Goo.gl Is Being Shut Down – 5 Alternatives
Thanks to a Tweet from Tony Vincent I learned that Google announced the impending closure of the Goo.gl URL shortening service. It has been a good URL shortening tool for years, but not the most popular service because you couldn’t customize your shortened URL. That’s why I’ve always preferred to use Bitly.com to shorten URLs. If […]
Quickly Summarize Long Articles With SummarizeThis
SummarizeThis is a free tool that will quickly create a summary of long passages of text. To use SummarizeThis you just copy and paste text into the summary box and click “summarize.” A summary of the text then appears above the original text that you copied. Applications for Education I included SummarizeThis in my recent […]
How to Generate Random Story Starters In Google Sheets
Flippity offers great Google Sheets templates that can be used for all kinds of things from random name selection to progress tracking to generating random story starters. Flippity’s Mix & Match template can be used to create image-based and text-based random story starters. Watch my video that is embedded below to learn how to use […]
Food, Timers, and Search – The Week in Review
Good morning from Maine from where the wind is howling and the sun has not yet risen. Why am I up so early on a weekend? Because I have two little kids and this is the quietest time of the day. It’s perfect for drinking coffee and writing things like this week’s week-in-review post. This […]
Vintage Travel Posters, Advertisements, and Films
In my post about Seward’s Folly I included the image of a vintage advertisement for an Alaskan cruise on Canadian Pacific. That poster came from the Boston Public Library’s Flickr collection of vintage travel posters. Most of the images in that collection are either in the public domain or have a Creative Commons license allowing for re-use […]
Seward’s Folly Lesson Plan
Thanks to this Tweet from the Library of Congress I was reminded that today in 1867 was the day that the United States purchased Alaska from Russia. At the time it was referred to as Seward’s Folly. The discovery of gold thirty years later changed that perception. The Library of Congress offers a free lesson […]
This Periodic Table Shows Elements By Country and Date of Discovery
On Tuesday morning I shared a collection of seven good resources to help students learn the Periodic Table of Elements. The next day Open Culture shared this periodic table visualization that shows the country and year in which each element was discovered. The Periodic Table by country and date of discovery (If you cannot see […]
In Case You Missed It – Ten Search Strategies Students Need To Know
Yesterday 60 people joined my live presentation of my Practical Ed Tech webinar titled Ten Search Strategies Students Need To Know. More than a few of you have inquired about accessing the recording. It is now possible to access the recordings and handouts through this registration page. Some of the highlights of the webinar include: The […]
5 Good Story Starters for Students
On Tuesday morning I shared the idea of using the Story Dice apps (available for iOS and Android) as writing prompts or story starters for students. A few of you wrote to me and asked about similar options that will work on Chromebooks. Here is a handful of story starter options that will work in […]
NoteStreaming 101 – What You Need To Know To Get Started
Earlier today on Twitter I posted a question about notebooks. Specifically, I wanted to know who still uses physical notebooks and, if so, if there is a preference for lined or unlined paper. By the way, I use a notebook with unlined paper and I draw with a Uniball Signo 207. Do you have a […]
