Tour Builder: Put Your Story on the Map

Tour Builder:  From Kelly Fitzgerald the Ed Tech Nut

Tour Builder allows a user to create a tour around the world using images, videos and text. Sign in with Google for Education account. Allows viewers to fly in using Street View.

Integration Ideas Students can create tours to represent travel through a book. Students can create tours to show where they have lived, traveled, want to travel, etc. Students can create tours to represent a timeline in history. Additional Resources Tour Builder Help Center Guides

Locate Public Domain Images with Pixabay

From EduTech for Teachers:

Welcome to another edition of Tech It Up Tuesday, a weekly series in which I share a an edtech tool, app, site or other resource that can be utilized in the educational setting.

OK, so what teacher or student living in this century doesn’t need a cool photo or two for a school-related activity? If you’re that person, then you’re going to love, love Pixabay, a site that hosts over 630,000+ high quality public domain photos, illustrations, vector graphics and videos free of charge for any purpose (the legal kind, of course).

Find your next hip image by conducting a keyword search and then if necessary, narrow your search through filtering by image type, category and/or orientation (landscape or horizontal). Users can also locate images by simply browsing the library as well. Once you discover “the one”, click the download button to view a variety of size choices to suit your needs.

All Pixabay images and videos are released free of copyrights under Creative Commons, which means they can be downloaded, modified, distributed and used royalty free without attribution in digital and/or print form, even in commercial applications.

Just so you know: Pixabay is an ad-supported site so when an image search is performed, a set of sponsored Shutterstock images appears at the top of the results page (similar to some Google search results in which display ads appear before the real deal). I have to admit, these images are pretty neat, but those appearing below the Shutterstock samples are the freebies.

Check out a few images I located via a search using the keyword “happiness”:







Classroom Connection:

In order to avoid any copyright issues, I typically recommend that students generate their own photos and graphics for multimedia projects whenever possible. However, when using their images is not an option, Pixabay is an excellent alternative.

Interactive Maps of Travel Through the Roman Empire

From Richard Byrne at Free Technology for Teachers

If you teach any lessons about the Roman Empire, take a look at ORBIS from Stanford University. ORBIS is Stanford University's Geospatial Network Model of the Roman Empire.

On ORBIS students can calculate the distance and travel times between 751 settlements in the Roman Empire. The calculations happen according to the modes of travel that would have been used during the time of the Roman Empire's greatest height. For example, I calculated the time and cost to travel by foot, wagon, and boat between Roma and Chalcis in March. The calculations include the cost of feeding donkeys along the way.

Click for full size image. 

 
Applications for Education 
While you could certainly have students use Google Earth to map distances between settlements in the Roman Empire, ORBIS is a step above that because students can calculate travel times and distances according the modes of transportation that were available during the Roman Empire.

How to Easily Record Video of your Classes Online (Step-By-Step)

From Matt Miller at Ditch That Textbook

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Using Google Hangouts on Air can enable teachers to create an online repository of videos of their classes. Students can watch them as needed.

The walls that kept classes from learning together are slowly starting to topple.

In the past, students were often confined to the classes they could take on campus. Teachers were often confined to teaching students face-to-face.

Now, with video options like Google Hangouts and Skype, teachers and students can meet with each other — or practically anyone else — around the globe that has the basic technology needs.

In my own classroom, I’ve found that Google Hangouts On Air — Google’s live video broadcast option — can help me record video of my classes and have it ready for students to watch in minutes.

Here are the steps that I take to record video of my class and make it available to my students. The process literally takes just a few minutes to set up (easily accomplished during a break between classes) and the video sharing is done in a few minutes as well.

1. Identify a Google account that you want to use to share videos to your class. I decided to create a new Google account for sharing these videos because I didn’t want to share them using my personal account. Plus, my school account had some features blocked that I couldn’t get around.

2. Once you’ve logged in to that account in Google, go to the Hangouts On Air page.Click the blue “Start a Hangout On Air” button.

The box you can use to name your Hangout.

3. In the box that appears, type a title for the Hangout (I usually include the date and the class I’m recording) and a description (I try to include a couple details of what we’ll be covering in the class). Under “Starts,” you’ll want to leave “Now” selected. Under “Audience,” I always select “Your circles.” I do that so that my class isn’t broadcast publicly. (You know, so I don’t run the risk of having someone I don’t know stumble into the video of my class.) Then click “Share.”

Note — The first time you do this, you’ll have to connect your Google Plus account with a YouTube account. It gives you a link to make that connection and it walks you through the entire process.

The Hangout On Air event page.

4. You’ll be taken to the event page for your Hangout On Air.You can enable some settings, like a Q&A for taking questions from the audience or the applause feature that lets the audience encourage you with clapping. You can also select a video to add as a trailer. Once you’re ready to start your Hangout On Air, click “Start.” (If you have a webcam that you need to connect to a computer, it would be good to connect it before moving on to the next step.)

5. Once you’re in the Hangout, click the “Start Broadcast” button when you’re ready to go live and start recording. You can record up to eight hours in one Hangout. (But, for the sake of your students, please don’t!) Click the “Stop broadcast” button when your video is done. Then click the red phone to end the Hangout.

With the Chromebook that I use to record class, I place it about three or four feet in front of where I’ll be teaching on a stool. It’s far enough away to see everything that I’ll be writing on the board (or displaying with a projector) but close enough that the microphone will pick up everything I say. (Device cameras and microphones will vary, of course, so you’ll probably want to do a test run beforehand.) When you’re in the Hangout, just watch your live video that’s being displayed to see how much adjusting you need to do to position the camera just right.

Note — While the Hangout is live, there’s a button in the bottom right that provides links. Those links allow people to join your broadcast and watch your class live. A student who is home ill or any other guest that wants to watch class remotely could be given a link and could take part in class as it happens!

6. When the Hangout is completed, the video from it is automatically uploaded to your YouTube channel and you’re returned to the event page. To get a link to the video, I usually click the play button on the event page. While it’s loading, there’s a YouTube logo in the bottom right. I click that to be taken to the video’s YouTube page. I just copy the link from the browser there. (There might be easier ways to do this, but this way works for me!)

7. After copying the link to the video, I just paste that link on my class website. You could also embed the video on your class website by clicking the “Share” tab on the YouTube video page and copying the embed code. (What??? You don’t have a class website? Here are some great ideas to jump start one of your own.)

Imagine the possibilities of recording your classes and having video of them available for use! Students who miss class can catch up by watching the videos, or they can watch again to make sure they didn’t miss anything. Being able to pause and rewind the teacher can be a great advantage.

In Indiana, when school is cancelled for poor winter weather, some schools have “eLearning days” where students do their work from home digitally. Recording a video with Hangouts On Air to be viewed live or watched later could be a perfect fit!

Teachers can use the videos as a reference for what they did in previous classes — or in previous years — to help with planning. Plus, teachers could share videos with each other to show their best lessons and activities. Everyone wins!

Google Apps "GAFE Smashing" Activities - Part 3: Breakout EDU Digital

Matt Miller @ Ditch That Textbook:

This is the final installment of a three-part series on “GAFE Smashing” — blending Google Apps together for engaging, creative experiences for students. Today’s post is written by Justin Birckbichler and Mari Venturino, both educators and Google Certified Innovators from Virginia and California, respectively. When they’re not creating new games for Breakout EDU Digital, they tweet at @Mr_B_Teacher and @MsVenturino.

Breakout EDU is an immersive learning platform developed by James Sanders and Mark Hammons. After visiting an escape room (a room where you are locked in and have to solve clues and riddles to escape) with a group of students, James and Mark noted how engaged the students were while working on the escape.

Problem solving. Critical thinking. Teamwork. And lots of fun. What’s Breakout EDU Digital all about? Check out this post. (Logo from Breakout EDU)

Realizing most educators can’t lock students in a room (for obvious legal and ethical reasons), the two decided to flip the concept – take a wooden box, add a hasp and a few locks, and provide clues. Let the students’ natural curiosity and excitement do the rest. By the end, students will have (hopefully) found and figured out all of the clues, enabling them to unlock all the locks and complete the game before time runs out. (See a thorough explanation of how Breakout EDU works here.)

We (Justin and Mari) have run multiple Breakout EDU games with our students. We love seeing how engaged and motivated our students are, even those who less likely to participate in class. We realized how much fun these games were, while also being educational. We wanted to replicate them using only digital tools. With Google Forms and data validation, we were able to recreate the locked box and hasp. In our games, all clues are linked directly within a Google Site, and take some serious detective work to solve.

This project started small, and we expected to share the games around, then move on with other things. When we sent out the initial invitation to Beta test our games on March 25, 2016, we were blown away with over 200 responses in less than 36 hours. After the initial Beta test and feedback, we released our games and website out to a wider audience on Facebook and Twitter.

In mid-April, James Sanders reached out to us and asked if we’d like to officially become Breakout EDU Digital, and take on breakoutedu.com/digital. We responded with an immediate “yes!” and began integrating our content into the Breakout EDU website.

We’ve certainly learned a lot since we first launched our games.

One lesson we’ve learned is that we constantly need to be flexible in our teaching. As part of our games we have a feedback form that allows us to hear directly from the people who are playing our games. We act on all feedback that we feel improves the games, which is something an effective teacher should always do as you gauge student reaction in class.

Resiliency and growth mindset have been another huge focal point of this project. We purposely make the games challenging and rather in-depth. Sometimes people contact us asking for answers or hints, and we encourage them to explore the games alongside their students, to show that teachers don’t always hold all the knowledge. This may make some teachers uncomfortable, but the connections your class forms as you decode the games together will pay off in dividends.

Some of the many Breakout EDU Digital games available to play at breakoutedu.com/digital.

You can definitely tie your instructional content into a Breakout EDU, whether the box version or the digital type. For our digital game “Alcatraz Night Escape,” we made understanding of the history of Alcatraz necessary to unlock the Form. Other users who have created their own have also tied their content into their digital breakouts. Imagine how much more engaging this is than reading it from a textbook! (See lots of pre-created Digital Breakout EDU games here.)

So how can you develop your own Breakout EDU Digital games? We’ve tried to streamline the process by having a “Build Your Own” button on the website. These are a series of screencast tutorials that model different elements of our games. The most important element is the Google Form that acts as the box. Under advanced settings on “short answer” (in the new Forms) or “text” (in the old Forms,) you must turn on “data validation.” From there, type in the desired response and add something like “Still locked” or “Keep trying” in the help text. If you don’t, it will give the answer to the students. There are plenty more tutorials available for you to watch, and we’re always on the lookout for new ideas!

One of the critical elements of the original Breakout EDU is the collaboration and communication between the classmates. With Breakout EDU Digital, there might not have been as inherent a need for collaboration since each device is its own box. We have presented at a GAFE Summit (Mari live, and Justin on Google Hangouts) where we had participants play a short demo game. The session started out with everyone on their own devices. They naturally paired up and then formed larger groups to work together to solve the breakout.

Additionally, we recently hosted a Breakout EDU Digital LIVE event with eighteen adults working together to solve a brand new game. These events proved that the collaboration factor definitely takes it to the next level.

We predict an exciting future for Breakout EDU Digital. We are currently getting ready to launch a Digital Sandbox, where community members can submit their own games for others to play and provide feedback. Additionally, we are both building our own individual games and collaborating on games. We’re on pace to release one game per week for the foreseeable future. We always love feedback and suggestions on new directions and how to improve our games.

So what are you waiting for? Go visit breakoutedu.com and breakoutedu.com/digital to learn more about how you can use it in your classroom, or join the Breakout EDU Facebook group for ideas and help. The students will be engaged, will collaborate, will develop interpersonal skills, will have fun, and will even learning something along the way!

Contact Justin or Mari via email at digital@breakoutedu.com.

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Mandi Tolen, a Missouri math teacher and #DitchBook Twitter chat regular, created a Breakout EDU Digital game for her students. It’s called, “Digital Breakout Data Cruncher.”

Mandi Tolen’s Breakout EDU Digital game, “Digital Breakout Data Cruncher”. Click here to check it out!

She’s a big fan of using Breakout EDU Digital to get kids excited about learning. “BreakoutEDU is a great ‘hook’ for a lesson,” she said. “It provides opportunities for students to problem solve and persevere. While solving the Breakout, students will be learning about the content. It would also be amazing to have students create their own BreakoutEDU.”

Mandi’s steps:

• You can create a digital BreakoutEDU using Googles Sites as the shell. By inserting a two column table onto the main page of your site and embedding a Google Form on one side and Google Drawing image on the other, you can create an exciting adventure for your students.
• On the Google Form, you will insert a timer from YouTube (BreakoutEDU has one you can use or find another if you want less the 45 minutes) and make sure you validate each answer so students can’t continue until they have entered the correct clue.
• In Google Draw, create your image with invisible hotspots linking to the websites or clues. To create an invisible hotpot, create a shape on top of the image and change the line and fill to transparent. You can still insert a link into the invisible shape. Make sure its order is in the front. Have a few people test your BreakoutEDU to make sure they can solve the clues. You know what you intended but you want to make sure the clues aren’t to difficult (or easy.)

Play “Digital Breakout Data Cruncher” here: https://sites.google.com/site/digitalbreakoutdatacruncher/

And check out Mandi’s tutorial on making a Breakout EDU Digital game: https://infinitelyteaching.wordpress.com/2016/05/01/make-a-digital-breakoutedu/

Richard Byrne: Free Technology for Teachers - 2 Good Tools for Building Online Discussions around Videos

Two Good Tools for Building Online Discussions Around Videos

Watching videos then answering questions about them is the basic premise of a lot of flipped classroom lessons. To take that idea to higher level, invite students to ask questions and or and notations to videos that you have shared with them. Vialogues and VideoNot.es are excellent tools for building online discussions around shared videos.

VideoNotes allows you to load a video on the left side of your screen then on the right side of the screen VideoNotes gives you a notepad on which to type. VideoNot.es has a Google Drive integration which allows you to save and share notes. In the video embedded below I provide an overview of how to use VideoNot.es. 

Vialogues is a website that is designed to enable users to host conversations around a video. Users can upload videos to Vialogues or use YouTube videos as the centerpieces of their conversations. After you have selected a video from YouTube or uploaded a video of your own, you can post poll questions and add comments that are tied to points in the video. Your Vialogue can be made public or private. Public Vialogue's can be embedded into your blog or website. Watch the video below to learn how to use Vialogues.

Google Slides: Ask Questions DURING A Presentation

From Alice Keeler at Teacher Tech:

Be Interactive with your Audience

A typical drawback of presenting is the challenge of interactivity. Even though we want people to ask us questions during a presentation, it can be difficult for audience members to ask. A new feature in Google Slides aims to fix that.

Q&A During the Presentation

Google Slides now allows the presenter to solicit questions from the audience during the presentation. The presenter is able to see the questions posted, as is the audience. Audience members can vote up the question to ensure the most important questions are highlighted.

Present Button

When presenting in Slides, click on the arrow next to the present button.

Turn On Questions

From the speaker notes floating window, choose to “Start new” question session.

Short URL

A short URL is displayed as a header on the Slides presentation. This makes it easy for your audience to get to the question window. No additional effort by the presenter required. Simply click on the button and you are good to go.

Ask a Question

Audience members are presented with a question window that allows them to submit a question. The questions asked are visible to others in the question window as well as to the presenter in the speaker notes window.

Vote

Audience members can vote on the questions. This helps the speaker to know which questions are most important to all of the participants.

Share the Questions

The speaker has the ability to push out the questions to the presentation. The questions are not embedded into the final slides, but rather display during the actual presentation. This allows the presenter to take questions on the fly during the presentation. It can be really intimidating to stop a speaker in the middle of their talk, using the new questions feature in Slides makes it easy to ask.

Student Centered

Typically standing in front of the room presenting slides is NOT a student centered activity. As with all tools, we use them with a lot of intentionality to create a student centered classroom. Allowing students to ask questions during a presentation is a great first step towards a more student centered model, but still typically puts the focus on the teacher and the front of the room.

How can I use this question tool to put students at the center of their learning?

Guest Speakers

A quick and dirty way to reach R on the SAMR model is to bring in guest speakers via Google Hangout, especially on the fly as students curiosities necessitate asking an outside person. Google Slides can easily present through Google Hangout. A challenge in being a guest speaker via Hangout is it is difficult to see when someone on the other hand has a question. This new feature in Google Slides solves that problem. No matter where participants in a Google Hangout are, they can ask questions.

Online Classes

For my online class I teach, I use Google Hangout and Slides together for added interactivity. Using Google Hangout on Air allows some students to watch the discussion and others to actively join the discussion. By using collaborative Google Slides with a Google Hangout, even students who are watching the recording are able to actively participate. Asking questions is a major challenge for those students though. No longer! In one window, present the collaborative Slides with Q&A. You are not presenting the slides, but the question feature is enabled. Use the Slides Q&A feature as a back channel for all participants.

Richard Byrne: Free Technology for Teachers - Presentation Slides

Slides From My Presentations at PSLA 2016

One of my favorite things to do professionally is speak at conferences because I get to meet so many passionate educators. This week I had the privilege to give the opening keynote at the PSLA 2016 conference on Thursday evening. On Friday morning I gave another presentation. The slides from both of my presentations are embedded below.



Visit my work with me page to learn how to bring me to your school or conference.

7 Big Google Changes and How They Help Educators

Matt Miler at Ditch That Textbook

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These Google Changes — including Classroom, Keep, Calendar and more — can boost productivity and create new possibilities in the classroom. (Image via Steve Jurvetson /Flickr / CC BY 2.0)

Tens of millions of students and teachers worldwide use Google tools in the classroom.

Students are creating and collaborating, researching and sharing. Teachers are managing more efficient digital classes and offering more engaging, thought-provoking learning opportunities.

When new features or changes happen with Google products that affect education, it’s a big deal.

In recent days and weeks and months (as of publication of this post), Google has been improving its offerings for teachers and students.

Here are seven changes you should know about, ranging from small features with big impact to new, cutting-edge technology to watch as it develops:

1. Schedule to Google Classroom — This one must have been a very popular request among teachers. Before, you could post assignments, announcements and questions to Google Classroom. You could create new posts as drafts and save them. But you couldn’t schedule them to automatically post later.

Now that’s all possible. When creating a new assignment, announcement or question, instead of clicking “Assign,” use the drop-down button next to the “Assign” button and choose “Schedule”.(More: Google for Education’s news release)

Classroom application: Teachers can set up posts days or weeks in advance, saving the trouble of scrambling to post something the morning before class starts.

2. Slides Q&A — Slide presentations can be a very one-way method of communication when the speaker speaks and there’s no interaction with the audience. Google Slides has a new feature that makes slide presentations more interactive.

With Slide Q&A, people in the audience can submit questions to a presenter to be answered during the presentation. The presenter can see the questions on his/her put an audience-submitted question on the screen and answer it on the spot.

There’s also a neat feature that makes your cursor on the screen look like a laser pointer.

See all of it in a quick tutorial video here, or see the Google support page with step-by-step instructions. (More: Google Docs Blog news release)

Classroom application:

• Students can ask questions to teachers in a new format (although, in a smaller class, it’s still probably easiest to raise hands to ask questions).
• This would be handy if you want students to ask relevant questions during each other’s presentations.
• Educators providing professional development can gather questions with this tool.
• When connecting multiple classes via Google Hangouts/Skype/etc. or with a virtual guest orvirtual field trip, this tool can help classes to be better connected.

3. Set sharing permissions to expire — Sometimes, students only need access to your document, slides, spreadsheet or other file for a certain amount of time. You can now set your sharing permissions to expire at a specified time.

Click the blue “Share” button in the file to share. Add the person whose permission needs to expire at a certain point. Choose “Can View” instead of “Can Edit” or “Can Comment”. A stopwatch icon will appear, which you can click to specify when you want that person’s permission to view the file to expire.

A couple of limitations:

• You can only use “Can View” permissions with this feature (not edit or comment permissions).
• You must have an education or business Google account for access to this feature. (Standard Google accounts don’t have it.)
• You must add every individual whose permission you want to expire. (If you have a large group of students, educators or others, that could be cumbersome.)
  • A possible workaround: Remove permissions the old-fashioned way. Share the file with an “everyone with the link can …” link. When you want to remove permissions, change the sharing settings in that file back to “Private.” If you want to share the file with a different group, make a copy (File > Make a copy …) and share it. (That way, you’ll be sharing a brand new link and the people that had access previously won’t have access to it.)

Check out the Google support page with detailed instructions or the Google Apps updates page news release.

Classroom application: This will automatically remove access to study guides, assignments, answer explanations to tests or other classroom materials you share with students. Also, expiring permissions is a way to create a hard deadline on an activity … the document “disappears” when the deadline hits. (Although students are able to make a copy to their Google Drives if the want.)

4. Google Keep Chrome extension — Google Keep is a go-to Google tool for me. It’s like virtual sticky notes that follow you via your Google account to whatever device you use (computer, tablet, smartphone, etc.). Check out the basics and some ways to use it in class in this post.

If you use the Google Chrome web browser, you can now install an extension (like a little app in your Chrome browser) that will save a webpage as a note to your Google Keep with one click. You can add comments to your note so you’ll know why you saved it in the first place (very important for me!).

(More: Google Keep Chrome extension news release on the Google Docs blog)

Classroom application:

• Save webpages you’ll want to remember later for classroom instruction or professional development with this Google Keep extension.
• Students can gather resources for research, presentations, projects and more with the Google Keep extension.

5. Find a time with Google Calendar for Android — If you keep track of appointments with the Google Calendar app and you use an Android device (tablet/smartphone), finding a common meeting time with others just got much easier.

After adding the people involved in your calendar appointment, click the “Find a time” button. The app analyzes everyone’s calendars and finds openings that are common to all of their calendars. Choose the one that fits best and send the calendar invite.

(More: Gmail blog news release)

Classroom application: If you schedule appointments with colleagues, administrators, parents or even students that also use Google Calendar, this can save you lots of time asking questions back and forth about the best time to meet.

6. Synergise, a Google Apps virtual coach — It’s helpful to have someone help you learn about tools you don’t know yet and new features of ones you do know. Synergise does that with Google Apps, providing on-screen, in-the-moment, bite-sized training while you use the product. Previously a paid service, now Google has acquired Synergise and will be making its “Google Apps virtual coach” totally free.

Google says that Synergise will be available to all Google users by the end of the 2016 year.

(More: Google for Work blog news release)

Classroom application: Teachers who want to learn the basics of Google tools — or pick up new or advanced skills — will be able to use this on-screen virtual coach. Synergise will help students get up to speed even faster, and their training on Google Apps won’t depend solely on what the teacher can tell them.

7. 3D, virtual reality painting with Tilt Brush — This one likely won’t be readily accessible to classrooms right away, but it’s definitely worth watching.

Google has announced a new 3D painting tool called Tilt Brush. It works with the HTC Vive, a virtual reality set (VR goggles, controllers, etc.) that provides a full-room immersive experience. Tilt Brush lets you paint in 3D space in virtual reality. There’s a pretty stunning YouTube video of it(see below).

The HTC Vive retails at $799, so buying sets for your class — or even one! — is probably out of reach. The reason I include it here is because this technology has the chance to become accessible quickly. The VR goggles look and act a lot like Google Cardboard, Google’s new product that uses a cell phone to provide a VR experience. The Vive’s controllers work much like what you can do in games like Lightsaber Escape with your cell phone.

This VR/augmented reality technology is becoming more and more accessible. This is the world our students will work in one day. It’s worth watching.

Classroom application: With an HTC Vive VR set, students could paint in 3D in art classes or other educational settings. Its immersive setting can let students explore places — and their imaginations — in 3D. (If you can purchase one. If not, we’ll watch for this capability in more affordable options later.)