I’m not saying Rewordify is the silver bullet that will solve all of your problems with difficult text and primary documents. But it comes pretty dang close.

As we’re asking our kids to do more reading, especially of primary sources, it is also becoming more difficult to find leveled text and grade appropriate documents. The people at the Stanford History Education Group and others are suggesting that we need to modify the stuff we give our kids, making the information more accessible. That’s not always easy to do – it takes time and can be difficult finding replacements for struggling readers.

Rewordify can help.

Basically Rewordify takes a block of text or website and replaces difficult words and phrases with text that is easier to understand.

The site claims that this helps students read more, understand difficult English faster, and learn words in new ways. I’d throw in that the site can help you and your students break down difficult primary documents.

It’s also a great example of how you can integrate the Collect theme of our C4 Framework into your unit design.

The process is simple. Just type or paste in a sentence, paragraph, or website address and click the button. Rewordify.com analyzes the entire block of text—all at once—and finds all the hard words and phrases. You’ll instantly see a modified version, that simplifies and highlights those hard words and phrases, helping users understand and learn in new ways.

You can do the same sort of stuff with web pages. Just enter a website URL into the box. A separate window pops open with the same sort of look that you got with text but now it’s embedded on the site you entered. You can use all of the same tools as before.

Users can change the way the highlighting works to fit their learning style. You can control how easy or difficult the output text is, and the difficulty threshold of the words that are simplified and explained. (The site uses the Brigham Young University’s 450-million-word Corpus of Contemporary American English to determine the difficulty of each word in the text blocks you enter.)

Simply enter a block of text and click the button. You’ll instantly see a menu of choices, from “Maximum,” which rewords the most words with the simplest definitions, up to Level 5, which rewords only the hardest words with more descriptive definitions. This lets you match the support level to the reader, and progressively withdraw support as reading skill improves.

See all the options on the Settings page and read more on the Help page.

With a few clicks, you can also create a variety of foundational content building activities such as vocabulary quizzes, definition lists, matching sheets, and word bank sheets, with or without answer keys, from your block of text.

Students can do on-screen flash cards, quizzes, and word bank activities that give instant feedback and support their learning. Just rewordify a block of text, and you’ll see the tools below the text.

Their video does a great job of demonstrating what it looks like in practice. (Not sure I agree with the lounge jazz choice of music as background but what do I know?)

Filed under: 21st century skills, C4, differentiated instruction, literacy, primary sources, reading, strategies, technology integration

Magisto is a video editing service whose mobile apps I've featured in the past. This morning I tried tried their free Chrome App. The Magisto Chrome App makes it easy to stitch together video clips and pictures to create short videos.

The Magisto Chrome App allows you to quickly drag videos and images from your desktop to your Magisto account. From the videos you upload, Magisto will select the best portions to remix and blend with images. After you've uploaded the media that you want mixed, select a theme and music for your video. Magisto creates your video after you've completed the steps of uploading media, selecting a theme, and choosing music. The final video is emailed to you.

On the Magisto website you can create albums of your videos. Your albums can be made public or private. If you want to create a group album, you can invite other Magisto users to contribute to an album. From an album you can download videos and grab embed codes for your videos.

Applications for Education
The Magisto Chrome App is a good option for teachers who would like a simple video creation tool that offers a little bit more than Animoto in terms of sharing and length of videos that their students can create.

Biology Pop is a site that features videos, articles, games, and reviews of apps about topics in biology. The site features content in seven categories; anatomy, cell biology, biotechnology, genetics, ecology, evolution, and taxonomy. You can browse through the categories in a Pinterest-like style. An option to search by media type is also available.

Applications for Education
Biology Pop seems to be focused on current news and topics in biology rather than trying to be a reference site. If you're looking to bring some current news into your biology lessons, Biology Pop might be a good site to bookmark.

Thanks to Caitlin Cahill for sharing Biology Pop on Google+. 

Amazon Storybuilder is a new tool designed to help aspiring screenplay writers organize their stories. Storybuilder uses a virtual corkboard interface that will feel familiar to anyone that has ever used Padlet or Lino. On Storybuilder you can write your stories in a series of virtual sticky notes. Your corkboard can be arranged in columns for each act and scene in your story. Of course, if you're writing a book you could arrange your columns as chapters. Each sticky note can have a tag assigned to it to make it easier to locate when you have more notes than can appear on one page at time. You can arrange notes by dragging and dropping them on your Storybuilder board.

Applications for Education
You do have to have an Amazon account to use Storybuilder which limits it to use by high school and college students. Younger students could accomplish similar things by using a service like Padlet or Lino to organize their notes while planning a story.

Image credit: Jen Deyenberg

Tomorrow is the last day of school before winter break for many students. If you're looking for a good elementary school or middle school activity for the last day before break, consider having students create and send digital greeting cards. Here are three tools students can use to create and send digital greeting cards.

Animoto offers video themes for every season. Their holiday themes include "starry night," "wonderland of snow," "eight days of lights," "pop-up pandemonium," "gifting gifts," "spirit of December," and "wrapping scraps." To send a video greeting card through Animoto just select one of the themes, upload images or choose images from the Animoto gallery, select a soundtrack, title your project, and then let Animoto mix it into a beautiful video greeting. Students can share their video greetings through email, Facebook, or by embedding it into a blog.

PicMonkey is a great image editing and collage creation tool. They're currently offering a variety of holiday themes that students can use for their collages. Your students could create a holiday collage and share it via email or post in on your classroom blog.

Its A Message is a neat site for sending digital greetings that uses Google Maps Street View as its basis for generating location-based greeting cards. To send a greeting through Its A Message start by specifying any location. Its A Message will then take you to that location in a Street View display that has been enhanced for the holidays. For example, the imagery of Portland, Maine has been drawn with lights and snowflakes. After settling on a location click "share your message" to customize what appears on the screen and to send the greeting to friends.

Editor's note: Looking back on 2013, Edutopia has had a fantastic year. With more than 650 blog posts, 6700 comments and thousands of daily interactions with educators on our social media channels, we're thrilled to be connecting with so many talented and hard-working teachers, administrators, parents and students.

To close out the year, we asked one of our newer bloggers, Vicki Davis, for her roundup of our ten most trafficked posts -- some of which were written in previous years -- and why they're still resonating with educators.

Looking at the ten blog posts that really grabbed our attention 2013, I'm struck by how many of these are timeless topics for teachers. It's obvious that teachers, rather than being told what to do, prefer clear examples of how it's being done successfully today. Every one of these posts revolves around big-picture concepts with specific how-to's. (It is also clear that teachers love lists!)

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Envelopes for Google Drive is a handy Google Chrome Web App that I used earlier today. The app is actually a Drive Script that when launched creates an envelope template that you can save and access through your Google Drive account. Once the template is in your Google Drive account you can type addresses on the envelope for standard mailing.

Envelopes for Google Drive isn't something I'm going to use often, but I do need to address an envelope using this app beats the heck out of my chicken scratch handwriting on the envelope.

Whenever students start searching on the web for pictures to use in their slideshows, videos, or infographics I have them search first for public domain and Creative Commons licensed images. Using public domain images and Creative Commons licensed images (with proper attribution) ensures that students don't accidentally infringe on someone's copyright rights. In the video below I demonstrate three ways for students to search for Creative Commons licensed images.

The CC Attribution Helper mentioned in the video can be found here.

Assessment is one of the things that I'm often asked about in my blogging and website creation workshops. One of the assessment resources that I like to point out is this collection of rubrics from the University of Wisconsin, Stout. In the collection you will find rubrics for assessing student blogging, student wikis, podcasts, and video projects. Beyond the rubrics for digital projects there are rubrics for activities that aren't necessarily digital in nature. For example, you can find rubrics for writing, research, and oral presentations.

Applications for Education
These rubrics might not fit perfectly with the projects you're students are working on, but they could provide a good starting point for creating your own rubrics. Perhaps you could show the rubric you're considering to your students and ask them for their input as to what they think is important to be evaluated in their projects.

Flickr's massive collection of public domain images called The Commons grew by more than 1,000,000 images last week. Last week The British Library released more than 1,000,000 images to The Commons. The images from The British Library cover a wide range of topics from political satire to maps and diagrams to landscapes and portraits. You can find the images from The British Library here and the entire collection of The Commons here.

Applications for Education
The Commons was already a good place for students and teachers to find public domain images (mostly of a historical nature) and the addition of The British Library's images makes it even better. I've used images from The Commons in my history classes as prompts for discussion and my students have used them in short documentary videos they've made.

To go beyond visual artifacts you may want to explore The British Library's Sound Maps.

Over the weekend many blogs have covered this news from The British Library. I first saw the announcement from a Tweet from Jen Deyenberg. 

Editor's note: John Larmer, Editor in Chief at the Buck Institute for Education (BIE), contributed to this post.

The Common Core has embedded within it some Big Ideas that shift the role of teachers to curriculum designers and managers of an inquiry process. How can project-based learning (PBL) help with this shift?

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A couple of weeks ago, I piloted a 4th grade book talk at one of our elementary schools. Today, I piloted an entire 4th grade book talk between two elementary schools, with hopes that it goes well so I can begin doing this once a month with each grade level.

I am elated to say that it worked beautifully! And when I say ‘it’, I am referring to the technology AND the awesome kids that presented. I was a little worried about the Hangout on Air since our announcements trial last Friday. The morning I got in, Hangouts on Air had completely changed overnight and I’m not sure if it was that, or our bandwidth, but the teachers could not see it live. This time, we successfully had 11 classes watching the live stream. (4 in on the call, 6 watching) Yes, there was a bit of a delay today…but nothing too terrible.

The thing I’m most excited about is the excitement that is coming from the kids. The video book talks have started so many conversations about reading. I am hearing things like “I love that we are hearing about different books in the library. I always pick the same ones.” and “Can I do the book talk next time?” I have been so impressed with our students and love their enthusiasm with this.

In the next few weeks, I plan to roll this out with all grade levels. I will simply pick a 10-15 minute chunk of time every 2-4 weeks and invite all of those grade level teachers to enjoy us. I hope to eventually invite other schools from different parts of the country to share their favorite books too. I am also really excited to begin sharing our new books this way.

Overall, I am very excited to see where this takes us! Ultimately, I am just excited to see our students pumped about reading great books!

This morning I went to use the MIT App Inventor for the first time in a couple of weeks and discovered that MIT App Inventor 2 is now available to anyone who has a Google Account. MIT App Inventor 2 works just like the first version except version 2 runs entirely in your browser (Chrome or Firefox, IE is not supported). I immediately went to my Chromebook just to confirm that MIT App Inventor would run correctly on it, and it does.

The only download that is required for App Inventor 2 is the optional emulator. The emulator allows people who don't have Android devices to text their apps on their desktops. If you have an Android device then the emulator is not required and you don't need to worry about installing it.

Applications for Education
If you would like to introduce your students to programming real-world applications, the MIT App Inventor is a fantastic tool. App Inventor does not require you to have any prior coding or app development skill in order to create a working Android app. MIT provides excellent support documentation and curriculum for classroom use for new users of App Inventor.

Thanks to Peter Vogel sharing examples on Google+, this morning I learned about the Google's new Tips website. Google Tips is collection of Google product use examples and tips. You can select a specific product to learn about or scroll through the whole gallery of tips for all products. Most of the tips are things that I would categorize as "beginner" tips. Beginner tips are great for schools that are just getting started with Google Apps for Education, Chromebooks, and or Android tablets.

When you need a little more information about a Google product or you encounter an unexpected error, the Google Products Forum is a good place to search for help from other Google Apps users. For example, I turned to the Google Drive Forum to find out if other users were encountering unexpected errors with the Google Docs Template Gallery this morning.

Twice this week I've been asked for alternatives to iBooks Author that students can use to create multimedia books. This is probably a good time to share the three options that I usually recommend. These are listed in the order in which I typically recommend them.

Simple Booklet is a service offering free online booklet creation and publishing. To create a book using Simple Booklet just sign-up for a free account and click create. Select the layout template that suits your needs. To add content click anywhere on the blank canvas and a menu of options will appear. You can add text, images, audio files, videos, and links to each page of your booklet. In the field for adding text there is an option to copy from Word documents.

Each page of your Simple Booklet can have multiple elements on it. To include videos you can upload your own files or select from a variety of provides including SchoolTube, TeacherTube, YouTube, and others. To add audio to your pages you can upload your own files or again select from the online hosts Last.fm, Sound Cloud, or Mix Cloud. When you're done building pages in your Simple Booklet you can share it online by embedding it into a webpage or you can share the unique link generated for your booklet.

Widbook is a platform designed to help people collaboratively create multimedia books. The service is part multimedia book authoring tool and part social network. Mashable called it "the YouTube of books." On Widbook you can create a digital book that contains text, images, and videos. Widbook is collaborative because you can invite others to make contributions to your books. To use Widbook you have to create a profile on the service. The books that you create become a part of your profile. If you allow it, other Widbook users can add content and or comments to your books. Likewise, you can search for others' books and make contributions to their books.


Widbook - Write, read and share! from Widbook on Vimeo.

Glossi is a service for creating digital magazines. Glossi magazines can include images, videos, audio files, and links to external sources of information. The magazines that you create are displayed with page-turning effects. Your magazines can be embedded into your blog. Learn more about Glossi in the video below.

As the holiday break approaches many high school and college students will be preparing for exams. When getting together in the same place to study with a group, an online study group is a good option too. Here are three tools students can use to organize online study groups.

ExamTime is a service that middle school, high school, and college students can use to prepare for tests. On ExamTimes users can create flashcards, mind maps, and practice quizzes to help them study. ExamTime also provides the option to create online groups to share study materials. Groups allow teachers and students to share learning resources to group members and to host discussions.


Think Binder is a website that gives students a place to create online study groups. In each group students can share files, share links, chat, and draw on a collaborative whiteboard. Students can create and join multiple groups. As you will see in the video below, getting started with Think Binder takes just a minute. Embedded below is my brief video overview of Think Binder.


Google+ is probably the most robust service for high school and college students to use create online study groups. Students can create private communities in which they share resources, have discussions, and they can host Hangouts in which they talk see each other as well as share whiteboard space, share documents, and share presentations.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Moyan Brenn

When I first started to get online, I used Internet Explorer, then Firefox, and now I use Google Chrome, but am able to use any of those other browsers depending upon the site and what works best.

I also signed up years ago for a Hotmail account, but then at work I was given “First Class” email, followed by Outlook account, and now Gmail.

Do you remember Word Perfect?  I used that as well, followed by Word (a ton of different versions), and now exclusively Google Drive for word processing.

Other than all of these things leading to Google products (I do love Google stuff but am also a big fan of an iPhone), what do all of these things have in common?

Change.

To clarify this isn’t change for the sake of change.  All of the technologies that I have left behind and have moved onto are for something better, yet they have more than likely iterations of one another.   Innovation is not always entirely new, but it should always be better.

I would be surprised that in 10 years I am using the same things that I am now as I know in the world of technology, things continuously evolve.  It is norm in the world of technology, and in reality, the world.  Change is inevitable, and many people in the world of educational technology see change as the constant and something to embrace, not fear. This is not everyone (there are a lot of people in educational technology that are still terrified of the “cloud”) but it is a common mindset with many that are in the field.

This is one of the reasons why I believe educational technology seems to be creeping into every conversation and every level of school at this moment in time.  Not because change hasn’t been the constant, but because of the pace that change is happening.  What is awesome about this development is that you are seeing traditional “technology” conferences (such as ISTE), have a different audience.  You are not only finding tech coordinators anymore, but teachers of every level and administrators.  These educators are not necessarily coming to check out the technology, but are embracing the mindset that at every level, educators are looking to become innovators.  Many educators outside of the EdTech have had this same “innovator” mindset for a long time, and it seems like now is the “perfect storm” of educators coming together.

To try and predict the important technology that we will be using years from now in education is much too hard; just expect to be doing something different.  Yet, to hire and look for and develop people that see change as an opportunity to do something amazing should be a standard in our organizations.

The “Innovator Mindset” is something that educators should embrace as a whole.

We piloted our first Book Talk on Air today! What. A. Blast! Eventually, I will do this once a month for each grade level so all of the classes can tune in. It will be a great way to share our new library books and get the kids involved in book reviews. The kids were fabulous! We can’t wait until the next one!

If you’re reading this and have no idea what the Daily Create is, you can thank me later.

Essentially it’s the brain child love child of Alan Levine and company. It’s filled with creative goodness both from a consumption aspect but mostly as a community of participation. I’ve made small contributions over the past few months but have been faithful introducing many to its awesomeness. My belief about creativity is that it’s a muscle and this is as good an exercise plan as there is.

Given the upcoming term I’ll be teaching starting in January, I began planning and Alan has been gracious to participate and share in every one of the 10+ sections I’ve taught over the past 7 years. This time it came with a price.

 

https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/408723888575504384

Fine. I needed the kick in the pants.

Unlike most Daily Creates, Alan set up 3 that built upon each other beginning with this one:
Create a visual that might accompany one of the mashed up headlines from @twoheadlines

So I did.

I don’t know if this looks that good or not. I realize I’m no photoshop expert and in fact couldn’t remember the last time I really tried to mix and layer two or more images. I realized I don’t think I have any software on my machine that does that so I used Pixlr to create this. The biggest issue I had was resizing the layer. In fact I couldn’t figure it out so I resized the baby outside of pixlr and imported it so I wouldn’t have to fiddle with the size. Anyway, it’s a bit hacky but as a tweet/image combo is decent.

Of course this was only assignment #1. The next assignment was to write a story to go with the headline. No technical no how but took some time trying to make it work. This was the result:

The once feared Raider Nation is trying something new. In an effort to deflect the focus on their ineptness as a football team, the Oakland Raiders have begun a new initiative, adopting and caring for children. The goal is to have other teams see the Raiders as soft and caring and thus have other teams take them even more lightly than they currently are.

The first adoption is baby Katie. Plans are to bring her out with the team captains during the coin flip. Their opponents will be encouraged to tickle and say “Koochie Koo” to the infant instead of the usual handshake. While this method is not based on any research, the team is desperate. The Vikings, Texans and Jaguars are currently looking into a similar program, only with puppies and kittens.

Finally I had to complete the trifecta for Alan with an audio assignment and using some clips from Youtube and bringing them into Audacity to mix them, I uploaded it to Soundcloud:

So while all this was someone coercive on Alan’s part, I’m thankful he did it. I know I use time as an excuse. Sometimes assignments don’t interest me but I really don’t think there’s a better way to practice and improve creativity with media than the Daily Create. Maybe you have another method or maybe you think the Daily Create is useless. I’ll continue to support and encourage others and participate more.

Also I can now book Alan for February 24th.

 

Over the last couple of weeks whenever I drive around my town I see more snow accumulating on the mountains. This weekend the lifts will open on the mountain closest to my home and I can't wait to hit the slopes. On the topic of skiing, this month National Geographic has a couple of neat features. First Skiers features an interactive timeline and a map of the history of skiing around the world. The timeline begins in 8000 BC and continues through present day. The timeline displays when, where, and how people have used skis around the world throughout time.

After examining the history and development of skiing, consider introducing your students to the physics of skiing. In the video below the National Science Foundation offers a four minute overview of the physics of skiing. The video examines the roles of gravity, acceleration, and friction on the speed of a skier. After watching the video, delve into more detail with this lesson plan from the University of Utah's math department.

Scrible is a free service offering a nice set of tools for highlighting, annotating, and bookmarking webpages. Recently, Scrible released a new Chrome extension that includes tools for highlighting, creating sticky notes, and altering the font on any webpage that you save in your Scrible account. Scrible also offers an option for formatting bibliographies while you bookmark. And to help you organize your favorite parts of articles Scrible allows you to compile your article clippings into one package.

The Scrible Chrome extension notifies you when you’re on a webpage you previously annotated. The Chrome extension will prompt you to load your previous annotations when you visit a page you've previously saved. To help you keep your most research fresh in your mind, Scrible's Chrome extension automatically loads your most recent annotations while you browse the Web.

Applications for Education
Tools like Scrible are excellent for students to use when they're conducting online research. The benefit of using a tool like Scrible is that students can take notes on their bookmarks and bookmark only the parts of a website that they need to reference in their reports. Saving bookmarks in this manner saves time when you go back to visit a site because you'll immediately see what it was that promoted you to bookmark it in the first place.

Students can get a free Scrible account that has double the storage capacity of the standard free account.

Last week I posted a review of Randy Krum's Cool Infographics then followed-up by posting Five Good Online Tools for Creating Infographics. Consider this a second follow-up to my Cool Infographics book review. In his book Randy Krum goes into much more detail on each of these key elements of good infographic design. These are the elements of good design that he outlines in his chapter about designing infographics. You can get a sample chapter of the book here.

1. Be accurate. It seems obvious, but you will find infographics are not accurate. For example, make sure your pie charts add up to 100%.

2. Tell one story really well. An infographic that tries to do too much ends up not telling a story at all.

3. The 5 second rule. Krum shares that most of the page view duration times are 5-10 seconds for infographics featured on his blog. Create infographics that tell a story quickly.

4. Big fonts are not data visualizations. Krum states, "displaying the number in a large font doesn't make it any easier for the audience to understand."

5. Minimize text. Along the lines of #4 above. This is another tip that seems obvious, yet we see text-heavy infographics all over the web.

6. Eliminate chart legends. If the viewer needs a legend, your infographic's story might not be as clear as it should be.

7. Pick a good topic. Some topics are not as suitable for infographic display as others.

Disclosure: I received a free press copy of the Cool Infographics book, but I don't have any financial interest in sales of this book. I just find the topic and the book interesting. 

Classmint is a free online flashcard service. Like other services similar to it, Classmint can be used to create and share sets of flashcards. A couple of aspects of Classmint make it different from some other flashcard services. First, Classmint will read your flashcards to you. Second, in addition to supporting the use of images in your flashcard, Classmint allows you to annotate those images on your flashcards. Learn more about Classmint in the video below.


Applications for Education
As I've said for years, I've never assigned the task of creating flashcards to high school students, yet they just seem to show up with them. Services like Classmint could be useful to students who like to use flashcards as a method of reviewing before a test. The option for including annotated images will be helpful to students studying for exams courses like anatomy and physiology.

Disclosure: Classmint is a financial supporter of Free Technology for Teachers. 

Our first graders are working on a very special holiday family traditions project in their classrooms, in the library, and at home with their family.

For this project, we decided to have each student pick a holiday family tradition to tell all of us about.

Over Thanksgiving break, each student worked on the "Holiday Traditions" research, shown below, with their family.  They were to pick a holiday tradition and explain it in four easy steps.
Writing 1.6 With guidance and support from adults, use a variety of digital tools to produce and publish writing, including in collaboration with peers.

Writing 1.7 Participate in shared research and writing projects (example: explore a number of "how-to" books on a given topic and use them to write a sequence of instructions) 

Writing 1.8 With guidance and support from adults, recall information from experiences or gather information from provided sources to answer a question. 

Speaking & Listening 1.1 Participate in collaborative conversations with diverse partners about grade 1 topics and texts with peers and adults in small and larger groups. 
Next week we are going to Skype with our friends from Capstone.... Karon Dubke, senior photographer, Sarah Schuette, author and photo stylist, and Marcy Morin, studio scheduler will talk to the first graders about creating these wonderful books and how important it is to create clear written steps and photographs or illustrations when giving directions to others. 

We will even be making a special treat from one of the cookbooks and a little origami with the artist of the other series too. It is going to be such a fun day....We all can't wait to connect with our friends in their studio.  
During this week, the first graders took the written directions that they did with their family and created a storyboard of their four steps.  They illustrated each step with pencil, crayons, and markers.
They really enjoyed sharing their holiday family traditions.  They also loved working on the storyboard for their project too.

We will use these storyboards next week when we start putting the final project together.  We will be taking their written directions, along with the storyboard illustrations, and combining them to create a digital project that we will share with their families, our school community, and globally.

Our third grade buddies will be helping the first graders with this part of the project too.

I still remember my first Skype call. My brother was doing some work in Cairo and suggested via email that we try a new tool that he had been using. Of course, we had some trouble with the bandwidth and so kept losing the video.

But how cool was that? Audio and video from halfway around the world?

Skype has gotten better, bandwidth has gotten bigger, and the opportunities to use Skype as a teaching and learning tool have gotten wider.

And I know many of you already use Skype in your classrooms but for those still not sure about the whole thing or aren’t sure what that might look like, here’s a suggestion. Start small and try something like Mystery Skype.

At its simplest level, Mystery Skype is an educational game, invented by teachers, played by two classrooms on Skype. The aim of the game is to guess the location of the other classroom by asking each other questions. It works with all grade levels and is perfect for content like geography and history.

Start by heading to the Skype in the Classroom site and create a teacher profile. You don’t actually have to do this to use Skype as a teaching tool but as part of the deal, Skype gives you 12 months of free group video chats – allowing for multiple classrooms to chat at the same time. So . . . kind of a no-brainer.

You also get access to other educators and all of their posted lessons. Pretty sweet.

Then just head over to the Mystery Skype site and get started. And again, remember, you can always just arrange your own Skype conversations with whomever you want. Going through the Skype in the Classroom site makes it easier for you to connect with other teachers.

Steps in the process?

• Sign up
  Lots of places to do this – the quickest and easiest will be the Skype in the Classroom site. But there are other places out there.
• Arrange for a date and time
  And keep in mind the different time zones. (I tried one once with a group in Australia. That International Date Line really screwed me up. Don’t be that guy.)
• Get your kids ready
  Depending on the grade, your students may need a lot of prep. If it’s a simple give and take with another class with the goal of figuring out location, your kids will need to research their own city and state – climate, people, sports teams, landmarks, tourist spots, etc so they are prepared to answer questions
• Brainstorm questions to ask
  This ties right back to their own research. These are questions we want to ask so we need to be prepared to answer similar questions. But a good place to start is to tell your kids to start big and work backwards. Start with stuff like “Are you in the western hemisphere?” not “Are you Chicago?” You might try this list of questions to get started.
• Some suggest assigned jobs for your kids during the call.
  Like Greeters, Answerers, Mappers, etc. I like this idea.
• Test your tech
  Make sure that the computer, speakers, camera, projector are all working. The Test Call option in the software is great for this. This is also a great excuse to do a test run with your kids. Practice asking and answering questions.You will also want to confirm with the other teacher about date, time, and process. And be sure to talk about the no-Googling issue. Will kids get to use online resources to solve the problem?
• Make the call
  Then step back and let your kids figure it out. This is their call, not yours. But be ready to help fact check their answers. And alternating questions between groups is usually the simplest strategy during the call. But feel free to let one group work through the process until they guess correctly and then switch.

• Name that artifact
  Arrange with a local or not-so-local museum to showcase an artifact or display. Students have to guess what it is.
• Book talks
  Read the same book as another class. Meet on Skype to discuss.
• Author talks
  Most authors love to talk about their book. Also think about online bloggers or authors of newspaper and magazine articles.
• Outside experts
  You can go so many different ways with this. Studying geographic land forms? Connect with state or national office at the Department of the Interior. Gettysburg? Call a ranger at the NPS battlefield site.

A few resources?

• More than you will ever need
• Skype history lessons
• The Global Connection

Have fun!

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In my previous post shared some advice from Randy Krum, author of Cool Infographics, about creating infographics. In his book Randy devotes a chapter to design tools. Many of the tools used by professional designers cost hundreds or thousands of dollars. But you don't have to spend anything if you want your students to try their hands at creating a data visualization in the form of an infographic. Here are five free tools that your students can use to create infographics.

Infogr.am is an online tool for creating interactive charts, graphs, and interactive infographic posters. There are four basic chart types that you can create on Infogr.am; bar, pie, line, and matrix. Each chart type can be edited to use any spreadsheet information that you want to upload to your Infogr.am account. The information in that spreadsheet will be displayed in your customized chart. When you place your cursor over your completed chart the spreadsheet information will appear in small pop-up window. Infogr.am infographics can include videos and maps along with pictures and text. Your Infogr.am projects can be embedded into your blog, website, or wiki.

Easel.ly provides a canvas on which you can build your own infographic by dragging and dropping pre-made design elements. You can use a blank canvas or build upon one of Easel.ly's themes. If Easel.ly doesn't have enough pre-made elements for you, you can upload your own graphics to include in your infographic. Your completed infographic can be exported and saved as PNG, JPG, PDG, and SVG files.

Piktochart provides seven free infographic templates. Each template can be customized by changing the colors, fonts, icons, and charts on each template. If you need more space on the template, you can add more fields at the bottom of the templates. If you need less space, you can remove fields from the templates.

EWC Presenter is a new tool from Easy Web Content (a website creation and hosting service). EWC Presenter makes it easy to create slideshows, banner graphics, and interactive infographics. The slideshow creator and banner graphic creator don't stand-out from other tools like them. The EWC Presenter's infographic animation option is worth noting. EWC Presenter's infographic tool allows you to animate elements within your infographic. And as was featured in a post early this month, EWC Presenter infographics support audio files.

Canva is a service that makes it easy to create beautiful slides, flyers, posters, infographics, and photo collages. Creating these graphics on Canva is a drag-and-drop process. Start by selecting a template then dragging and dropping into place background designs, pictures, clip art, and text boxes. Canva offers a huge library of clip art and photographs to use in your designs. You can also upload your own images to use in your graphics. Your completed Canva projects can be downloaded as PDF and PNG files. You can also simply link to your online graphic.

Earlier this week Jerome Burg, the founder of Google Lit Trips, announced that Google Lit Trips is now a 501c non-profit organization. Google Lit Trips is still free and is still a great resource for teachers of language arts and history.

Google Lit Trips provides excellent models for using Google Earth in language arts lessons. The concept of Google Lit Trips is to help students gain a better understanding of stories and their authors through mapping. Students and teachers can use Google Earth to map a story or map the biography of an author. On Google Lit Trips you can find and download lessons and Google Earth files created by other teachers. The two videos below offer overviews of how Google Lit Trips work.


Tech Awards: 2010 Laureate from GoogleLitTrips on Vimeo.



GLT Overview: Animation Demo from GoogleLitTrips on Vimeo.

Applications for Education
I've used the Google Lit Trips model with students in my history classes. Instead of mapping literature we mapped the biographies of famous people that we were studying. A couple of my favorite examples from students were mapping the lives of Theodore Roosevelt and Benjamin Franklin. If you don't have access to Google Earth, you can apply most of the concepts of Google Lit Trips to Google Maps.