A Crash Course on the History of the 4th of July
The 4th of July is this Friday. In the United States the 4th of July marks Independence Day. In the video below John Green offers a short overview of the history of Independence Day and the ways in which Americans have celebrated the holiday since 1776. As always, Green includes plenty of sarcastic comments throughout […]
Mocomi Offers Hundreds of Short Video Lessons for Kids
Mocomi is a nice website featuring educational and entertaining content for elementary and middle school students. The main feature of Mocomi is their collection of more than 300 educational videos. The animated videos provide short lessons on everything from the history of Greek language to explanations of how car engines work. Applications for Education Mocomi […]
Videos – How Fireworks Work
This coming Friday the United States will celebrate Independence Day. Cities and towns all over the country will feature fireworks displays to celebrate the day. I’m sure that many of you will be enjoying a fireworks display (I will be at home keeping my dogs calm because they hate fireworks). If you or your children […]
Create Interactive Videos On ThingLink Video
ThingLink is a popular tool for collaboratively creating interactive images. Now, you can use ThingLink to create interactive videos too. ThingLink Video (still in beta, but you can register for early access here) allows you to select any public video on YouTube and add interactive pinmarks to it. Each pinmark can contain embeds of other […]
Create Word Clouds on Your iPad With ABCya’s Word Clouds App
ABCya’s Word Clouds iPad app makes it easy to quickly create word clouds on your iPad. To create a word cloud with Word Clouds by ABCya just type or paste text into the text field. After entering your text Word Clouds by ABCya will generate a visual representation of the most common words in your […]
Earth Science and Socioeconomic Data Maps
The Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center publishes data sets and maps designed to blend the studies of socioeconomics and Earth science. One of the results of that work is the creation of some interesting mapped visualizations of data sets. Some of the more interesting maps illustrate correlations between climate zone and population density. All of […]
Five Fun and Free iPad Apps That Help Students Learn to Write
Jumbled Sentences is a series of five free iPad apps designed to help students learn to construct sentences. The apps provide students with drag and drop activities in which they sort jumbled words into sentences. The sound can be turned off and on in each app. When the sound is turned on students can hear […]
If This Then That – Automate Routine Tasks
If This Then That is a helpful website for automating many routine online tasks. If This Then That helps you automate tasks like saving your Pinterest pins to your Evernote account, setting text alerts for calendar events, and sending email attachments directly to your Dropbox account. There are thousands of formulas, “recipes” is what IFTTT calls them, available […]
The Week in Review – The ISTE Edition
Adam Bellow programming a robot at ISTE 2014. Good afternoon from the ISTE conference in Atlanta, Georgia. I’ve had a great couple of days connecting with educators from all over the world. The best aspect of conferences like this is getting to learn from other educators. Yesterday, I shared a cool idea that I picked […]
Create and Share Short Stories With Story Builder from Google
Here’s another neat thing that I learned about from Jen Roberts. On Back in March on her blog, Literacy, Technology, and Policy she shared how she has students use Google’s Story Builder tool to create short stories. Through Story Builder you can create a short story that appears to be written by multiple editors but […]
