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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

Inversion Invasion - iPad App to Teach Students About Chords

Inversion Invasion is an iPad app that teaches students about keyboard chords in an arcade-style game. To "defend" various scenes like city centers students have to play the correct notes and chords while "aliens" "invade." The app comes from Jambots who produces other music education apps like Lo-Fi Folk Arranger and Pedal to the Steel.

The video below provides a demonstration of Inversion Invasion.


Applications for Education
Music educators looking for an engaging way for students to practice chords when they don't have access to pianos or keyboards, Inversion Invasion could be a helpful app.

Schedule Project Due Dates in Wikispaces

If you assign wiki editing due dates to your students' wiki projects, Wikispaces has just launched a new feature just for you. Events is a Wikispaces feature that allows you to schedule due dates for Wikispaces Projects. When you schedule a Wikispaces Event you can specify a lock time for your project. Once that lock time is reached no one is able to make any further edits to that page. Watch the short video below to learn more about Wikispaces Events.



Applications for Education
Wikispaces Events doesn't change the way that students use Wikispaces, but it does make it easier for you to manage your students' work in Wikispaces.

Hackpad - A Simple Wiki Platform

Hackpad is a new, simple wiki service that I learned about from one of Jackie Gerstein's Tweets earlier this week. People who have used services like TitanPad or PrimaryPad will notice a lot of similarities in the user interface between those services and Hackpad.

At the simplest level Hackpad can be used for collaborative note-taking and writing outlines. Beyond that Hackpad allows you to include video and images by simply copying and pasting links into the document that you're working on. If you have Dropbox files that you want to link to, you can do that on Hackpad too. The layout options on Hackpad are very limited, but you can create a table of contents with links in the margins of your Hackpad page. To organize all of the Hackpads that you participate in, you can create a Hackpad collection in your account.

There are two sharing options for your Hackpad pages. You can make the pages public and open to everyone with the link or the pages can be private and viewable only to the people you invite. Joining Hackpad can be accomplished by using your Google account, your Facebook account, or by creating a Hackpad-specific account.

Applications for Education
Hackpad's tag line is "the best wiki ever." I'm not sure that it's the best wiki ever, I'm still partial to Wikispaces, but Hackpad is quite nice. If you're looking for a clean, simple platform for your students to use to create outlines together, share notes, or build reference pages, Hackpad is definitely worth giving a good look.

Get Ready for the 2012 WordGirl Definition Competition

On May 1, 2012 Scholastic is hosting a live WordGirl Definition Competition. During the live webcast classrooms can play along by submitting their responses to the questions. Some participating classrooms will be called in to participate live over the web. The competition will feature three rounds of questions about word usage and definitions. You can register for the event and get a pre-competition preparation kit here.

The Science of Gardening - Interactives and Videos

The Science of Gardening is a superb collection of interactive graphics and videos about gardening that I learned about from Mark Dunk on Twitter. Produced by Exploratorium, Science of Gardening has three basic categories; Feed, Control, and Bloom. In each category there are multiple videos and interactive graphics for students to explore.

In the Feed category students learn about dirt, compost, and seeds. The "garden variety" interactive reveals to student the origins of some common plants like corn, squash, onions, and carrots. Students can also take a video tour of a garden and learn what it takes to create good soil.

In the Control category of Science of Gardening students learn about like hybridizing plants, biodiversity, growing plants in a greenhouse, and take a look at a giant pumpkin competition.

Finally, in the Bloom category students explore pollination, the attraction of flowers, and see that a garden can grow just about anywhere when it is cared properly cared for.

Applications for Education
As spring approaches in the Northern Hemisphere (just a week away now) I'm sure many of us will be thinking about the blooming plants around us. Some of us may even have students planting gardens at home or at school (the alternative ed school in my district does that). The Science of Gardening could be a good resource to build a science lesson around that students can relate to outside of the classroom.

Create Multimedia Reference Stories with Qwiki Creator

Last week in North Carolina I gave my popular Best of the Web presentation. In that presentation I included the multimedia reference site Qwiki. In case you haven't seen it before, Qwiki publishes narrated, illustrated, interactive reference entries. To use Qwiki, enter a topic in the search box or select a topic from the featured topics on the homepage. Then watch, listen, and read the Qwiki entry for that topic. Below your chosen Qwiki you will see a selection of related Qwiki entries. You can also find related materials by clicking the "Q" symbol that appears at the end of the Qwiki play bar.

Yesterday, through Steve Dembo I learned that Qwiki is now offering Qwiki Creator. Qwiki Creator (still only available by invitation) will allow users to create their own multimedia reference stories. Using Qwiki Creator you will be able to develop your story using videos, images, maps, and text. To lend your personality to the presentation, you can narrate the story. And like the already existing Qwiki entries, you will be able to make the story interactive. Qwiki Creator is also promising to be optimized for iPads.

A sample Qwiki is embedded below.

View Gaza Strip and over 3,000,000 other topics on Qwiki.

Applications for Education
Qwiki Creator has the potential to be a great way for students to organize and share information that they create on their own or information that they discover through research. I would love to see Qwiki Creator used as an alternative to the traditional book report assignment. Students could narrate a summary of the book and also add visuals that they think illustrate key points or characters in the stories that they read.

Interactive Visualization of the Scale of the Universe

I just received an email from a reader, Mary Murphy, who shared with me a fantastic interactive visualization of the scale of the universe. The Scale of the Universe 2 features a huge selection of objects in the universe that are arranged according to size and scale. You can zoom-in on the image to objects as small as neutrinos and quarks or as large as planets, constellations, and galaxies. When you click on an object in The Scale of the Universe 2 a small window of information about that object pops up.

Applications for Education
Trying to wrap their minds around the true size and scale of the universe can be a challenge for some students (I know it was for me). The Scale of the Universe 2 could be a great way for students to explore the size of the universe by comparing objects they're familiar with to objects that they've only read about.

Use GeoGebra on the Web

This morning through Jeff Thomas and Guillermo Batista I learned that the popular and free program GeoGebra is now available as a web-based application using HTML5. This means that if your students are using Chromebooks, tablets, or just aren't allowed to download software they can still use GeoGebra. In reading the announcement from GeoGebra it appears that not all GeoGebra functions are available in the web version yet. Here's a sample animation of GeoGebra in HTML5.

Applications for Education
If you have been waiting for a web-based alternative to GeoGebra for your students, the wait appears to be over. Now your students don't have to install any software on their computers to use GeoGebra at home or on the go with their tablets.

Search Stories Makes Documenting Research Fun

The keynote speaker for NCTIES was my friend Ken Shelton. I've known Ken for a few years now and one thing that I know for sure about Ken is that he knows how to design a presentation (more on that in another post). In his keynote, Ken shared a great idea for getting students enjoy documenting the research process instead of groaning about having to document it. Ken's suggestion is to have students create Google Search Story videos.

The Google Search Stories Video Creator allows you to create a short video about the searches that you perform on Google. To create your video you enter your search terms, select some background music, and let the creator render a video for you. Ken showed a video of a search for North Carolina barbecue restaurants. Below is a search story about an Internet-famous wedding dance.



Applications for Education
As mentioned above, having students create short search story videos could be a good way to get them interested in documenting at least a part of the research process.