If you can get past the distraction of cute animal videos, video game highlights, and other nonsense, you can find excellent educational videos on YouTube. But even then it's not enough to just share the video with your students either in your classroom or online. When sharing videos with students in an online format, add some questions for them to answer or ideas for them to consider as they watch. Here are five tools that are good for doing that. After a few years EDpuzzle remains at the…

Free Technology for Teachers

YouTube is the place that most of us turn to first when we need an educational video clip. Even if you use the search refinement tools in YouTube, it can be a challenge to find a clip that is appro…

There are times when a good video or video clip can be just the thing that a student needs to see how all of the pieces of a topic come together. And sometimes just seeing a demonstration or hearin…

This week is Geography Awareness Week. A great way for students to hone their knowledge of geography is by creating and playing augmented reality geography games. Students can play AR geography gam…

Free Technology for Teachers

Google Forms and Microsoft Forms and their corresponding Google Sheets and Excel sheets are excellent tools for collecting data then looking at in a variety of ways. Making then grading quizzes is …

Storyboard That started out as simple tool that anyone could use to create good-looking storyboards for a variety of purposes including explaining historical events, plot lines, and even business plans. Over the years Storyboard That has evolved to provide more than 40,000 pieces of artwork and dozens of templates for making everything from simple comics to timelines to complex flowcharts. The update to Storyboard That features a new templates and artwork for making worksheets and story…

The new school year is here for almost all of us. At this time every year for the last three years I have published my free Practical Ed Tech Handbook. I’ve just finished the fourth edition o…

I like the sound of a classroom full of kids talking and working together on projects. But there are times when students need to be aware of the volume of their voices during those times that they're working together. And there times when you do need your students to be quiet for activities like silent reading or journal writing. You could play the role of judge and jury when it comes to classroom noise or you can get some help in the form of a simple noise meter that you display on a screen…

A huge component of taking care of yourself is simply making time for taking care of yourself. But between job responsibilities, family responsibilities, and other obligations we have in our lives …

Two weeks ago my tip of the week prompted a bunch of questions from readers regarding where to find and how to use music in multimedia projects. Much like with videos watched on YouTube or streamed…

For many years Book Creator was my go-to recommendation for teachers who wanted to have their students create multimedia ebooks on iPads. So when the folks at Book Creator launched an online version to use Google Chrome I quickly added it to my list of recommended web tools too. Book Creator can be used by students to create multimedia ebooks that include video, images, audio, text, and free-hand drawings. You can watch an overview of Book Creator here. After getting familiar with Book…

This week’s Ed Tech Fitness challenge was about mindful breathing. To stay with that theme let’s take a look at a service that is designed to help you understand your students’ em…

This week’s Ed Tech Fitness challenge was to try going on a social media diet. In other words, cut back or cut out the time you spend on the social media site(s) that sucks time out of your d…

At about this time last year Google announced that their URL shortening service, Goo.gl, would be shuttered within a year. That time has come and as of yesterday, Goo.gl is dead. Goo.gl was never m…