Free Technology for Teachers

Learn How to Build a Search Engine

noreply@blogger.com (Mr. Byrne) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 12:00:00 +0000

Udacity is offering a new, free seven week Computer Science 101 course. The course promises to teach you everything you need to know to build a search engine like Google or Yahoo even if you don't have any prior programming knowledge. The course is open for enrollment right now and starts on February 20, 2012. You can view the syllabus now and watch the promotional video featuring the instructors below.

Alien Buddies - An iPad App for Learning Shapes, Numbers, Letters

noreply@blogger.com (Mr. Byrne) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 11:00:00 +0000

Alien Buddies is an iPad and iPhone app designed for pre-k students to practice recognizing shapes, letters, and numbers. The app provides leveled games in which students practice recognizing patterns and sequences. The activities for recognizing letters and numbers have audio and visual prompting modes. Alien Buddies normally costs $1.99 but I received an email from the app's publisher informing me that it is available for free today, January 27th.

A Google Maps Lesson Idea - Seasonings Around the World

noreply@blogger.com (Mr. Byrne) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 11:00:00 +0000

On Wednesday morning I came across a neat article on NPR titled A Trip Around the World, By Way of Seasonings. The article is part of a series of recipes that call for using spices from places all over the world. The article gave me an idea for a Google Maps project in world history classes.

As any history teacher knows, discovering new travel routes for the spice trade was one of the motivations for early explorers. The idea I had was to have students research where those spices came from, which explorers went where, and plot that information on a Google Map or in Google Earth. Students using Google Earth could create a narrated tour of the world using the information that they include in their placemarks.

For directions on creating placemarks and tours in Google Maps and Google Earth, please visit my collection of Google tutorials.

Frozen Planet - An Interactive Exploration of the Poles

noreply@blogger.com (Mr. Byrne) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 10:15:00 +0000

The Open University is a fantastic place to discover all kinds of valuable educational materials. From time to time I find myself getting lost in the content both on The Open University's website and The Open University's various YouTube channels. I was doing just that recently when I discovered Frozen Planet: Explore the Polar Regions.

Frozen Planet: Explore the Polar Regions features an interactive display through which you can view the history of polar exploration and the science of the polar regions. The interactive display is created through the use of the Google Earth browser plug-in and a timeline. You can click along the timeline to see and read placemarks on Google Earth. You can browse through and click on a list of important places in both polar regions. For further investigation and analysis of the polar regions you can activate a number of Google Earth layers within the Frozen Planet display. The display also includes videos about each region although the playlist for the Antarctic region is much longer than the playlist for the Arctic region.

Applications for Education
Frozen Planet: Explore the Polar Regions could be a good resource for both science and history teachers. In fact, Frozen Planet could be the basis for an interdisciplinary unit at the middle school or high school level.

Here's a fun fact that I learned through Frozen Planet: Explore the Polar Regions, five years after being the first person to stand on top of Mount Everest Sir Edmund Hillary was part of the team that completed the first complete crossing of Antarctica .

New Google in Education Ebook and Website

noreply@blogger.com (Mr. Byrne) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 09:10:00 +0000

Yesterday, the Google Apps for Education team published a new ebook (PDF) titled A New and Open World for Learning. A New and Open World for Learning is all about using Google's products and services in education. The ebook is clearly a marketing vehicle for Google Apps for Education, but you will find some good examples of and ideas for using Google apps in your school.

As part of the same announcement in which A New and Open World for Learning was released, Google also announced a revamped Google in Education website. The aspects of Google in Education that are probably of most interest to classroom teachers are the lesson plan index and the classroom tools index. The classroom tools index provides links to information about each of the services available to teachers and students. In the classroom tools index you'll find some tutorial or how-to resources.

New Google+ Safety Center for Teens, Parents, and Educators

noreply@blogger.com (Mr. Byrne) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 00:13:00 +0000

Today, Google+ opened to students 13 years old or older. As ZDNet reported, in conjunction with opening Google+ to teenagers Google opened a new Google+ Safety Center. The Google+ Safety Center features a couple of guides to Google+ settings and functions for teens and their parents. The section for teens isn't much more than a basic introduction to Google+ settings, but the section for parents provides some solid advice and answers to common concerns that parents have about their teens use of social media.

In addition to information about Google+, the Google+ Safety Center offers resources from Common Sense Media about anti-bullying practices and digital reputation management.

Applications for Education
If you're considering using Google+ with your teenage students, you might have some parents with concerns about having their children using the service. The materials provided in the Google+ Safety Center could help ease their minds.

Some of the features of Google+ that could be of use to students are screen sharing and document sharing in Hangouts. Those two services could be helpful for peer editing and or peer tutoring. You and your students could also use the Concept Board app in Google+ Hangouts for collaborative brainstorming sessions.

Five Resources for Visual Fractions Lessons

noreply@blogger.com (Mr. Byrne) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 20:57:00 +0000

This is a list that I created in response to a request that I recently received as direct message on Twitter. A couple of these resources I found through a search in the Diigo community. If you don't have a Diigo account or if you do but you have never searched the community bookmarks, I recommend giving it a try.

Who Wants Pizza? is a fun online activity for learning about fractions. Who Wants Pizza was developed by Cynthia Lanius at Rice University. The activity has five parts plus practice activities for students to explore. Teachers will find notes about using this activities in the classroom.

Visual Fractions has eight categories of visualizations, lessons, and games for students to explore and learn the functions of fractions.

The National Library of Virtual Manipulatives has a lot of interactive activities for students learning the use of fractions, addition and subtraction, and the multiplication of fractions.

Thinking Blocks is a nice site for elementary and middle school mathematics teachers. Thinking Blocks provides interactive templates in which students use brightly colored blocks to model and solve problems. As students work through the problems they are provided with feedback as to whether or not they are using the correct sequence to solve each problem. There are templates and problems for addition, multiplication, fractions, and ratios. You can also develop your own problems using the modeling tool.

Conceptua Math is a provider of interactive visual mathematics lessons. One of Conceptua Math's primary focuses is on the development of tools to aid teachers in the instruction of lessons on fractions. Conceptua Math's offerings are a mix of free and premium (paid) tools. There are a total of fifteen free interactive tools for teachers and students. Each of the free tools has an introductory video and a sample lesson plan.

Econ Ed Link - Economics Lessons and Games

noreply@blogger.com (Mr. Byrne) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 20:02:00 +0000

Produced by the Council for Economic Education, Econ Ed Link hosts hundreds of lesson plans and interactive games for teaching students about a wide range of topics in economics. Teachers can search the lesson plan index by grade level, concept, standard, or length of lesson (one class period vs. multiple class periods). Most of the lessons attempt to provide "real world" context.

The interactive section of Econ Ed Link offers four pages of videos and games. The videos and games can be used as stand-alone activities or as part of lesson plan. I tested out the interactive game on developing good credit habits. Developing Good Credit Habits is a game appropriate for middle school and high school students. Students earn money by correctly answering questions about credit scores, interest rates, and spending practices. The purpose of the game is to purchase items and pay expenses without damaging your credit score.

Applications for Education
Econ Ed Link offers lesson plans appropriate for all K-12 students. Many of the lessons are designed for use not only in the classroom but in the home as well. The parent section of Econ Ed Link offers good material that you can send home with your students to get parents involved in students' learning about personal economics.

Check This - Quickly Build and Publish Webpages

noreply@blogger.com (Mr. Byrne) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 17:35:00 +0000

Check This is a new service for quickly building and publishing webpages. As Robin Wauters wrote this week, Check This falls somewhere between nothing and a blog. Check This isn't designed to replace your favorite blog or website creation platform, rather it is designed to fill the niche for people who desire to publish a simple announcement page. Without registering you can add text, images, and videos to your Check This page in a matter of seconds. And after you have published your page you can go back and edit it by using the unique edit link sent to the email address you provide in the step between creation and publishing.

In the video below I provide a short walk-through on creating a webpage with Check This.

Applications for Education
Check This could be a good tool for club advisers, PTAs, and other school-related organizations to publish a simple webpage that announces and provides details about a school activity. I'm thinking that Check This could be used by a PTA to provide details about upcoming fundraiser activities.

If you're looking for an easy-to-use tool for your students to use to publish their essays, images, or videos without using a full-fledged blogging platform, Check This might be the tool for you. If you don't need video and image support, you might also consider one of these five tools for students to publish their writings in under a minute.

Win Technology Prizes for Your School

noreply@blogger.com (Mr. Byrne) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 16:11:00 +0000

Full disclosure: the sponsor of this contest is an advertiser on Free Technology for Teachers. Even if they weren't an advertiser there is still a good chance that I'd mention this contest.

The Worth Ave Group is currently sponsoring a contest through which schools in the United States can win technology prizes worth up to $25,000. Here's how it works: a teacher is nominated by a community member and is then placed on the contest's list of eligible nominees. The teacher who receives the most votes will win a $25,000 technology prize package for his or her school. The contest will also award smaller prizes to five runners-up. Voters will also be entered into a random drawing for iPads. The voting is open now through the end of March, 2012. You can read the full contest rules here (link is to a PDF).

Seven Tools for Creating Data Visualizations

noreply@blogger.com (Mr. Byrne) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 11:00:00 +0000

This morning I received an email asking me for some tools for creating data visualizations. Here are seven tools that students can use to build data visualizations.

Better World Flux is a free data visualization development tool that was created for the World Bank's Apps for Development Challenge. The purpose of the challenge was to encourage app developers to create products that could be used to highlight the development data hosted by the World Bank. Better World Flux allows users to create animated visualizations of development data. To use Better World Flux (no registration required) all you have to do is select a data set from the menu provided and select a country or countries from the menu provided. From there Better World Flux creates an animated data visualization for you. The visualization will change as the years on the timeline at the bottom of the visualization change. This way users can see growth and recession of a statistic over time.
Learn more about Better World Flux in the video below.

Target Map is a service that allows anyone to create mapped displays of data sets. Users of Target Map can importa and map their own data sets, use data sets from other users, use data sets found online, or manually input data onto a map. When I created my sample map, I choose to manually input data. Target Map allows you to map data for a country, a region, or for the whole world. You can customize the display to make borders appear faint or bold and alter the look of data points. Although at first glance Target Map's user interface might not appear to be terribly intuitive, it is actually quite easy to use if you follow the directions. Target Map is free to use if you agree to publish your maps to the public gallery. If you want to keep your maps private you can do so for a small fee. The first time you create a map on Target Map it is reviewed for quality before it is added to the public gallery.

Many Eyes is an online data visualization tool developed by IBM. Many Eyes provides tools for creating a wide variety of data visualizations using your data sets or data sets hosted by IBM. If you're not interested in creating visualizations but just want to explore the visualizations created by others, you can do that on Many Eyes too. The video below offers an overview of creating data visualizations with Many Eyes.

Gapminder is a great tool for creating data visualizations. Gapminder gives users the ability to create graphs of hundreds of demographic and economic indicators. I like Gapminder because it provides a good way for visual learners to see data sets in a context that is significantly different from standard data sets. Gapminder has a page for educators on which they can find thematic animations, graphs, quizzes, model lessons, and a PDF guide to using Gapminder. For teachers working in schools with slow Internet connections or very strict filtering, Gapminder has a desktop application that you can download and install for Mac or Windows computers. The video below demonstrates Gapminder desktop.

Google's Public Data Explorer draws on data sets from the World Bank, the US CDC, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, and other sources of public data. In all there are eighty data sets. The Public Data Explorer makes it possible to quickly create visual representations and visual comparisons of the data sets. Each visualization you create has a unique url that you can direct people to or you can embed the visualization in a blog or website. You can use your own data in the Public Data Explorer but to do this you need to use the Data Set Publishing Language (DSPL) developed by Google. The process of upload data in the DSPL format isn't something you'll learn in minutes, but if you're really interested in doing it Google does have a step-by-step tutorial for you to follow.

Map a List is a free tool that you can use to turn Google Spreadsheet information into Google Maps placemarks. To create a map from your spreadsheets you need to register for a Map a List account and give it access to your Google Docs account. Map a List then walks you through each step of selecting a spreadsheet, defining the parameters for your map, and choosing placemarks. Within Google Spreadsheets there are many "Gadgets" that can be used to create visualizations of data. To explore the gadgets that will work with your data, go to the "insert" drop-down menu then select "gadgets."

World Map is a free program developed by the Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard University. World Map is designed to enable creation, visualization, and exploration of geographically referenced information. In other words, you can build some great mapped data visualizations on the service.

To create a map on World Map you can use the more than 1800 data sets that are stored in the service or you can upload your own data sets. The majority of the data sets in the World Map library have abstracts explaining a bit about the purpose and scope of the data. There are five default base maps that you can choose to build upon. Alternatively, you can choose to create your map completely from scratch and upload your own base layer to build upon. Maps that you create on World Map can be embedded into a website, printed, or viewed in Google Earth.

A Great Collection of Cool Infographics on Pinterest

noreply@blogger.com (Mr. Byrne) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 00:48:00 +0000

Cool Infographics is a great blog that I have mentioned numerous times in the past. Many of the infographics that I've shared, I discovered on Cool Infographics. Recently, Randy Krum, the author of Cool Infographics started putting all of the infographics that he writes about onto a Pinterest page. The Cool Infographics Pinterest page contains all of the infographics that Randy wrote about in 2011. Included in the page are some infographic videos like this one about Stuxnet.

Applications for Education
If you are considering having your students develop infographics as a class project, the Cool Infographics Pinterest page could provide you and your students with some great models. You may also find some infographics that have flaws and in those cases you and your students can discuss what those flaws are and how a particular infographic could be improved.

Exchange Opportunities for U.S. Teachers and Administrators

noreply@blogger.com (Mr. Byrne) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 22:39:00 +0000

The United States Department of State is currently offering a great opportunity for teachers and school administrators in the United States to teach and learn in Thailand, Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay. Through the Educational Seminars program teachers and administrators can receive grant-funded trips during the summer to learn and share best practices.

Applications are being accepted through March 30 for the trips to Brazil, Argentina, and Thailand. The Argentina and Brazil trips are only open to administrators while the Thailand trip is open to teachers and administrators. You can learn more about the Educational Seminars program here and here (PDF).

Thanks to Scott McLeod for sharing this on Twitter earlier today.

Dozens of Examples of VoiceThread in Education

noreply@blogger.com (Mr. Byrne) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 21:07:00 +0000

Earlier today, in a post about the California Gold Rush, I mentioned using VoiceThread in a lesson. In writing that post I neglected to mention what a VoiceThread is. Rather than reading my explanation, the best thing to do is to watch the VoiceThread explanation of VoiceThread that I have embedded below.

Applications for Education
Hopefully, after watching the VoiceThread above you will have some ideas for how you can use VoiceThread in your classroom. To get give you even more ideas and examples VoiceThread has a digital library of more than five dozen examples of VoiceThread being used in a wide variety of content areas taught in K-12 classrooms.

Building a Gold Mine

noreply@blogger.com (Mr. Byrne) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 11:15:00 +0000

Last week I shared a list of lesson plans for teaching about historical gold rushes in North America. Yesterday, the National Archives' featured document was this image of men developing a gold mine in the Sierra Nevada. That image gave me the idea for a VoiceThread project about gold rushes. You could start with this image (pictured below) and ask students to share their thoughts about the construction techniques and the men in the picture. Then have students search sources like The Commons, US National Archives, or simply Google Images to find more images to add to and comment on in theVoiceThread that they start.

Image source: Today's Document from the National Archives

New Drag and Drop File Uploads in Wikispaces

noreply@blogger.com (Mr. Byrne) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 11:00:00 +0000

The popular wiki-building service Wikispaces recently made an handy enhancement to their user interface. The new feature is the option to upload files by simply dragging them from your desktop to the wiki you're working on. I've included two screenshots of the process below.

Step 1.

Step 2.

Applications for Education
The addition of drag and drop uploads doesn't revolutionize the way that you and your students create wikis or what you do with them, but it is still a helpful little enhancement.

If you're looking for ideas about assessing student use of wikis, check out these rubrics from the University of Wisconsin.

State of the Union Address - Behind the Scenes and More

noreply@blogger.com (Mr. Byrne) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 10:44:00 +0000

Last night President Obama delivered his 2012 State of the Union Address. Every US-based news website has coverage of the event. If you're thinking of discussing the State of the Union Address in your classroom today, here are a few things that should be helpful to you.

The White House website you can find the entire video of last night's address. The White House published the "enhanced" video which includes some visuals to complement the content of President Obama's key points. You can view the video online or download it directly from the White House website.

The White House published a short "behind the scenes" video about the writing of the State of the Union Address.

You can find the full transcript of President Obama's State of the Union Address on the White House's website. Put that transcript into a tool like Wordle to create word clouds that will help students quickly recognize the most-used words and phrases in President Obama's address last night.

Finally, Larry Ferlazzo has a short list of visualizations of last night's address. Included in that list is this NY Times interactive display of last night's State of the Union Address. The interactive allows you to skip through the transcript to read the text and watch the corresponding video.

Learn About Physics Through the Circus

noreply@blogger.com (Mr. Byrne) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 00:42:00 +0000

In 2010 PBS aired a short series called Circus. Circus was a documentary about the Big Apple Circus. The show took viewers behind the scenes of a traveling circus production. All six of the episodes are currently available to watch online. Today, through a Tweet by Danny Nicholson I learned that the Circus website offers some short circus-based physics lessons.

Circus Physics is a series of eight short videos. Each of the videos features a circus act that demonstrates a basic principle of physics. Each video clip is accompanied by text and image explanations. I've embedded the Newton's Laws of Motion video below.

Watch Circus Physics: Newton's Laws of Motion on PBS. See more from Circus.

PEMDAS Math Rap

noreply@blogger.com (Mr. Byrne) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 00:13:00 +0000

A couple of weeks ago I shared Rhyme N' Learn's Don't Let Pi Make You Cry math rap video. This week they released another math rap video. The new video reminds students about the process for solving long equations. The video explains PEMDAS (parentheses, exponents, multiplication, division, addition, subtraction). The video can be viewed on YouTube and if you really like it you can buy a copy of Rhyme N' Learn's CD.

And this PEMDAS song is definitely not a rap, but is certainly catchy.

Chronicles of the American Revolution

noreply@blogger.com (Mr. Byrne) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 23:57:00 +0000

Liberty, The American Revolution is a feature on PBS.org. There are a couple of resources in this feature that are worth noting. First, and probably the most useful, is The Chronicle of Revolution. The Chronicle of Revolution provides a timeline of events that contributed to the start of the American Revolution. Students can read newspaper accounts as they go through the chronicles. Within each newspaper account are links to further reading about important people and places mentioned in the articles.

The second item of interest in Liberty, The American Revolution is the Road to Revolution game. The game isn't really a game, it's more like a quiz with some graphics added to it. The game is designed to quiz students on the information in The Chronicle of Revolution.

Applications for Education
The Chronicle of Revolution and the Road to Revolution are best suited to use with middle school students or possibly older elementary school students. Neither resource will replace your textbooks, but they certainly make good supplements to them.

Please click here for seven more resources for teaching about the American Revolution.

The New Boston - Great Videos for Learning Computer Science and More

noreply@blogger.com (Mr. Byrne) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 21:30:00 +0000

The New Boston is an educational website and YouTube channel that I recently discovered while reviewing the EduPort Android app. The purpose of The New Boston is to share instructional videos and tutorials in the areas of computer science, computer programming, mathematics, science, robotics, and much more. Think of The New Boston as Khan Academy for computer science. For students who are interested in programming, The New Boston offers an active discussion forum in which they can ask questions.

One of the channels within The New Boston that jumped out at me is the Android app development series which contains 200 instructional videos.

Here's a sample from The New Boston.

Applications for Education
The New Boston could be a great resource for students who want to learn programming on their own. The New Boston could also be a great source of supplemental materials for the courses that you teach.

Video Project Idea - Get to Know Your School

noreply@blogger.com (Mr. Byrne) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 11:30:00 +0000

One of the challenges of large schools, especially large high schools, is getting to know the people in the building and what is happening in the building. I was thinking about this over the weekend when I got the idea for a student video project. The idea is this, have students create "this is our school" videos that can be displayed on your school's website.

Here are some video project ideas:

Profiles of teachers. Expand the profile beyond, "what do you teach?" and focus on the teacher's interests, hobbies, or "secret talents."
Profiles of students.
Profiles of lesser-known extracurricular clubs.
Profiles of secretaries, custodial staff, cafeteria staff. Don't forget, they're very important in keeping a school running smoothly.

Here are some free tools for creating videos:

WeVideo is a collaborative online video creation tool. In the video editor you can upload your own media clips or use stock media clips to produce your video. The video editor provides tools for trimming the length of display and or sound of each element you add to your video project. What makes WeVideo collaborative is that you can invite other people to create and edit with you. WeVideo offers four different user plans.

Myna is a free web-based audio track mixer created by Aviary. Using Myna you can mix together up to ten tracks to create your own audio files. The sounds you mix can come from the Myna library, your vocal recordings made with Myna's recorder, or audio tracks that you upload to your Myna account.

Roc, which is similar to Aviary's Myna audio editor, is a cloud-based tool for mixing sounds. Completed Roc projects can be downloaded for use in podcasts, videos, and other multimedia projects. Roc can also be integrated into your Google Apps account through the Google Apps Marketplace.

You might want to arrange a series of videos about your school. Perhaps linking them together in sequence in a choose-your-own adventure style. If so, check out this post for directions on how to do that.

Free Download - Ten Digital Storytelling Projects

noreply@blogger.com (Mr. Byrne) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 16:25:00 +0000

A couple of months ago I put out a call for readers who were interested in sharing their digital storytelling projects to get in touch with me. There was a good response to that call. From those responses came ten digital storytelling projects developed and conducted by educators just like you and me. I assembled the stories, added some content of my own, and put together the PDF that you should see embedded below. Please feel free to download the document from Issuu, Docstoc, or Scribd.

Open publication - Free publishing - More education

10 Digital Storytelling Projects

Another Earth - Compare Maps Side-by-Side

noreply@blogger.com (Mr. Byrne) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 15:22:00 +0000

Yesterday, I shared a great resource for geography teachers. That resource is called GE Teach. GE Teach was developed by a high school geography teacher. One of the nice features of GE Teach is the option to compare to views of Google Earth side-by-side. This morning I found a similar website called Another Earth.

Another Earth provides a split screen for comparing views of the Earth side-by-side. One neat use for Another Earth is to use the time sliders to compare views of the same places in the world at different times. You can also use Another Earth to compare different places at the same point in time. In the screen capture below I used the sun layer to compare levels of sunlight at the same time South America and Australia.

Click image to view full size.

Applications for Education
Another Earth doesn't offer as many layers for comparison as GE Teach does, but it is still a good tool for students to use to compare views of the Earth across time and space.

Science Fair Project Ideas from Education.com

noreply@blogger.com (Mr. Byrne) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 14:05:00 +0000

The second half of the school year seems to be when the most science fairs happen. If you and your students are looking for some ideas for science fair projects, Education.com offers some good ideas that you can use as-is or adapt to fit your specific situation. On the Education.com Science Fair page you can specify a grade level and a field of science to find project ideas suitable for your students.

Education.com offers a set of widgets that you can embed into your professional resources blog or website. The widgets offered link to resources developed by Education.com. I've embedded the Activities Widget below. The widget should link you to hands-on activities for teaching social studies. You can customize the widget to show content for any subject and or grade level that you like.

Education.com Activities

Social Studies Activities

Get your own widget