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Best Free Veterans Day Lessons & Activities

10 de Novembro de 2023, 12:30
Plan your Veterans Day classroom activities and lessons with quizzes, videos, primary sources, and more

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AI Lesson Plan Tips

27 de Setembro de 2023, 09:00
Best practices and tips for when you’re developing AI lesson plans

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How Wastewater Gets Recycled

17 de Agosto de 2023, 10:55

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.


Here are some more resources and lessons related to the water cycle:


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Don't Let the Graphs Fool You

13 de Agosto de 2023, 09:56

Tools like Canva, Adobe Express, and even good ol' PowerPoint make it incredibly easy to quickly create good looking graphs. But as Randy Krum points out in his book, Cool Infographics, a graphic that looks good isn't necessarily a good graphic. In fact, many times a graphic is made to look good in order to distract from the reality of the information presented within it. That's a point that is made in a few ways in a TED-Ed lesson titled How to Spot a Misleading Graph

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.



Applications for Education
This video could make a great addition to your list of resources for teaching students how to be savvy media consumers. After watching the video I'd have students do two things. First, I'd have them look through a few newspapers or journals (online or physical) to try to find some graphs that use one of the misleading techniques taught in the TED-Ed lesson. Second, I'd provide students with some datasets to try their hands at creating accurate graphs as well as slightly misleading graphs.


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All About Batteries - And How to Preserve Your Laptop's Battery Life

4 de Agosto de 2023, 13:25

This week TED-Ed published a new lesson that addresses a topic that just about everyone who owns a cell phone has wondered about at one time or another. That question is "why do phone batteries get worse over time?"  

Why Your Phone Battery Gets Worse Over Time explains how lithium ion batteries work, why they hold less energy over time, and how batteries are recycled. The end of the video dives into the topic of lithium supply and why not all batteries are recycled. Watch the lesson on the TED-Ed YouTube channel or as embedded below. 



The new TED-Ed lesson about batteries is a good companion to an earlier TED-Ed lesson on the same topic. In How Batteries Work students learn about the origins of batteries, how batteries work, the differences between disposable and rechargeable batteries, and why rechargeable batteries eventually cannot be recharged any more. Students watching the video will also see the difference between dry cell and wet cell batteries.



Use This Setting to Preserve Laptop Battery Life
Even though it has improved in recent years, Google Chrome is still notorious for draining laptop batteries. This is particularly true when you have many extensions installed. You can preserve some of your battery's life by opening the advanced settings menu in Chrome and choosing to disable the option to "continue running background apps when Chrome is closed." Watch this video to learn how to enable this setting.



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How to Get in the Flow

30 de Julho de 2023, 08:41

In a world in which there is no shortage of digital distractions it can be hard to get into the flow of working a project, studying, or simply sitting and thinking for a while. That's why I like what Engageable is trying to do, why I appreciate the work of Cal Newport, and why I was happy to see a new TED-Ed video about entering a state of flow. 

TED-Ed's new lesson, How to Enter Flow State, explains why it can be difficult to enter a flow state, why sometimes it's easier than others to enter a flow state, and the mental effects of getting into a flow state. Interestingly, the video is actually fairly light on tips for how to to actually enter a flow state of mind. It provides the same tips that you've probably heard before. Those are things like setting small, achievable goals for a work session and work in a quiet, distraction-free environment. 

The video from the lesson is embedded below. 



Applications for Education
Last fall TED-Ed published a lesson that explains why people procrastinate even when it feels bad. I would show students the lesson about procrastination before showing them the one about how to get into a workflow. With the knowledge of why they procrastinate, students might be more interested in learning how to get into a workflow to get things done.



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