by Free Technology for Teachers | Mar 26, 2021 | Academic Technology
For Google Meet users one of the easiest ways to improve the accessibility of your live online instruction is to enable captions during your meetings. A transcript of those captions can be quite helpful to students who miss the meeting and or those who want to revisit...
by Free Technology for Teachers | Mar 26, 2021 | Academic Technology
It has always been possible to shorten long Microsoft Forms URLS with third-party services like Bitly and Yellkey. Recently, Microsoft added a built-in URL shortener to Microsoft Forms. This option now appears when you click on the share button in Microsoft Forms....
by Free Technology for Teachers | Mar 25, 2021 | Academic Technology
The default inbox arrangement in Gmail consists of a Primary tab, a Social tab, and a Promotions tab. Gmail generally does a pretty good job of accurately sorting messages into those tabs. There are some occasions when messages that should appear in the Primary tab...
by Free Technology for Teachers | Mar 25, 2021 | Academic Technology
Every other week Rushton Hurley from Next Vista for Learning and I host a free webinar called Two Ed Tech Guys Take Questions and Share Cool Stuff. The next one is next Thursday which happens to be April Fools’ Day. As the title implies, during each webinar we...
by Free Technology for Teachers | Mar 24, 2021 | Academic Technology
I’ve tried dozens, possibly more than one hundred, mind mapping and flowchart creation tools over the last thirteen+ years of writing this blog. In fact, my first published writing was as a co-author of a chapter about mind mapping in the book What School...
by Free Technology for Teachers | Mar 24, 2021 | Academic Technology
This is an excerpt of my full article that I published on my other site, Practical Ed Tech. Threadit is Google’s new tool for recording webcam and screencast videos. The best way to think of it is as “Google Docs meets Flipgrid.” Here’s my...
by Free Technology for Teachers | Mar 23, 2021 | Academic Technology
Last night I uploaded a new video to my YouTube channel. Everything was normal for the first few steps. I added my description, added a custom thumbnail, and added the video to a playlist just as I normally would. Then I clicked the button to state that I...
by Free Technology for Teachers | Mar 23, 2021 | Academic Technology
Last week Google introduced a new video recording tool called Threadit. A Chrome extension is one aspect of what Threadit offers. With the Threadit Chrome extension installed you can record a video without leaving your Gmail inbox. Threadit is now the second tool that...
by Free Technology for Teachers | Mar 22, 2021 | Academic Technology
PresentationTube is a non-profit that has provided a free service to teachers for many years. That service is the ability to record video presentations based on PowerPoint files and PDFs. Recently, PresentationTube released a Chrome extension that lets you create...
by Free Technology for Teachers | Mar 22, 2021 | Academic Technology
MathQuiz.io is a new math game developed by a student. It’s a relatively simple site that presents you with a series of math problems to solve in your head then enter an answer. The problems are presented in sets of ten consecutive questions. You can play in an...
by Free Technology for Teachers | Mar 22, 2021 | Academic Technology
Every other Thursday afternoon Rushton Hurley from Next Vista for Learning and I host a half-hour webinar plainly titled Two Ed Tech Guys Take Questions & Share Cool Stuff. Last week was our Larry Bird episode (number 33). The recording of the webinar is now...
by Free Technology for Teachers | Mar 20, 2021 | Academic Technology
Good evening from Maine where it was a great first day of spring! I went for a bike ride outside then played outdoor bingo with my daughters. We also got started on some yard work that we can do in the few west-facing patches of lawn where the snow has completely...
by Free Technology for Teachers | Mar 19, 2021 | Academic Technology
This week Google rolled-out the latest update to Chrome. In the latest version there is now support for automatic captioning of audio and video on any web page that you visit in the Chrome web browser. The captions will work whether or not the audio is played aloud....
by Free Technology for Teachers | Mar 19, 2021 | Academic Technology
This week Synth released an updated user interface and a renewed focus on helping teachers and students engage in asynchronous audio conversations. In this post I’ll provide an overview of what Synth does, what has been updated in its user interface,...
by Free Technology for Teachers | Mar 19, 2021 | Academic Technology
Earlier this week I looked at one of my students’ computers and noticed that he had made his mouse pointer red and about three times its normal size. When I asked him why he changed it his answer was, “it’s easier to see.” I suppose that I...
by Free Technology for Teachers | Mar 18, 2021 | Academic Technology
About six weeks ago I published a video about how to enable automatic captions in Zoom. At the time, that feature was only available in the paid versions of Zoom. Since then Zoom has made two updates to their policy about access to live captioning. First, Zoom now...
by Free Technology for Teachers | Mar 18, 2021 | Academic Technology
Are you tired of starting every Zoom meeting with five minutes of “please remember to mute yourself” as people straggle into the meeting? Are you tired of muttering to yourself, “why doesn’t the host use the mute everyone function?” If...
by Free Technology for Teachers | Mar 17, 2021 | Academic Technology
Back in November I published a video about using the ping command on a Windows computer. The reason for that was to show an easy method to check if a website is down or if there is a problem on your end. Using the ping command in the command prompt window on your...
by Free Technology for Teachers | Mar 17, 2021 | Academic Technology
I knew this would happen. I also know there’s not much I can do to prevent it other than file DMCA takedown notices when it happens. The “it” I’m referring to is the plagiarism of my blog post announcing my free webinar about copyright and the...
by Free Technology for Teachers | Mar 17, 2021 | Academic Technology
On Monday Google announced a change to the presentation menu in Google Slides. Yesterday afternoon I got to try it for the first time. The new Google Slides presentation menu is a great improvement over the old one!Just like before you still need to click the...
by Free Technology for Teachers | Mar 16, 2021 | Academic Technology
PayGrade is a classroom economy simulation that you can use all year. As I wrote last year, unlike some mock economy activities PayGrade can be used in just about any classroom setting. Recently, PayGrade added the option to use your school-issued Google account to...
by Free Technology for Teachers | Mar 16, 2021 | Academic Technology
Yesterday afternoon I hosted a free webinar titled Copyright & Creative Commons for K-12 Educators. The recording of the webinar is now available to view here on my YouTube channel. The recording is also embedded below. Here’s a list of the resources that I...
by Free Technology for Teachers | Mar 16, 2021 | Academic Technology
For years City Guesser has been a popular geography game in which players have to guess the identity and location of a city based on Google Street View imagery. The new version of City Guesser replaces Google Street View imagery with street level video clips. In City...
by Free Technology for Teachers | Mar 16, 2021 | Academic Technology
The snow is melting, the sun is shining a bit longer, and we’re starting to see and hear more birds around our house. Those are all sure signs that spring is on the horizon here in Maine. On that note, here are some short lessons about the arrival of spring. Why...
by Free Technology for Teachers | Mar 16, 2021 | Academic Technology
Last week one of my colleagues asked me for help setting up some Zoom meetings. He needed to hold a series of meetings that were not going to be held at the same time each day. He could have set a series of individual meetings. That would have required students to...
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