon in Google Maps

In the last two days while I was busy traveling and hiking in Alberta (hike pictures to come on Saturday) Google released two great updates to Google Maps.

On Tuesday Google released updates to the 3D buildings that can be viewed in Google Maps Streetview. Now you can see some famous landmarks, like the Eiffel Tower and the White House, as 3D models in Google Maps. I've embedded the 3D model of the White House below.


View Larger Map

Yesterday, Google released new Streetview imagery for the Amazon. Now you can go on a virtual Streetview tour of the Amazon. Some the imagery is absolutely stunning. A video introduction is included below.



Applications for Education
The new imagery and 3D buildings could be a fantastic way for your students to explore all kinds of famous and interesting places around the globe. Whenever I teach a place-based lesson I like to have my students create simple stories using My Places in Google Maps. I've found that compared to using a basic paper map by exploring the imagery and pinning placemarks in Google Maps, my students have a greater recall of where things are and why they are important.

If you have never created a map in Google Maps, I have posted directions to get you started here.

7 Good Resources for Art Teachers and Students

I was recently contacted by a reader who wanted to know what I had in my archives for art lessons and digital art galleries that students can access. While this isn't every visual art resource in my archive, these are seven of my personal favorites.

The Art Project powered by Google features interior tours of seventeen world famous art museums. Select a museum from the list on the homepage and you can virtually tour it using the same interface style you experience in Google Maps Streetview. Inside the museum just double click to zoom to a location. You can also open a floor plan overview and click on a room to navigate to that part of the museum. The best part of the Art Project powered by Google is the option to create your own artwork collection while visiting each museum. As you're touring a museum click on the "+" symbol on any work of art see it in greater detail, to add it to your collection, and to open background information about that work of art. To create a collection you must be signed into your Google account.

Smarthistory is a free online alternative to expensive art history textbooks. Smarthistory was developed by art history professors Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker. Smarthistory features more than just images of notable works of art. Videos lessons, VoiceThread lessons, and audio lessons about eras and themes in art history are what make Smarthistory a valuable resource. Students can browse all of the resources of Smarthistory by artist name, style of work, theme, or time period. Smarthistory is now partnered with Khan Academy to deliver lessons.

Picturing America is a project of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Library Association. Picturing America is an interactive gallery of artwork related to events, people, and themes in American history. You can browse the gallery chronologically or by theme. Click on any image in the gallery to learn about the artist and the artwork itself. Along with the background information for each image, Picturing America provides links to additional resources for learning about the artwork and artists.

The World Digital Library hosts nearly 5,000 primary documents and images from collections around the world. Sponsored by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the mission of the World Digital Library is to promote the study and understanding of cultures. The WDL can be searched by date, era, country, continent, topic, and type of resource. In my search of the WDL I noticed that roughly half of the resources are historical maps and images. The WDL aims to be accessible to as many people as possible by providing search tools and content descriptions in seven languages. The WDL can also be searched by clicking through the map on the homepage.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has a great collection of multimedia, interactive features about art and artists. In these features you can learn about styles of art, specific works, and the artists. There is a mix of videos and slideshows contained in the interactive archive. The archive contains features about Picasso and Pollock as well as artists whose works aren't quite as famous.

Art Babble is a video website designed and maintained by the Indianapolis Museum of Art. The purpose of Art Babble is to provide a place for people to learn about the creation of art, artists, and collections through quality video productions. Visitors to Art Babble will find videos related to many forms of and formats for art. Browse the video channels and you'll find videos covering a wide array of topics including abstract art, European Art and Design, African Art, graphic design, glass, sculpture, surrealism, and much more.

MOOM, the Museum of Online Museums, is a list of museums that offer online exhibitions. In some cases the museums include virtual tours and in other cases the museums online exhibits are simple photo galleries. Some of the notable museums featured in the Museum of Online Museums include the Smithsonian, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Tell Your Administrators, EdCamp Leadership Happens This Summer

On Sunday I published my video interview with one of the founders of the EdCamp Foundation, Dr. Kristen Swanson. Since then I learned from Kevin Jarrett about EdCamp Leadership.

EdCamp Leadership is an EdCamp for school administrators to connect and share their ideas about school leadership. The event is going to be held on July 26th at the Foundation for Educational Administration (FEA) Administration Conference and Training Center in Monroe Township, New Jersey. Like all EdCamp events, EdCamp Leadership is free and anyone can lead a session about a topic that is important to him or her. You can register for the event here. 

Pace Recorder Helps Students Pace Speeches

PaceRecorder is a simple Android app that records your voice and gives you instant feedback about the pace with which you are speaking. The feedback comes in the form of three simple symbols; a turtle, a rabbit, and a thumbs-up. If the turtle appears while you're speaking it indicates that you're relaxed or perhaps a bit too slow. The rabbit indicates excitement and perhaps that you're speaking a bit too quickly. And, of course, the thumbs-up means you're right on track.

Here is a demo of PaceRecorder.



Applications for Education
One of the nervous habits that most people have when they speak to a large audience is to speak too quickly. This is especially true for students who are giving presentations to a group for the first time. PaceRecorder is a free Android app that aims to help people better pace their speeches.

Typing Club for Google Chrome & A New Teacher Portal

Typing Club is a popular website offering free online touch typing lessons for students of all ages. Recently, through an email from one the Typing Club founders, I learned that Typing Club is available as a Google Chrome Web App. The Web App functions the same way as the website. As you type you are given instant real-time feedback about your accuracy and speed. Unlike other typing lessons that make you wait until an activity is completed to determine your accuracy or speed, Typing Club recalculates that information with each keystroke.

Applications for Education
Typing Club provides a free portal service for teachers to use to track their students' progress. In addition to use of the standard lessons, the portal service allows teachers to create customized lessons for their students.

This is Cool! Albert Einstein's Library Online

Through the Open Culture blog I just learned that more than 80,000 of Albert Einstein's documents and drawings are now available to view for free at Einstein Archives Online. The archives include not only his scientific work but also his images and documents from his travels and thoughts on the world in general.

Applications for Education
I haven't had much time to look at the Einstein Archives yet (I'm boarding a plane in two minutes), but I think that it has the potential to be a great resource for science, math, and history teachers who their students to research the development of Einstein's ideas over the course of his life. After I get more time to browse the archives, I'll update this post.

Google Earth Tour of James Cook's Exploration of Australia

Well-constructed Google Earth tours can be excellent multimedia alternatives to textbooks. One such example of this is a collection of Google Earth files about Captain James Cook's exploration of Australia and New Zealand. The files contain animations and audio explanations of Cook's explorations of the coastlines of Australia and New Zealand. I learned about these files from the Google Earth Blog. You can read more about the construction of these files on the Google Earth Blog.

Download Cook's Exploration of Australia (warning, it's a very large file).
Download Cook's Circumnavigation of New Zealand.
Download Cook's Circumnavigation of South Island, New Zealand.

Applications for Education
These files could provide helpful audio and visual aids for teachers of history and world geography.

Try the TinEye Browser Extension for Quick Image Searches

TinEye is a reverse image search engine. What that means is that instead of searching for images by keyword like you would on Yahoo Images you search for images by uploading an image or linking to an image. For example, if I have a picture of my dog and want to find more pictures of dogs like him, I simply upload a picture of my dog to TinEye and TinEye will search for images like mine.

TinEye offers browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, and Opera. With the extension installed you can simply right click on any image and select "search image on TinEye" to quickly conduct an image search.

Applications for Education
TinEye's browser extensions could be very helpful for students to quickly locate images to use in presentations. As I wrote a couple of years ago, TinEye itself could be useful for teaching students to be aware of their digital footprints. You could use TinEye to show them that an image they upload to a social network could get reused in multiple places.

101 Questions - A New Math Questions Site from Dan Meyer

Dan Meyer has just launched a new site called 101 Questions on which he is sharing images and videos as prompts for developing math questions. Each image and video has a 140 character field in which you can enter your question. Questions are compiled and can be Tweeted. Take a look at the top 10 to get a feel for what you will find on 101 Questions. I've embedded one of the videos from 101 Questions below.

Incredible Shrinking Dollar from Dan Meyer on Vimeo.

I won't pretend to be able to explain the larger purpose of the site as well as Dan does, so I'll just encourage you to go read his blog post about it. And if you need more background on who Dan Meyer is, watch his TED Talk Math Class Needs a Makeover.

How to Cite a Tweet (MLA Style)

This has been bouncing all over the web for weeks now, but I first saw it Tweeted by Joyce Valenza so I'm going to credit her. If you've ever wondered how to cite a Tweet in your written work, the MLA now has guidelines for how to do it. You can read the guidelines here.

Applications for Education
If you're writing a paper for your own course work and need to include opinions from other educators in that paper, ask on Twitter and you might all of the opinions you need and then some. Now, thanks to the MLA, there is a defined way to cite those Tweets.

Alpha Munchies - A Fun Typing Game

Last week I published a list of 7 Good Resources for Developing Typing Skills. Here's another good resource to add to that list. ABCya's Alpha Munchies is a fun typing game for elementary school students. The game requires students to type letters or words, depending upon the level, to guard their lunches against "Alpha Critters."

Applications for Education
I played Alpha Munchies for a little while and could see how students would get sucked into playing it for a long time. The longer they play it, the better they should get at typing quickly and accurately. If you're going to have students use the game in your classroom, I recommend having them use headphones or turn off the sound as the music might drive you nuts after a while.

Disclosure: ABCya is an advertiser on Free Technology for Teachers. 

Bundlenet - Bundle the Web and Send it to Friends

Bundlenut is a simple service for organizing a set of links and sharing them with others. To use the service just visit Bundlenut and start entering the links that you want to include in your bundle. You can include comments about each of the links. When you have added all of links that you want to include in your bundle, Bundlenut will assign a unique url to your bundle. Anyone with access to that url will be able to see all of your links and comments about those links.

You can use the service with or without registering. The advantage of registration is that you can go back and modify your bundle whenever you would like to.

Applications for Education
Bundlenut could be a useful service to use when you want students to read and evaluate a specific set of online resources like primary source documents. Students could also use the service when they are working on collaborative research assignments to share important and useful links with other group members.

5 Ways You Can Use Wikis

Today I had the privilege to participate in Discovery's Beyond the Textbook forum. One of my take-aways from the day's conversation is that most of the technologies that we want to use to make textbooks interactive and meaningful for students already exist, we just need to organize and utilize them in a way that makes sense for teachers and students. I've combined that take-away with a recent request from a reader to delineate some ways that teachers can use Wikispaces to create this list of ideas for using wikis in classrooms. Please feel free to add your suggestions, with links if possible, in the comments below (please note, I'll be on planes for the next 18 hours so there will be a delay between your comment submission and its appearance on the blog).

1. As a digital portfolio of student-created videos.

2. As a place for students to share notes on each unit of study in your courses.

3. As an alternative to textbooks. Work with colleagues in your school or department to create a multimedia reference site for your students. Include YouTube videos that use the "choose your own adventure" model to allow students to pursue areas of interest.

4. As an alternative to textbooks. Have students create reference pages for units of study in your course. When you do this students become responsible to each other for creating accurate and meaningful content that they can refer to when it comes time for assessment. For example, when I get to the 1920's in my US History curriculum I have each student create a page on a wiki about a theme from that decade. Some of the themes that the students cover are fashion, entertainment, and sports. I mentioned this briefly on a podcast that will be published soon by Steve Dembo and Dean Shareski.

5. As a place to track, document, and manage on-going community projects. In my district every student is required to complete a community service project before graduation. As a homeroom or "common block" advisor teachers are supposed to help their students take the necessary steps to document that work. By creating a homeroom wiki you create a place where students can make weekly updates about what they have done to complete their projects.

How are you using wikis in your classroom? Please leave a comment below. 

If you're not quite sure what a wiki is or what makes it different from a traditional website or blog, watch Wikis in Plain English from Common Craft.

Graph Words - An Instant Visual Thesaurus

Graph Words is a neat little site that provides webs of related words. If you're like me and you tend to use the word "awesome" a lot and want to mix it up, type "awesome" into Graph Words to see a web of alternative word choices. Click on any word in the web to generate a new web of more related words. Give it a try with this web based on the word "awful." Your webs can be downloaded as a PNG image.

Applications for Education
Using Graph Words could be a nice way for students who are stuck in a rut using the same words receptively to find new words to work into their writings and conversations.

Three Ways to Watch Videos & Discuss Them in Real-time Online

YouTube can be a good place to find educational videos to support your lessons. We've all had students who struggle to hold their comments until the video has stopped. One strategy that many teachers have used in those cases is to tell students to "write it down." The web makes it possible to take that strategy a step further and have students not only "write it down" but also enable teachers to instantly respond to students' comments while watching a video. Here are three tools that enable users to watch videos online and discuss them with others at the same time.

Synchtube is a free service for watching videos and chatting about them at the same time. Here's how it works; find the url of your favorite YouTube, Vimeo, or Blip.tv video, copy that url into Synchtube, and begin chatting with your friends while the video is playing. You can comment on the video and share thoughts inspired by the video while you're watching it.

Watch2gether is a neat site through which you can watch YouTube videos and host text chats about them at the same time. It is really quite easy to use Watch2gether. To get started enter a nickname for yourself (it could be your real first name) then search for a video or enter the url of a video that you have previously bookmarked. When you have found the video you want a chat column will be present on the right side of your browser. You can invite others to chat with you by sending them the url assigned to your chat. Together you can watch a video and discuss it.

Google+ Hangouts provide the option to watch YouTube videos with a small group. Now that Google+ is open to anyone over 13, this could be a good option for high school use.

Finding and Diving Into the Mariana Trench

The Mariana Trench is more than a mile deeper than Mount Everest is tall. Filmmaker James Cameron is planning to dive to the bottom and film it. National Geographic has released a couple of preview videos about the dive. The two videos, embedded below, provide a couple of quick lessons about the deepest valley on Earth.

Sounding the Bottom is a short explanation of how sonar is used to measure depths.



The Long Way Down offers a nice visual perspective of just how deep James Cameron will be diving.


H/T to The Adventure Blog. 

Three Tools Students Can Use To Collaboratively Organize Online Research

One of the challenges that I always give to students when they work on collaborative research projects is to "go deeper than you would if you were working alone." The idea that I try to convey to them that the purpose of working together is not to make the assignment easier it is to make it possible for them to discover more information than they would if they were working alone. If the students are researching a topic online, often a series of emails with links to useful materials gets bounced between them. To alleviate the inbox flood, here are three tools that students can use to collaboratively organize their online research.

Diigo is my number one choice for collaborative bookmarking. Students can create groups or you can create groups for them to which they contribute bookmarks. Bookmarks can be annotated with notes about what makes that bookmark useful for the project that the students are working on. My friend Mary Beth Hertz wrote a nice overview of Diigo a couple of years ago, you can read that post here. The video below provides an overview of Diigo's features. 

Diigo V5: Collect and Highlight, Then Remember! from diigobuzz on Vimeo.

Think Binder is a website that gives students a place to create online study groups. In each group students can share files, share links, chat, and draw on a collaborative whiteboard. Students can create and join multiple groups. As you will see in the video below, getting started with Think Binder takes just a minute.
Embedded below is my brief video overview of Think Binder.


Searcheeze is a relatively new and neat service for curating the web with your friends. Searcheeze is basically a social bookmarking service with an extra publishing feature added to it. Here's how it works. Searcheeze provides a bookmarklet for bookmarking the things you find online. When you click the bookmarklet it opens up a sidebar to which you can drag as much highlighted text as you like from the webpage you're viewing. From that sidebar you can specify which of your collections of bookmarks you want send your highlighted content and bookmarks to. Then back in your Searcheeze account you can arrange your content and publish it for others to see. If you want to curate content with other Searcheeze users you can do so by sharing a collection and working together to add to it.

The video below offers a short overview of Searcheeze.

Searcheeze - Search collaboration made easy! from Searcheeze on Vimeo.

Frozen Planet - 7 Resources Beyond Discovery

I just watched the premiere of Discovery's new series Frozen Planet. In fact, I watched it at Discovery's headquarters then came back to my hotel room and watched part of it on television again. As I was watching Discovery had a pop-up on the television screen directing me to Discovery.com/frozenplanet for behind the scenes information and more. I was hoping to find a lot of useful classroom materials at that site, but I didn't. There are two neat infographics and a nice set of reference pages about the animals in each episode, but beyond that there isn't much more than video clips. So I decided to write a round-up some of the resources about the Arctic and Antarctic regions that I've found over the years.

The NASA Explorer channel on YouTube has some good videos about the climates of the Arctic and Antarctic regions. I've embedded Arctic Sea Ice 101 below.


ARMAP is a comprehensive resource of interactive, online maps of Arctic research. ARMAP's resources include files for use in Google Earth as well as ArcGIS explorer. You can also access 2D maps directly on the ARMAP website. ARMAP provides map layers and placemarks about a wide range of topics related to Arctic research. Before opening the general ARMAP map, visit the map gallery for a primer on the type of resources that can found on ARMAP. You should also check out the links section of ARMAP to visit the sources of much of the ARMAP content.

The Extreme Ice Survey offers a Google Earth file that displays the results of the Extreme Ice Survey. In this Google Earth file users can view glaciers, historical data about glaciers, and some video clips about shrinking glaciers. The Extreme Ice Survey website has high quality photos and time lapse videos from the surveyors. Embedded below is one of the videos from the Extreme Ice Survey.

EIS PROMO from Extreme Ice Survey on Vimeo.

Snag Learning hosts a couple of films about Antarctica. Terra Antarctica documents a six week kayaking exploration of Antarctica. The expedition was funded by National Geographic to document the effects of global warming and ecotourism on Antarctica and the world at large. Click here to watch the film and read the viewing/ discussion questions.
Watch more free documentaries

Snag Learning also makes the National Geographic film Emperors of Ice available for free viewing online. In Emperors of Ice viewers will dive under the ice with the penguins, learn how the Emperor Penguins select a mate and raise young, and interact with other penguins. Viewers will see how the Emperor Penguin is uniquely equipped to survive in the harsh environment of Antarctica. Finally, Emperors of Ice, produced by National Geographic, documents the potential effects of climate change on the Emperor Penguins of Antarctica. Watch a preview of Emperors of Ice below. You can find discussion questions here.

Watch more free documentaries


Frozen Planet: Explore the Polar Regions comes to us from The Open University. Frozen Planet: Explore the Polar Regions features an interactive display through which you can view the history of polar exploration and the science of the polar regions. The interactive display is created through the use of the Google Earth browser plug-in and a timeline. You can click along the timeline to see and read placemarks on Google Earth. You can browse through and click on a list of important places in both polar regions. For further investigation and analysis of the polar regions you can activate a number of Google Earth layers within the Frozen Planet display. The display also includes videos about each region although the playlist for the Antarctic region is much longer than the playlist for the Arctic region.

Explore.org offers some very nice footage of Polar Bears in their natural habitats. I've included one of the videos below.

Polar Bears International has some lesson plans for teaching about climate change, ecotourism, and conservation. You will also find links to a slideshow on Polar Bears and nice PDF about Polar Bears that contains an educational game.

Paper Toys - Build Great Paper Models

One of the "skills" that I've never really acquired is folding paper to create anything other than poorly gliding airplanes. That could all change thanks to Paper Toys. Paper Toys is a website providing free, printable templates and directions for making paper models of all kinds of buildings, cars, hats, and landmarks. The directions are PDFs that you can download and print. The templates range from simple hats and dolls to complex structures like the White House, the Great Wall of China, and the Eiffel Tower.

Applications for Education
Building some of these Paper Toys models could be a fun hands-on conclusion to a lesson about the places where some of these landmarks are found.

H/T to iLearn Technology. 

Attend an EdCamp This Spring

This was originally going to be a post just about EdCamp Social Studies which is happening next Saturday in Philadelphia, but then I realized that there are a lot of EdCamps happening this spring. You might be wondering what an EdCamp is, the short explanation is that EdCamps are free, informal conferences organized by educators for educators. Anyone can attend and anyone can present. Earlier this month I recorded a short Skype conversation with one of the EdCamp Foundation's founders, Dr. Kristen Swanson. That video is embedded below.


Here's Kristen's TEDx Talk about EdCamp.


I'm currently planning to attend EdCamp Maine on March 31 and EdCamp Boston on April 28. To find an EdCamp in your area or to organize one of your own, visit the EdCamp Foundation wiki.

Screen Leap - Instant and Easy Screen Sharing

Screen Leap is a free screen sharing service that I recently learned about through a post by Vicki Davis. To share your screen using Screen Leap just visit the site, click "share your screen," enable the Java applet, and send the sharing code to the person you want to view your screen. The person receiving your invitation code will be able to see your screen when you have Screen Leap activated.

Applications for Education
Screen Leap could be a handy little tool for those times when it is easier to show someone how to do something than it is to tell them how to do it. I'm thinking it could be particularly useful when you're trying to walk someone through setting up an account on a new-to-them web service.

Here are some other screen sharing services you might want to try:
Quick Screen Share
Join.me
Big Marker

Week in Review - The Most Popular Posts

Good morning from Maine where I'm getting ready for two straight weeks of travel starting tomorrow with a trip to Discovery's headquarters for a forum titled Beyond the Textbook. Then I'm off to the Teacher2Teacher conference in Medicine Hat, Alberta, then to The American School in Lugano, Switzerland before coming home for EdCamp Maine. Thank you for reading, following, and sharing my blog posts. It's because of you that this blog continues to grow and provide me with these neat opportunities.

Here are this week's most popular posts:
1. TED Education - It's a Good Start
2. Numberphile - Videos About Curious Number Facts
3. Make Stop-Motion Movies With JellyCam 4.0
4. Mathnet on YouTube
5. Four Video Explanations of Daylight Saving Time
6. Create Study Materials from Evernote Notes
7. NCAA Geography Game


Please visit the official advertisers and marketing partners that help keep this blog going.
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The University of Maryland Baltimore County offers graduate programs for teachers. In April I will be holding another free public webinar through UMBC.
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Welcome iPad Insight - New Sponsor

Some of you may have noticed a new advertiser appeared on Free Technology for Teachers this week. iPad Insight provides reviews of iPad apps, iPad accessories, and iPad tutorials. As I don't always have enough time in my day to review web apps, Android apps, and iPad apps iPad Insight is a good partnership for Free Technology for Teachers.

Here's a recent video overview of Keynote for iPad produced by iPad Insight.

WeVideo Now Offers an Android App for Collaborative Video Creation

WeVideo is a collaborative, online video creation and editing tool that I've been quite excited about since last fall. In January they left beta and opened to the whole world. Their latest update was the launch of a free Android app.

The WeVideo Android app will allow you to capture images and videos then quickly add them to collaborative video projects in WeVideo. Before you upload your videos with the app you can trim them to save editing time when you're using WeVideo on the web. And just like when you use the web version of WeVideo, you can invite other WeVideo users to view your media and contribute to your projects.

While using the WeVideo online editor you can upload your own media clips or use stock media clips to produce your video. The video editor provides tools for trimming the length of display and or sound of each element you add to your video project. What makes WeVideo collaborative is that you can invite other people to create and edit with you.

Applications for Education
The WeVideo Android app could be a great application for students to use when working on video projects for your course. By using the app students working on group video projects can capture and share media for that project quickly and easily whenever they see something that can enhance their videos.

Create Hashtag Infographics with Visual.ly

Infographics are all over the web these days. Now Visual.ly makes it easy to make your own Infographics from Twitter hashtags. To create an infographic with Visual.ly just sign-in with your Twitter ID, enter a hashtag that you want to see visualized, and select an infographic template. I created a simple infographic using the hashtag #edchat.


Applications for Education
Right now Visual.ly has limited application beyond visualizing hashtags, but hopefully they'll add more functionality in the future. In the meantime, Visual.ly could be a good way to visualize trends in current events for a social studies classroom. If your school uses Twitter to broadcast messages, like Patrick Larkin's school does, Visual.ly could be useful too.

Embed Plus Offers Real-World Context for Vocabulary Words

Embed Plus is a free service for clipping and annotating YouTube videos. I wrote about the service and included a demo of it last winter. This morning I learned from Learn It In 5 that Embed Plus also provides a nice service for learning how to pronounce words and watch some examples of those words being used in a real-world context.

Embed Plus Dictionary allows you to search for a word, hear a pronunciation, and watch a video clip in which that word is used in a real-world context. The example that Embed Plus features is about the word "salmon." I've embedded their example below.


Applications for Education
Embed Plus Dictionary could be a good resource for students of high school age or older. The video clips that I saw would not be terribly engaging for younger students. If you're looking for clips that would be appropriate for K-8 students, I recommend visiting Wordia.

Copyright for Canadians

Next week I will be speaking at the Teacher 2 Teacher conference in Bow Island, Alberta. One of my presentations next week is about student video projects. An element of that session is remixing media. On that topic there are always questions regarding copyright. As I was reminded the last time I was in Canada, copyright laws in Canada are different from those in the U.S.

In a stroke of good luck for me, David Wees published Copyright for Canadian Educators earlier this week. His short presentation is a good overview of copyright concerns that educators should be aware of. David is looking for feedback on the presentation so if you have thoughts to add, please visit David Wees's Copyright for Canadian Educators.

Two Excellent SMARTBoard Blogs to Bookmark

I have to admit that I don't always understand the appeal of SMARTBoards (or any other interactive whiteboard). That is probably because I often see them being used as nothing more than expensive LCD projectors. Then sometimes I see IWBs being used in a manner that makes me stop and say, "hmmm, now that is neat." If your thoughts about interactive whiteboards are like mine, you might benefit from reading Why Teachers Love SMARTBoards. The document was created by James Hollis who runs Teachers Love SMARTBoards a blog and training service.


Another good blog about resources for interactive whiteboards is Danny Nicholson's The Whiteboard Blog. I've mentioned Danny's blog before because I often find good IWB-specific resources in his blog posts.

Zopler - Collaborative Storytelling

Zopler is an interesting free service for collaboratively writing stories. The basic idea behind Zopler is to enable the creation of community-crafted stories. Here's how it works; as a member of Zopler you can start a story with as little as one sentence or as much as 1000 words. Your story starter can include images too. Then you can make your story starter public or private. If you make it public, any Zopler member can add to it. If you make it private, only those people that you approve can add to your story. Contributions to stories can be voted up or down by other contributors to the same story.

The video below provides a short overview of Zopler.



Applications for Education
Zopler could be good way for students to collaborate on creative stories. You might have students write a collaborative story about a shared event like a field trip so that they can all get their version of events into one piece. One word of caution, if you use this with students make sure that the stories are marked as private so that random contributors don't post inappropriate comments on their stories.

NCAA Geography Game

This is an idea that I got from listening to the Dan Patrick Show today (I love radio on the Internet). Today on the show the host (wasn't Dan today) quizzed the producers on their knowledge of where some of the schools in the NCAA Men's Basketball tournament are located. Quick, where is Murray State? Where is Lehigh? As I listened to this I thought that it could be turned into a quick, fun classroom geography activity. Ask your students to find out where some of the lesser-known schools are located (city and state). Take it a step further and ask your students to research a few important facts about that school. If you need a list of all of the school participating in this year's tournament, Team Rankings has a free printable bracket (PDF). After the classroom activity is completed you can show students this Google Map of all of the schools.


View 2012 College Basketball Tournament in a larger map

Here's an NCAA math activity that I proposed last year.

Here's a TED Talk from the greatest men's college basketball coach ever, John Wooden. (Apologies to fans of Dean Smith, Bobby Knight, Mike Krzyzewski, and Jim Calhoun).

AudioViator - Free Audio Tours of Cities and Landmarks

AudioViator is an excellent collection of audio tours of cities and landmarks all over the globe. All of the tours that I previewed are Creative Commons licensed and available to download for free. You can search for audio tours by keyword or use the map to browse for free audio tours. I used the map to find audio tours of Boston's Freedom Trail and Mount Rushmore.

Applications for Education
If you're taking your students on a field trip, take a look at AudioViator to find an audio tour that your students can use while on that field trip or in preparation for it. You could also use the audio tour files as part of a Google Earth tour. For example, you could take the Mount Rushmore audio file then have students create a visual tour in Google Earth to match the audio tour.

Google Earth Gallery Now Available on iPads & Android Tablets

Yesterday the Google announced some nice updates to the Google Earth app for iOS and Android. For schools using iPads or Android tablets in their classrooms, the most significant update is access to the Google Earth Gallery. Along with access to the Google Earth Gallery came support for viewing KML files on your iPad or Android device. Now you can browse the gallery of public KML files and open them on your favorite iOS or Android device.

Android users will now be able to capture a screenshot of the Google Earth map you're viewing and share it via Google+, Gmail, and other social networks.

Applications for Education
As mentioned above, for schools using such devices, being able to browse and open KML files on iPads and Android tablets is a great enhancement to the Google Earth mobile app. The screenshot option on Android devices could also be a great feature for teachers who want to share a specific view with all of their students.

H/T to the Google Earth Blog. 

All of My Blogging Advice in One Place

Earlier this morning on Twitter William Blackledge asked me for some advice about starting a blog. It's hard to make all my advice fit into 140 characters so I compiled this list of blog posts about blogging that I've written in the past. Hence the title All of My Blogging Advice in One Place.

What I've Learned from 5,000 Blog Posts
11 Things You Should Know About Blogging
So You Want to Reuse a Blog Post?
So Your Content Got Stolen, Now What?
How Do You Keep Up With All of This?
About Accepting Advertising as an Ed Tech Blogger (or as a blogger in general)

From Sue Waters, What You Want to Know About Blogging

SideVibe Eliminates Premium Plans

Last fall I wrote about SideVibe, a service designed to help you build lesson plans around web content. At the time that I wrote my review, SideVibe was offering a "premium" version for $5.99/ month that allowed teachers and students to converse about the content in closed feedback loops. Last week I received an email informing me that SideVibe is no longer charging for that service.

Embedded below is an overview of SideVibe.


Applications for Education
SideVibe could be a helpful tool when teaching students to evaluate the validity of information found on websites. By using SideVibe you could take a fake website like DHMO.org and build an evaluation lesson around it.