If you’re an Instagram user who likes to find new ideas for using technology in your classroom, I have a new Instagram account for you to follow. It’s mine! I created a new account that is simply titled Practical Ed Tech. This will be where I share some short video tips like this one containing five exit ticket questions and this one about using the I’m Feeling Lucky feature in Google Earth. Why?
There are a few reasons for this change.
Practical Ed Tech Tips on Instagram published first on https://youreduio.tumblr.com/ via Tumblr Practical Ed Tech Tips on Instagram
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This Thursday at 4pm ET/ 1pm PT Rushton Hurley from Next Vista for Learning and I are hosting the second episode of the second season of Two Ed Tech Guys Take Questions and Share Cool Stuff! We’d love to have you join us! You can register for the session right here.
In every episode we answer questions from readers and viewers like you. We also share some cool and interesting things that we’ve found around the Web. Rushton tends to share cool videos and pictures while I tend to share cool tech tools. And we both try our best to give helpful answers to your questions about all things educational technology. Please join us! And feel free to email me in advance with your questions or send them in live during the webinar. Recordings and resources from our previous episodes are available on this Next Vista for Learning page. Free Webinar on Thursday - Two EdTech Guys Take Questions published first on https://youreduio.tumblr.com/ via Tumblr Free Webinar on Thursday - Two EdTech Guys Take Questions When the podcast Ear Hustle first launched in 2017, Nigel Poor and Earlonne Woods explored the largely invisible stories inside San Quentin State Prison. While the word “prison” might make one think of felonies, violence and hardened criminals, any listener could clearly hear that the heart of the podcast is about humanity, early life choices and confronting mistakes. For example, their first episode “Cellies” is about seeking a person to safely share one’s limited space. Other episodes cover topics like parents working through challenging conditions to be present in their children’s lives and nurturers who care for unusual pets in a high security facility. Podcast fans also got to hear incarcerated people reflect on what their lives were like growing up long before they ended up in San Quentin, including stories about their relationships with family and community members. Listeners, including teachers, heard this connection and reached out to Ear Hustle’s creators to share. “We got a lot of letters from teachers and their students talking about what they learned from the episode,” said Woods. He met Poor, a visual artist and educator, while serving a 31-years-to-life sentence at San Quentin. He served 21 years before having his sentence commuted by the governor in 2018. Educators were drawn to using Ear Hustle episodes as springboards for multimodal activities in their classrooms. And now there is “This is Ear Hustle: Unflinching Stories of Everyday Prison Life,” their new book about uncovering and amplifying stories about prison life and how they came together to co-host the first ever podcast produced within a prison. They also write about their experiences in school, how it shaped their lives and how it informs what they do today. “I was one of [those] kids that learned to read way later,” said Woods. “I was the class clown to avoid being in the situations of reading, being in the situations of math, so I would just act out.” Similarly, Poor writes about how she had dyslexia and undiagnosed learning disabilities that made school difficult even though she was naturally curious. “I’ve carried that with me. That idea of being told that I wasn’t smart, that I couldn’t do things, that I was bothersome because teachers had to explain things to me over and over again,” she said. With a podcast that is already rich with activities for young learners, “This is Ear Hustle” provides more accounts from incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people that students can explore in the classroom. How podcasts build writing skillsBenjamin Bush, a Kentucky-based high school English teacher, started using Ear Hustle in his class because he was looking for a new way to engage his students. “The biggest problem that I think that it addresses is apathy. Getting someone to just start working on something is the hardest,” said Bush. Ear Hustle drew in his learners because it allowed them to listen to voices other than his. They could hear from a wide range of people featured on the podcast and relate to their experiences. “We got to know the backgrounds of their lives and the things that they had struggled with through poverty and trauma, which affects a lot of our kids,” he said. After each episode, Bush’s students did a related writing assignment. “It allowed me to reimagine what a text is in a classroom and how multimedia exists in a classroom in the same way that a novel or a play would.” For example, “Cellies” examines the size of a typical prison cell (Woods’ was five feet by ten feet at San Quentin) and how to negotiate the space with a cellmate. “We all have roommates at some point in our lives,” writes Woods in his book. “We also wanted the subject to be something that everybody could relate to—whether they were in prison or in society.” In class, Bush and his students used rulers to measure out the size of a cell and did creative writing about what it would feel like to inhabit the limited space with another person. For another assignment, Bush brought in additional articles about solitary confinement, sentencing guidelines and parole rules for students to fuel their classroom conversations about prison systems. Later, students could choose to write a persuasive argument piece about one of the issues they talked about. After listening to “Catch a Kite,” an episode about receiving letters, students had the opportunity to write a letter to someone in the podcast. In one letter, a student talks about how he identifies with how his letter recipient needed to commit crimes to support his family. Another student wrote about how “Thick Glass,” Ear Hustle’s episode about parenting, helped her understand dynamics within her own family. “Her father had been in and out of prison,” Bush said. “She wrote in her letter that Ear Hustle allowed her to envision her father as a good father. She was able to see him as redeemable in a way that maybe she hadn’t before.”
Connection and a sense of not being alone in hard situations are key feelings that Woods hopes to leave with young people who listen to Ear Hustle’s stories. He also thinks these connections help young people become better learners. “You can benefit from someone’s story,” he said. “You can have a different insight on something that will help you navigate through your life.” Kinetic learning and listeningEar Hustle co-host Nigel Poor has brought the podcast into her photography classes at California State University, Sacramento, saying its focus on storytelling primes students to slow down and build important skills in observing. “I use it to talk about storytelling and compassionate listening and building empathy, which I think are tools anybody needs no matter what they’re studying.” For her class, Ear Hustle is the basis of a kinetic learning experience to help students pay attention to other invisible stories. She’ll tell students to go for a walk outside and find something discarded on the ground that draws their attention. Picking up abandoned bits and pieces is part of Poor’s art practice, and when she first started volunteering at San Quentin, she would collect things from the prison’s parking lot. In the book, she describes the lot as her “hunting ground.” In class, she’ll invite students to bring back their found object and share a story they’ve created about it. “It sounds weird at first, but it gets people to connect with their creativity and the associations that they make with objects and experiences. And that’s, to me, where stories start.” She’ll then move into playing clips from Ear Hustle and discussing what people hear in them and how she and Earlonne put episodes together. “There’s so much [emphasis] put on the end result,” said Poor about education. “Listening and thinking is actually a valid activity. So I like to talk about that, and I like to talk about ways to pull stories out of people and give people the confidence to talk about themselves.” Using hands-on learning to understand systemsDanielle Devencenzi, assistant principal at St. Ignatius College Prep high school in San Francisco, begins her criminal justice class by looking at major legislation that shaped the U.S. justice system such as California’s Three Strikes Sentencing Law, the 1994 Crime Bill and landmark US Supreme Court cases. “Twelve years ago, I started to take my students to San Quentin to really understand the social justice issues facing our prison system in California, specifically mass incarceration,” she said.
Hearing firsthand from incarcerated people and seeing the environment adds more depth to the books and articles they discuss as part of the class, according to Devencenzi. “I’m a firm believer that if you don’t really see what’s happening and really talk to the people who are impacted by our systems, then you can’t really be an informed agent of change.” Devencenzi gives each of her students a notebook that they’ll use to write down their reactions, observations and notes from conversations with the people they meet on their tour of the prison. In a debrief, after visiting the prison, Devencenzi has students circle up their desks to share one thing from their notebook while she takes notes that she’ll later send to San Quentin. “They always talk about the humanity of the guys and how brave they are to tell their story in front of a bunch of complete strangers,” she said. When Ear Hustle first came out, her class was able to see the recording studio and meet some of the people featured in the episodes during their visits to San Quentin. “The podcast just became humanized when they met Curtis,” said Devencenzi about connecting with Curtis Roberts, who shared his story in “Left Behind.” Like Woods, Roberts had his sentence commuted in 2018. “It was just a month later when Curtis actually came to my classroom and visited my students again after they had met him in the prison yard,” said Devencenzi.
As a culminating project, students in Devencenzi’s criminal justice class create a podcast based on in-depth interviews. Students explore their communities looking for trends and topics that – like their favorite episodes of Ear Hustle – require a little digging to uncover. Woods and Poor have dreams of creating an entire Ear Hustle curriculum that includes the expanded stories and deeper dives from “This is Ear Hustle.” At Woods’ request, Poor stands up to show that she’s wearing a black one-piece jumpsuit as part of her work for an episode about a 30-day Ear Hustle challenge. “We’re asking listeners to come on this journey with us where we are eating the food that’s eaten in prison during the same time and wearing three select outfits,” said Poor. “Not because we think we can replicate life in prison, but as a way to just build awareness and empathy about some of the things you give up when you go to prison.” They think the Ear Hustle challenge, which draws on themes surfaced in the “Prison 101” chapter from “This is Ear Hustle” and an episode from season two called “The Workaround,” would be a worthwhile activity for high school students. While stories from behind prison walls may seem to be an unlikely place to find education materials, Ear Hustle shows that there are several entry points into learning where storytelling is concerned. “There’s learning through reading. There’s learning through experiencing. People who don’t necessarily think they’re educators actually can be educators,” said Poor. “I would love for that to be a lesson of ‘This is Ear Hustle’: that voices really matter and that there’s surprising stories everywhere that are worthy of being heard.” Listening to learn: Why ‘Ear Hustle’ stories about prison life is so engaging to students published first on https://youreduio.tumblr.com/ via Tumblr Listening to learn: Why ‘Ear Hustle’ stories about prison life is so engaging to students
BookWidgets is a service for creating interactive online activities. It has been on my radar for a while and last week I finally gave it a try. I wish I had tried it sooner.
BookWidgets lets you create online interactive activities for your students to complete on any device. One of the best things about it is that it offers more than thirty question types that you can choose to insert into your activities. In other words, you can build in enough question variety and activity variety that students won’t get bored by just answering the same types of questions over and over. Unique Online Activities One of the first things I noticed when I started to create a BookWidgets activity is that there are some activity templates that I haven’t found in any similar platforms. A few that stand out include split whiteboards, split worksheets, and active plotting. The split whiteboards template lets you create an activity in which students read text on one side of the screen and use freehand drawing and writing on the other side of the screen to answer questions. I can envision a lot of mathematics teachers using that option. The active plotting template is another that math teachers will like. It lets you create a graphing activity that your students complete online. The neat thing about it is that you can watch their work in real time. The split worksheets template, like the split whiteboard template, shows students text on one side of the screen and questions on the other side. There are many other interesting templates and widgets that you can use in the creation of online activities for your students to complete via BookWidgets. There are templates for before and after comparisons, templates for adding interactive markers to images, and templates for showing a sequence of animation and video frames. My screenshot below shows you some of the many types of templates that you can use to create online activities in BookWidgets. The little camera icon next to a BookWidgets template title indicates that you can view your students’ progress in realtime. The little checkbox icon identifies templates that can be used to create activities that can be automatically scored for you. Getting Started Like any good educational technology service, BookWidgets provides a comprehensive set of tutorials for first-time users. But as I do whenever I try a new service, I skipped the tutorials and dove right into making an activity. I recommend doing the same as I think it’s the best way to discover how a tool will really work for you. When you first sign into your BookWidgets account you’ll be taken to your teacher dashboard. There you’ll see a home button on the left-hand side of the screen. That’s where you’ll also find a “My Widgets” box where you can then click to create your first widget (I’d call widgets “activities” if I was in charge of naming things). When you click “create a widget” you’ll then see a menu of more than thirty widget types including the aforementioned split whiteboard widget and split worksheet widget. Assigning Activities and Viewing Progress There are a few ways that you can distribute your BookWidget to students. The simplest way is to simply grab the unique link assigned to your widget and share it with your students wherever you normally share links. Another option is to import your Google Classroom roster and share your widgets as assignments in Google Classroom. It’s also possible to connect to Microsoft Teams, Moodle, Schoology, and Canvas. And if your students use tablets or phones in your classroom, you might want to use the QR code option to share activities with them. Students can complete BookWidget activities in the web browser on any device. When they’ve completed the activity they’ll simply tap or click the envelope icon in the upper-right corner of the screen to submit the assignment. Students don’t need to have email addresses in order to complete BookWidget activities. Once they’ve submitted a completed activity, you can view your students’ responses by simply clicking the “Grades & Reporting” option in your teacher dashboard then clicking “student work” where you can then view individual work and score it. You can also view a summary of submissions in the “Grades & Reporting” field. As I mentioned above, it is possible to see your students’ work in progress before they have submitted it for your review. To do that just connect your Google Classroom account and click on “Live” in your teacher dashboard to see which of your students are working on an activity and how much they’ve done. Options for Every Teacher I could probably write one thousand words just about the customization options available to teachers creating BookWidgets activities. Suffice it to say, there is something for everyone. You can format your text for left-to-right or right-to-left. You can choose from sixteen language options or add your own custom translation. Pages can be formatted in landscape or portrait mode. More than thirty question types and response types are available to add to BookWidgets activities. In this blog post I’ve only scratched the surface of what’s available. Some of the other notable features include the ability to record audio responses to questions, annotate images and drawings as responses, take and or upload image responses, and a slew of matching and ordering question formats. Math and science teachers will be pleased to learn that BookWidgets even has tools for authoring questions with equations and for creating responses with equations.
Watch my short video below to learn how to create your first BookWidgets activity and see how your students will use it.
And for even more examples of using split worksheets and split whiteboards take a look at this example called Kung Fu Grasshoppers and this one of an online maze. Disclosure: BookWidgets is an advertiser on FreeTech4Teachers.com. BookWidgets - Create Unique Online Activities for Your Students published first on https://youreduio.tumblr.com/ via Tumblr BookWidgets - Create Unique Online Activities for Your Students
Disclosure: Samsung is an advertiser on FreeTech4Teachers.com
As I shared last week, Samsung’s 12th annual Solve for Tomorrow contest is now open for submissions. The deadline to enter is November 8th. The process to register and enter takes less than ten minutes. In this short video I demonstrate how to fill out the initial application and how to access the scoring rubric so that you know what to include in your entry. The overall winners of Samsung’s Solve for Tomorrow contest will receive a prize package that includes $100,000 in classroom technology and materials for their school. National finalists will receive $50,000 in classroom technology prizes. And state finalists receive $6,500 in prizes for their schools. State finalists are selected from the initial entries like the one that I demonstrated creating in the video above. State finalists will be announced in early December. Enter here! How to Enter Samsung’s Solve for Tomorrow Contest published first on https://youreduio.tumblr.com/ via Tumblr How to Enter Samsung's Solve for Tomorrow Contest
On Saturday morning I published a video about word art, fonts, and special characters in Google Docs and Slides. Later in the day someone Tweeted at me to “make sure the fonts are accessible.” I replied with a section of my free Practical Ed Tech Handbook that is dedicated to accessibility. An excerpt of that section is included below.
Google Documents Google Documents has some built-in accessibility options that you should know how to enable. There are also some third-party Google Docs add-ons that can help you improve the accessibility of your documents. In Google Documents there is a built-in voice typing capability. To find the voice typing tool simply open the “Tools” drop-down menu then select “Voice typing.” A microphone icon will appear in the left margin of your document. Click it to activate your microphone then start speaking and your words will appear on the page. You will have to speak directions like “question mark” to add punctuation and “new line” to start writing on a new line. In the same “Tools” drop-down menu that contains the voice typing tool you will find the general accessibility settings menu. It is there that you can enable support for screen readers and screen magnifiers. On the topic of screen readers, when you insert an image into a Google Document you can right-click on it to bring up the option to add alt text. Alt text is text that you add to an image to describe what is in the image. Screen readers will read the alt text. Grackle is a Google Docs and Slides add-on that will check your documents and slides for accessibility compliance. When you run Grackle’s accessibility checker it will identify places where your slide doesn’t meet accessibility standards. It makes suggestions for improvement on the areas in which your document, slide, or sheet doesn’t meet accessibility standards. Some of the suggestions can be implemented with just a click from the Grackle Add-on menu while others are changes that you will have to make yourself. You can watch a demonstration of all of the Google Docs accessibility options mentioned above right here. Google Slides In Google Slides subtitles appear at the bottom of your screen when you are in full-screen presentation mode. You can enable subtitles by entering presentation mode then hovering your cursor over the lower-left corner of your slides to make the subtitles option appear. This short video provides a demonstration of how to enable subtitles in Google Slides. Alt text, short for alternative text, is text that you can add to images and videos to describe what they are and or what they contain. Adding alt text can make your slideshows accessible to people who use screen readers. The alt text describes what is in a picture, chart, or video that is included in a slide. PowerPoint, Keynote, and Google Slides all provide options for adding alt text to your presentations. To add alt text to images or videos in Google Slides simply right-click on the image or slide to which you need to add alt text. The menu that appears when you right-click on the image or video will include an alt text option where you can then write a title and description for the image or video. This video provides a demonstration of how to add alt text to Google Slides. This post originally appeared on FreeTech4Teachers.com. If you see it elsewhere, it has been used without permission. Sites that steal my (Richard Byrne’s) work include CloudComputin and WayBetterSite. Featured image captured by Richard Byrne. Accessibility in Google Docs and Slides published first on https://youreduio.tumblr.com/ via Tumblr Accessibility in Google Docs and Slides Teaching civics soft skills: How do civics education and social-emotional learning overlap?10/25/2021 Kara Cisco wants her students to deliberate. Each week in her 9th grade civics class in a suburb of Minneapolis, the educator guides students through differing ideas of American government. Whether it’s viewing a TikTok challenge through the ideas of Hobbs and Locke, or looking at natural rights theory and classical republicanism through the lens of Covid-19, she asks students to first understand, then argue for different—and often opposing—points of view. These exercises in “perspective-taking,” she said, take her lessons a step farther than history and knowledge-building about government. Empathy, tolerance and communicating across differences are in short supply in many communities, and young people need practice as they enter a deeply divided society. “We don’t necessarily have a lot of examples of two people with disparate opinions having a conversation where the goal isn’t to win,” Cisco said, “but to deliberate and understand.” Educators across the nation are getting focused on teaching the “soft skills” of civics education. As civics has made a comeback into classrooms after years of neglect, educators and experts say they are layering traditional civics content with skills more social and emotional in nature, like social awareness, identity development and relationship skills. Over the last few years, as political and social challenges roiled the nation—from a global pandemic to the murder of George Floyd to the January 6th insurrection—civics educators are saying both knowledge and empathy, action and communication skills are needed to be a twenty-first century citizen. Schools, they say, should be teaching both. To that end, perhaps the biggest comeback civics has made is that it now includes a heavy dose of Social-Emotional Learning, or SEL, alongside the Articles of Confederation or how a bill becomes law. Social-Emotional Learning, an umbrella term for the development of non-academic skills like managing emotions and developing healthy relationships, is already ubiquitous in schools. But its explicit connection to civics learning, and the outcomes it’s supposed to produce, like more engaged citizens, is newer. Decades of research has shown that high-quality SEL improves social and academic outcomes for students, and even sets the stage for healthy brain development. But a new framework out from CASEL, SEL’s largest research and advocacy organization, added a new long-term outcome: engaged citizenship. Identity development that leads to self-awareness, they wrote, is associated not only with positive mental health and self-esteem, but “productive citizenship later in life.” In turn, civics organizations have begun adding SEL to their core competencies. A few years ago, the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools added SEL as complementary to their “Six Proven Practices” that include civics and government courses, service learning and student-led school groups. Advocacy organizations like CivXNow, a non-partisan pro-civics group of 100 organizations, think it’s important as well. “Civics and SEL have a symbiotic relationship, and when we integrate them, we help nurture students as knowledgeable, caring and engaged citizens,” said Emma Humphries, CivxNow’s deputy director and chief education officer at iCivics. “At a time when Americans can’t agree on anything, this is incredibly important. There’s a sense that Americans, and, with it, our constitutional democracy, could really benefit from two things: more and deeper civic knowledge, and increased civility.” A crisis in civics educationOver the last fifty or sixty years, civics education has fallen out of favor in many schools. Educating for citizenship, once the core mission of public schools, was sidelined by competing objectives like educating for college and career, and focus on Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM). High-stakes testing and accountability measures, focusing on reading and math, forced important subjects like history and government to the sidelines. In the last round of 8th grade assessments on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) from 2018, only 15% scored proficient in history, and about 24% scored proficient in civics. Experts say sidelining history, civics and government contributed to America’s incredibly low level of knowledge about their civic rights, responsibilities and system of government, and might contribute to low voting rates as well. But while history and civic knowledge is crucial, many of today’s civic challenges, as seen through recent crises, are more complex. The social isolation and alienation, sharing of online misinformation, and hateful polarization that helped contribute to recent events can’t neatly be solved by content classes alone. Solving these issues, experts say, requires a more holistic approach. “Both enterprises are anchored in relationships,” said Robert J. Jagers, vice president of research at CASEL. History provides context to what happened in the past, while SEL helps students assess how they should behave in the future. A positive school culture with standards and codes of behavior, he said, is SEL that also naturally helps students prepare for living in a democracy. “SEL is civic socialization, it’s relational, helping you to understand yourself in connection with other people,” Jagers said. “Your own thoughts and emotions and behaviors, how to be reserved when it’s appropriate, when you do that in a group. You learn how to do that by extension as the groups get larger, and the contexts get different.” Civics skills where SEL plays a partAs the connection between civics and SEL becomes stronger, educators and programs are finding ways to highlight how SEL improves the civic skills needed to meet twenty-first century challenges. Media literacy is an important civic skill. Research shows that a majority of students can’t discern the truth of what they read or see online, and the “fake news” shared on social media has been a driver of polarization and civil unrest. Yet investigating the emotions behind how we share and what we believe on social media is a crucial part of media literacy that often doesn’t get addressed, said librarian and author Jennifer LaGarde. Social-emotional learning can help students identify the why behind what they share, she said, and understand the important role managing emotions plays. In the new book “Developing Digital Detectives: Essential Lessons for Discerning Fact from Fiction in the ‘Fake News’ Era,” LaGarde and co-author Darren Hudgins say that before fact checking an online claim, students need to do an “emotion check” first. “We know that one of the ways to get us to click and hit ‘share’ is to trigger an emotion,” LaGarde said. “Once that emotion is triggered, the flight or fight part of our brain is triggered, and then it doesn’t matter what we know about fact checking. The emotion has taken over.”
The inquiry-driven College, Career and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards, developed by the National Council for the Social Studies, weaves in relationship-building skills to get students communicating with each other as they are exploring history and civics concepts, and evaluating sources. Art Lewandowski, professor of teaching and learning at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio, teaches preservice teachers the C3 Framework as a philosophical framework to understand state history standards. He said the inquiry-based standards weave in aspects of SEL, including building relationship and communication skills, throughout to prepare students not just for taking a test. “It’s to prepare students for civic engagement,” he said, “and preparing students to collaborate with diverse peers to solve problems.” And then there’s the work of learning to talk about difficult topics with those who might disagree. Research has shown that classrooms where students discuss politically controversial topics, led by a well-prepared teacher, can increase the “civic knowledge, skills and dispositions that lead to adult civic engagement.” In times of extreme division and polarization—one where tensions run so deep nearly half of Americans think dissolution is a good idea—teaching how to “deliberate for understanding” can be a challenge. Social-emotional skills can help. Kara Cisco’s civics students have frequent conversations about controversial topics in her civics class, but that wouldn’t be possible, she said, without the careful, deliberate scaffolding of social-emotional skills along the way. Students are required to take different positions on the same topic, in order to get practice having empathy and understanding for another’s position. And she teaches them to use specific sentence frames to communicate understanding. Sometimes it’s as simple as saying “I disagree with Jasmine’s idea,” instead of “I disagree with Jasmine.” “The SEL standards become the civics standards,” Cisco said. “You’re not teaching two separate things, they weave together perfectly.” While educators continue to blend SEL and civics, researchers are still trying to figure out a way to measure SEL’s effectiveness in producing engaged citizens. Laura Hamilton, associate vice president of Research Centers at the Educational Testing Service, called figuring out how to assess civic dispositions a “work in progress.” “We know how to assess knowledge,” she said. “But when you start to look at dispositions, civic engagement in the community or voting, those are harder to measure, and harder to link to what is happening in K-12 schools.” She sees promise in computer-based assessments that engage students in an activity, like presenting students with a social problem and gauging how they would respond. In the meantime, Cisco is hoping that the perspective-taking exercises leave an impression, and go with her students into their futures as engaged citizens. “Whenever I’m asked to give my why for teaching,” she said, “my answer is: the future of our country. This is the make it or break it generation.” Teaching civics’ soft skills: How do civics education and social-emotional learning overlap? published first on https://youreduio.tumblr.com/ via Tumblr Teaching civics’ soft skills: How do civics education and social-emotional learning overlap?
Halloween is just seven days away. Ten days ago I shared my updated list of Halloween-themed activities and resources. In that list I included playing a Halloween safety review game from Kahoot. Keeping with the idea of Halloween safety, consider having students create a short video about trick o’ treat safety.
There are a lot of tools and ways that student could create a short video about trick o’ treating safety. They could make a quick one-take video in Flipgrid in which they share a Halloween safety tip. Another option is to use Adobe Spark to make a little audio slideshow about Halloween safety. And my favorite option would be to use Canva’s video editor to make a little animated video about Halloween safety.
A quick search for “Halloween” in Canva will provide you with templates for making Halloween-themed videos and lots of Halloween-themed animated GIFs and drawings. Here’s a demonstration of how to create an animated video by using Canva’s video editor.
A Video Project for the Week - Halloween Safety published first on https://youreduio.tumblr.com/ via Tumblr A Video Project for the Week - Halloween Safety
Good morning from Maine where it is still dark as I draft this blog post. In fact, it will be dark for at least another hour. The late sunrise is the only thing that I dislike about this time of year in Maine. Except for the big oak tree in my front yard, all of the leaves on the trees have changed color, the temperatures are a pleasant range of 50-60F, and there’s lots of fun to be had outside. We’ll be playing in the big leaf piles in our yard today. I hope that you do something fun today too.
As I do every week, I’ve assembled a list of the most popular posts of the week. Take a look and see if there’s something interesting that you missed earlier in the week. These were the week’s most popular posts:1. An Overview of Google Forms Quiz Settings 2. Samsung Solve for Tomorrow - A Great STEM Contest for Students! 3. Life on Minimum Wage - A Personal Economics Simulation Game 4. Ten Skills Students Can Learn from Google’s Applied Digital Skills Lessons 5. The United Nations Explained for Kids 6. Gary Paulsen Talks About Reading and Writing 7. I’m Feeling Lucky - A Google Earth Lesson Thank you for your support! Your registrations in Practical Ed Tech courses (listed below) help me keep Free Technology for Teachers going.
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Forms, Earth, and STEM - The Week in Review published first on https://youreduio.tumblr.com/ via Tumblr Forms, Earth, and STEM - The Week in Review
Earlier this week I received an email from a reader who wanted some advice to pass along to colleagues about using custom fonts in Google Docs. I made this short video to lend some assistance. Before you watch the video there are a few things to note about fonts in Google Docs and Slides.
Unfortunately, without using a third-party add-on there isn’t a way to upload fonts into Google Docs and Slides from outside of the Google Workspace ecosystem. That said, there are more than 400 fonts available in the fonts drop-down menu in Google Docs and Slides. Word Art in Google Slides lets you create text that automatically resizes when you click and drag on the corners around it. Word Art can also be customized with border and fill colors as well as border dashes and dots. Special characters in Google Docs and Slides are found in the “insert” drop-down menu. This is where you can find things like emoticons, musical symbols, accent marks, and lots of little icons. Watch this video to learn more about using Word Art, fonts, and special characters in Google Docs and Slides. Tips on Word Art, Fonts, and Special Characters in Google Docs and Slides published first on https://youreduio.tumblr.com/ via Tumblr Tips on Word Art, Fonts, and Special Characters in Google Docs and Slides |
About UsI'm a freelance journalist and creative writer who immensely enjoys writing and researching into any topic. I offer high quality content writing services. I've participated in a number of projects, and have experience writing for different platforms. |