by Free Technology for Teachers | Oct 19, 2018 | Academic Technology
Creating a storyboard is an excellent way for students to plan video projects. Storyboards provide a frame-by-frame outline of the plot of a video. Even if your students are going to use tools like Adobe Spark or Powtoon that have frame-by-frame video editing, it is...
by Free Technology for Teachers | Oct 19, 2018 | Academic Technology
This morning I answered an email from a reader who had a question about ytCropper. The link ytCropper link for her cropped video wasn’t working in Google Slides. My solution was to not use ytCropper and instead just use the built-in formatting tools in Google...
by Free Technology for Teachers | Oct 19, 2018 | Academic Technology
Earlier this week I shared the 101st explanatory video published by Common Craft. More than a decade ago Common Craft pioneered using simple paper cutouts to tell stories and explain difficult concepts in videos. Six years ago Lee LeFever, the founder of Common Craft,...
by Free Technology for Teachers | Oct 18, 2018 | Academic Technology
Last week I wrote about having middle school students create presentations from a combination of illustrations and videos that they made. In that post I shared Brush Ninja animation tool. That’s just one of many tools that students could have used to animated...
by Free Technology for Teachers | Oct 18, 2018 | Academic Technology
Back in September the folks at Plickers, a popular student-response service, released a bunch of updates to their mobile apps and website. Some of those updates, like easier display of questions have been popular. Some of those updates were panned by teachers....
by Free Technology for Teachers | Oct 18, 2018 | Academic Technology
I have published more than 250 Google tools tutorial videos over the last few years. But if my dry screencasts aren’t your style, try Google’s EDU in 90 series of videos. EDU in 90 offers 38 videos designed to introduce viewers to some of the things that...
by Free Technology for Teachers | Oct 18, 2018 | Academic Technology
Disclosure: JotForm is an advertiser on FreeTech4teachers.com If you have ever looked at a form on a web page and thought, “I’d like my forms to look like that,” then JotForm is the service you need to try. JotForm is a service for making fillable...
by Free Technology for Teachers | Oct 17, 2018 | Academic Technology
I have always found Theodore Roosevelt to be one of the most fascinating characters in U.S. History. That is why I was excited this morning when I saw an email from the Library of Congress announcing the online publication of Theodore Roosevelt’s papers. The...
by Free Technology for Teachers | Oct 17, 2018 | Academic Technology
This week Microsoft unveiled a slew of new accessibility options for the services that teachers and students use most. One of those features is the inclusion of Immersive Reader in Flipgrid. Immersive Reader is a free service that students can use to have text read...
by Free Technology for Teachers | Oct 17, 2018 | Academic Technology
This week Common Craft published their 101st explainer video. The latest video is about understanding terms of service agreements on websites and apps. Like nearly all Common Craft videos Terms of Service Agreements begins with an analog example before transitioning...
by Free Technology for Teachers | Oct 17, 2018 | Academic Technology
Wakelet is quickly becoming a popular choice amongst teachers who want to create collections of notes that can include text, videos, links, and pictures. Students can use it for the same purpose and share their collections with their teachers. This week Wakelet added...
by Free Technology for Teachers | Oct 17, 2018 | Academic Technology
On Monday I shared tutorials for two ways to send personalized certificates via Google Forms and Google Sheets. What I didn’t include in those tutorials was how to create a custom certificate without using the default certificate template found in Google Slides....
by Free Technology for Teachers | Oct 17, 2018 | Academic Technology
Case Maker is a free service designed for middle school social studies teachers and their students. Case Maker uses primary sources from the Library of Congress as the basis of activities in which students have to build a case in response to real civics scenarios. For...
by Free Technology for Teachers | Oct 16, 2018 | Academic Technology
Reactions is a YouTube channel produced by the American Chemical Society and PBS Digital Studios. The videos in the channel focus on explaining how chemistry concepts as they relate to things we see every day or to interesting “what if” scenarios....
by Free Technology for Teachers | Oct 16, 2018 | Academic Technology
Google has added two new formatting features to Google Docs. First, there is now a vertical ruler that you can use to evenly space the rows in tables in your Google Documents. Second, you can now adjust the size of the margins in your headers and footers. Both of...
by Free Technology for Teachers | Oct 16, 2018 | Academic Technology
ReadWorks is a popular service that offers a huge library of standards-aligned ELA lesson plans for K-12. You can search the ReadWorks library according to grade level and topic. Throughout the year ReadWorks publishes curated collections to align with holidays and...
by Free Technology for Teachers | Oct 15, 2018 | Academic Technology
In my previous post I shared the steps that I took to find a Google Earth file that contains more than 550 ancient locations in ancient Greece. At the end of the video in that post I demonstrated how I was able to display those locations in Google Earth. That method...
by Free Technology for Teachers | Oct 15, 2018 | Academic Technology
Last night on Twitter Wes Fryer asked me if I knew of any Google Earth files that displayed ancient Greek locations. I didn’t have anything within my own bookmarks so I did a quick Google search that I filtered according to file type. I first filtered by file...
by Free Technology for Teachers | Oct 15, 2018 | Academic Technology
This week PBS Education is hosting the first webinar in a four part virtual professional development series called For the Love of Lit. This series features free webinars designed to help ELA teachers engage their students in learning about literature. The four...
by Free Technology for Teachers | Oct 15, 2018 | Academic Technology
This morning Lifehacker ran an article encouraging people to get a flu shot (the title of the article is not school-appropriate so I won’t link to it). The point of the article was to remind people that getting the flu shot isn’t just about them,...
by Free Technology for Teachers | Oct 15, 2018 | Academic Technology
From perfect attendance to volunteerism to honor roll there are lots of occasions during the school year for schools to issue certificates to students. It used to be that to personalize certificates for students you would have to manually enter their names on the...
by Free Technology for Teachers | Oct 15, 2018 | Academic Technology
Certify’em is a Google Forms Add-on that I have been using all year to issue certificates when people complete one of my professional development webinars or courses. Certify’em makes it easy to have certificates automatically emailed to people when they...
by Free Technology for Teachers | Oct 13, 2018 | Academic Technology
Every Sunday evening I send out the Practical Ed Tech Tip of the Week. I started doing that four years ago as a way to provide people who want to get their ed tech tips in weekly format instead of a daily format. In the weekly mailing I include my tip of the week...
by Free Technology for Teachers | Oct 13, 2018 | Academic Technology
Good morning from Maine where I’m home for a while after nearly four weeks of speaking at conferences and consulting with schools. When I started my little tour there were leaves on all of the trees in my yard. This morning I woke up to discover that one of...
by Free Technology for Teachers | Oct 13, 2018 | Academic Technology
I just spent the last three weeks working with students and teachers who had Chromebooks as their primary computers throughout the school day. One of the things that I showed some of the students during that time was how to expand the size of the Google Docs editor so...
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