The Week in Review – The Most Popular Posts
Good morning from Maine where it feels like winter! It’s 4F outside, a lot of snow is in the forecast, and we’re going to get our Christmas tree later today. I hope that all of you had a great week. I spent a lot of the week in Connecticut visiting family and friends for Thanksgiving. […]
7 Google Product Updates to Note from November
The end of November is here. During the last month Google announced a bunch of updates to many of the products frequently used by teachers and students. I covered many of them during the month, but there were a few that I missed. And there are few updates to the original updates from earlier this […]
12 Quick Thoughts After 12 Years of Free Technology for Teachers
Yesterday marked twelve years since I started this blog. I didn’t have much of clue about what I was doing. I chose the name Free Technology for Teachers because it was the height of the Web 2.0 boom and everything new seemed to be free. I wanted to try it all out. Writing blog posts […]
The History of Corn – A TED-Ed Lesson
Pictures of corn like the one in this blog post have become symbols of fall harvest and Thanksgiving. Corn and many products made with it are a staple of the diets of many of us today. How did corn become a staple of our diets? What has enabled it to become one of the most […]
Twelve Good Tools for Creating Mind Maps & Flowcharts – Updated
Earlier this week I published a video about a neat new service called Transo that lets you turn your notes into a mind map with just one click. Creating that video and writing the corresponding blog post got me to revisit a list of mind mapping tools that I published a couple of months ago. […]
Happy Thanksgiving!
It’s Thanksgiving Day in the United States. Somehow over the last 50 years it became a tradition that classic rock stations play Alice’s Restaurant Massacree at noon on Thanksgiving Day. And it has become a tradition for the last ten years that I post a video of Alice’s Restaurant Massacree here on Free Technology for Teachers. If you […]
Three Ways to Collaboratively Create Multimedia Maps
With Padlet’s new multimedia mapping tool and the recent update to the web version of Google Earth there are more ways than ever for students to collaborate on creating multimedia maps. The three collaborative multimedia mapping tools that I’m going to recommend to most people for the foreseeable future are Google’s My Maps, Padlet, and […]
Transno – Quickly Turn Outlines and Notes into Mind Maps
Transno is a new service that lets you write notes and outlines that can then be turned into mind maps and flowcharts with just one click. It reminds me a lot of the old Text2MindMap service that I used to use. Transno is better because it offers a variety of mind map and flowchart styles […]
Thanksgiving Bundle of Practical Ed Tech Webinars
Throughout the year on Practical Ed Tech I host live professional development webinars. The sale of those webinars helps to keep this blog running. The timing of the live webinars doesn’t work for everyone so I offer replays on-demand. For the next week all of the Practical Ed Tech on-demand webinars are on sale at […]
Three Easy Ways to Create Forms That Accept File Uploads
Last week Microsoft announced that a new file collection option has been added to Microsoft Forms. That feature is the option to accept file uploads in response to questions. The file upload option is already available to some users and is rolling out to others over the next few weeks. Microsoft Forms isn’t the only […]
