Canva Whiteboard Templates
Canva's whiteboard templates include mind mapping templates that you and your students can use individually or collaboratively. Watch this video for an overview of how to access and use those templates.
Google Jamboard Templates
Google Jamboard doesn't offer any pre-made mind mapping templates like Canva offers. However, it is easy to make and share your own mind mapping templates in Jamboard. This short video shows you how to do that.
Google Drawings
Long before Google offered Jamboard, I used Google Drawings to create mind maps to share online. That's still a viable option for Google Workspace users. Here's a demo of how to do that.
Transno
Transno is an interesting mind mapping tool because it will create mind maps based on your written outlines. Take a look at this video to see it in action.
Forky
Forky is a minimalist mind mapping tool. I like the simplicity of it compared with some other mind mapping tools that you could use. It does offer an online collaboration option for those who want to use it. See Forky in action in this demo.
GitMind
GitMind is another mind mapping tool that will create printable outlines for you based on your mind maps. Here's a brief demo of it.
Padlet
Last, but not least is Padlet. I've used Padlet for mind mapping longer than anything else on this list. If you want to include multimedia elements in your mind maps, Padlet is the tool for you. Watch my demo to see how it works.
There are other aspects of Microsoft Forms that I also like that aren't equaled in Google Forms. Those features are demonstrated in my new video that is embedded below.
1. Convert docs to forms.
2. Live mode
3. Timer
4. Start and end dates
5. Background music
Video - My Five Favorite Features of Microsoft Forms
The start of the school year is when many of us are excited to try new and different things. If you're looking for something new to try this year, take a look at my Around the World With Google Earth activity. It's loosely based on The Amazing Race and it's a fun way to introduce students to the basics of using Google Earth. If you need some help getting started with Google Earth, take a look at the tutorials that I have embedded below.
How to Measure in 2D and 3D in Google EarthGood morning from Maine where it's overcast and drizzly, again. It has been that kind of summer. Nonetheless, it has been a good summer filled with fun things for me and my family (my miserable cold not withstanding). I hope that it has been a good summer (or winter) for you as well.
We have less than two weeks until school starts again. We're making the most of it. This week I took one of my daughters for a one-on-one trip to Story Land. Next week, I'm doing the same for my other daughter. If still have a bit of vacation, I hope you make the most of it as well.
These were the week's most popular posts:Self-paced Courses You Can Start Today
Last Friday I published a video in which I demonstrated the teacher view and student view of Google Classroom. A lot of people replied to ask if I had a similar one about the parent view of Google Classroom. I didn't have one, but I was happy to refer people to this section of Sam Cary's video How to Use Google Classroom for Parents.
The whole video gives a complete walk-through of Google Classroom. The part that most teachers will care about is toward the end beginning around the 7:19 mark. It's at that point in the video that Sam begins to show the guardian summaries feature of Google Classroom. I've embedded the video below. You can also watch the whole thing on the New Ed Tech Classroom YouTube channel.
It's that time of year again when many of us are thinking about ways for our students to get to know each other and us. One popular way of doing that is through short video introductions. Microsoft Flip (formerly known as Flipgrid) provides a great platform on which to do that. As a teacher you can create a safe space for students to record and share short videos.
If you've never used Microsoft Flip or you are a tech coach responsible for introducing it to other teachers, I have a new video for you. In the video that is embedded below I demonstrate the following:
This morning my YouTube subscriptions included a notification of a new TED-Ed lesson that caught my attention. That lesson is titled How the Water You Flush Becomes the Water You Drink. As the titled implies, the lesson is all about how wastewater gets cleaned and put back into the water cycle where we'll eventually drink it once more.
The lesson introduces viewers to three types of wastewater and how wastewater is treated. The two key terms from the video are direct potable reuse and indirect potable reuse and the differences between the two. You can watch the lesson on YouTube or as embedded below. The full lesson with questions and additional resources can be found here on the TED-Ed website.
A few days ago while driving home from seeing a community theater's musical production of The Little Mermaid one of my daughters asked me "why does Venice have canals instead of roads?" It was a question that I was happy to answer. The question also inspired me to revisit some items on the topic that I new were in my blog's archives, somewhere. Here's my updated list of resources for teaching and learning about Venice.
And head here for more posts inspired by the questions my daughters ask me.
Venice Backstage is a seventeen minute video that explains how the water is contained, how the buildings stay upright, and how residents of Venice travel about the city.Along with Google Workspace tools, Padlet is one of the educational technology tools that I've used the most consistently over the last fifteen years. I've used it for everything from hosting online brainstorming sessions to digital mapping to distraction-free YouTube viewing and a whole lot more. Padlet recently add five new features for the new school year.
The new features of Padlet are demonstrated in the two new videos that are embedded below. The new features include:
Just like I do with my weekly newsletter, C-SPAN Classroom sends their weekly newsletter on Sunday evenings (Eastern Time). When I read it last night I learned about a new C-SPAN series that sounds great! It's called Books That Shaped America and it is presented by C-SPAN in conjunction with the Library of Congress.
Books That Shaped America is a ten-part weekly series that is beginning on September 18th. Each episode will feature one of ten books from American history that have shaped and impacted American society. The episodes will include commentary and analysis from experts on each book.
Thomas Paine's Common Sense is the first book that will be featured in the series. The Federalist Papers will be featured in the second episode. A couple of other works to be featured in the series are Their Eyes Were Watching God and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.
Each episode of Books That Shaped America will air at 9pm ET and be available on-demand on C-SPAN.org afterward. There are lesson materials planned for release to accompany the series although those materials are not yet published.
On a related note, most of the books in the series are available to find and read for free on Google Books and or at your local library. Complete copies of The Federalist Papers are available to read for free right here on the Avalon Project.
In this short video I explain and demonstrate how I created a template in Canva and shared it so that others can copy it and modify it without changing my original copy.
By watching How to Spot a Misleading Graph students can learn about three ways in which graphs can be misleading. Those ways are distorting the scale of the graph, manipulating the X or Y axis of a graph, and cherry-picking or not providing context for data in a graph. The whole lesson can be found here and the video is embedded below.
Good morning from Maine where the sun is rising on what should be a great summer day. Fortunately, I'm feeling much better than I did throughout the week as a struggled with a miserable cold that had me sleeping a lot more than normal and exercising a lot less than normal. I did get out for a few walks with my dogs. On one of those walks we stopped to help a salamander cross the road (to get to the other side, obviously).
I hope that you had a great week. If you started school this week, I hope it went well. If you still have a bit more vacation, soak it up and enjoy it before the madness of the school year begins.
These were the week's most popular posts:
1. Five Wolfram Alpha Tutorials for Teachers
2. Five Tools for Creating Automatically Scored Formative Assessments
3. Using AI for Creating Formative Assessments
4. Staying Organized With Google Drive Folder Descriptions
5. Five Uses for Google Docs Besides Essay Writing
6. How to Add Audio to Almost Anything in Google Workspace
7. A New Accessible PhET Simulation
Self-paced Courses You Can Start Today
As the new school year approaches it's a good idea to review some of the easily overlooked, but important features of some of the tools we use the most. Google Slides is one of those tools that I use a lot and has a lot of features that are easy to overlook. For example, unless you use them on a regular basis the accessibility features in Google Slides are easy to forget about. In a new video that is embedded below I provide and overview of three Google Slides accessibility features you should know how to enable.
Video - Three Google Slides Accessibility Settings You Should Know How to Enable
Twice this week readers emailed me to ask if I had any tutorials about how students join Google Classroom. I didn't have a current one so I made one.
In my new video that is embedded below I demonstrate three ways to invite students to join Google Classroom and the three ways that students can join your Google Classroom classes.
Video - Teacher and Student Views of Joining Google Classroom
In case you haven't heard, AI is the buzzword of the year in education and technology. If you haven't tried any AI tools yet, Google Slides has one that it's easy to use and that you might actually want to use on a regular basis.
The "insert images" menu in Google Slides now has an option titled "help me visualize." When you select that option you can type a description of the kind of image you would like to add to your slides. Once you've done that give Google twenty seconds and it will generate a small gallery of images for you to pick from. Pick one to add your slide and then you can crop it, resize it, and reposition it as you see fit. Watch my short video that is embedded below to see how the "help me visualize" feature in Google Slides works.
Video - How to Use AI in Google Slides
Last year I wrote about the qualities of a good school district website. Unfortunately, the school district in which my kids go to school didn't read that blog post or didn't take any action based on it. That was driven home this week as we attempted to find the school supply lists and the schedule for the start of the school for our kids.
The obvious place to look for a school supply list and the schedule for the start of the school year is the school's website. Unfortunately, that has been updated since the end of the last school year. Supply lists? Nowhere to be found. Schedule? The calendar for August is completely blank.
So how did we find the information that we needed? A friend who used to work in the district shared a Facebook post with me. At that point it was three days old! And what if I didn't use Facebook (like an increasing number of people)? We'd still be wondering about supply lists and schedules.
As I wrote last year, make the information that parents need the first and most obvious thing on your school's website. Nobody is going to the school's website in August to find out the results of a fundraising challenge from the previous spring nor do they care about pictures from a staff development meeting.
On a related note, here are my thoughts on newsletters versus social media and blogs for tech coaches.
p.s. I still think it's criminal that public schools don't provide all of the resources that students need. Supply lists that cost families $50+ per student represent a financial hardship for many families and puts their children at a disadvantage from the first day of school.
Earlier this week I shared directions for creating appointment slots in Google Calendar. After doing that it occurred to me that I've made a lot of Google Calendar tutorials over the years. And while I have a big playlist of more than 700 Google Workspace tutorials, I've never broken out the Google Calendar tutorials into a playlist of its own. So this morning that's what I did.
In this new playlist you'll find eighteen tutorials on how to use the various features of Google Calendar. I've embedded some of the highlights of the playlist below.
How to Print a Guest List for Google Calendar EventsIn one of yesterday's posts I shared directions on how to create an online reservation system by using Google Calendar's appointment slots feature. If you don't have a Google Workspace account or you simply want an option for creating an online reservation system that doesn't rely on Google, Calendly is a good option for you.
In Calendly you can create a calendar of meeting availability and let people click on it to book meetings with you. People can book meetings with you using any email account they want to use. In the video that is embedded below I demonstrate how to create an online reservation system by using Calendly.
Video - How to Create an Online Reservation System With Calendly