Latest education updates from around the world
Best Laptop Cases for Teachers
The best laptop cases for teachers could offer freedom of movement without sacrificing tech.
How to Integrate School Security and Communication Technology
With so many school security and communication products available, it’s important to make sure any you add will work with existing solutions
Improving DEI District-Wide
The David Douglas School District’s DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) efforts have led to restorative justice practices in the classroom and more diversity among educators.
7 Great Educational Halloween Games and Activities for Kids
Halloween brings a lot of fun and joy to us all. It is about the time of the year when spooky and ghosty themes are everywhere. Our classrooms are no exception. Halloween infuses our classrooms with its fun spirit and boosts kids excitements.
There are several educational ways to celebrate Halloween season with students in and out of class. Besides creating halloween-themed presentations using special Halloween PowerPoint and Google Slides templates, reading Halloween books created specifically for kids, and using Halloween apps, there are also a number of […]
The Common Cold Is Still Here! – Why Is It So Hard to Cure?
If you watched the video that I published on Wednesday you can hear me beginning to lose my voice. That’s because like everyone else in my house and seemingly everyone in my neighborhood, I had a cold last week. Thankfully, none of us had COVID-19. But it was a reminder that the common cold is still around and can still make you feel crummy for a few days.
Almost as if they were looking into our house, the producers of TED-Ed released a new video on Friday titled Why Is It […]
Trick O’ Treat Safety Review Games
Halloween is just eight days away. If you’re an elementary school teacher, you might be planning to do some trick o’ treating safety reviews with your students. Playing Kahoot games is a fun way to review almost anything including Halloween safety. That’s why a few years ago I made the following video to demonstrate how to find and modify Halloween safety games in Kahoot.
Best Lesson Planner Apps for Teachers
As teachers and educators, lesson planning is one of the key pedagogical practices that inform our instructional practice. Thankfully, gone are the days when everything has to be done the traditional way: pen and paper. Technology has now facilitated the whole process enabling teachers to cut down classroom prep time and, instead, focus on creating hands-on learning experiences for students.
3 Good Lesson Planners for Teachers
Several platforms provide lesson planning features including Google Classroom and Edmodo, however, if you are looking for easy to use and simple lesson planners , the tools below are great to start with. They will enable you to easily create and manage your lesson plans, add multimedia materials to your lessons (e.g., text, video, and image files), access your lesson plans on the cloud anywhere with Internet connection, and many more. For templates, check out this collection of pre-made lesson plan templates.
12 Best Places that Offer Free eBooks and Audiobooks
8 Must Read Personal Development Books for Teachers
Some Excellent Drawing Tools for Teachers and Students
Drawing is a great way to engage students in creativity-promoting activities in which students experiment with various ways of meaning making processes. There are several free drawing tools that you can with students in class. Below is a collection of some of the best student-friendly drawing tools to try out. For Chromebook users, check out this collection of Chromebook drawing tools. You can also check drawing apps for kids and best sketching websites for students.
A Great Visual Timeline Chronicling The Major Literary Events, Movements, and Authors
In today’s post I am sharing with you this interesting infographic from The Literature Network featuring major literary movements and periods from the medieval period stretching between 500 to 1500 to the postmodernist era that started in the late sixties of last century and is still going on till today.
Literary Periods and History Timeline is a great resource to share with students to help them learn about […]
8 Great Game-based Learning Books for Teachers and Educators
Game-based learning is a learning trend with an increasing attraction in today’s classrooms. At its core, game-based learning applies learning principles incorporated in the gaming industry in educational settings. The purpose is to enhance students learning and create optimal learning experiences in and out of classrooms. This is usually done through the use of a variety of hands-on and highly competitive activities geared towards engaging students and motivating them to learn better.
I have already shared a collection of some great game-based tools that you can use to create gameful learning experience in your class. In […]
ViewPure- Watch YouTube Videos without Ads and Distraction
YouTube is a powerful video resource to use in your instruction. It offers video content covering almost anything you want from learning how to dance to watching the latest James Web’s pictures of the planets millions of years away. In fact, YouTube is now being used as an alternative search engine to Google. A growing number of people opt for video results instead of textual content.
Geography, Monsters, and Drawings – The Week in Review
Good morning from Maine where the sun is rising and it’s a brisk 29F as I sip my dark roast coffee. It was a busy week here my little part of the world. We had two birthdays in my house, we all fought off little colds, and I announced a new course that I’m super excited about hosting in November.
This weekend I have hours of leaf blowing and raking ahead of me. But I’ll be sure to make time for riding bikes with my kids and taking our dogs for some walks in […]
TED-Ed Lessons With a Halloween Theme
Halloween is a little more than a week away. It is during the next week that a lot of students will be introduced to the work of Edgar Allan Poe. A TED-Ed lesson examines what made Poe’s macabre works timeless classics. In Why Should You Read Edgar Allan Poe? students can learn about Poe’s guiding principles for writing, the recurring themes of his work, and the personal factors in his life that contributed to his writing. Find the complete lesson here or watch the video as embedded below.
Quest App Lab Soars to 1,440 Apps, More Than Tripling Those on the Main Store
In early 2021 Meta launched App Lab for Quest which allows developers to distribute their games on the headset without going through Meta’s curation process. There’s now 1,457 games and apps available on App Lab, more than triple the number of apps on the main Quest store.
Update – October 20th, 2022
There’s now 1,457 apps available for Quest via App Lab, according to submissions tracked by VRDB. In the one year and eight months since launch, the number of apps on App Lab has more than tripled the number of apps on the main Quest store, which stands at […]
How Can TikTok Be Used in the Classroom?
TikTok can be a useful tool for student engagement in the class and beyond, using this guide.
What is Pear Deck and How Does It Work? Tips and Tricks
Pear Deck uses video to get students engaged while helping educators track progress.
Best Bibliography and Citation Tools for Teachers and Student Researchers
1-RefWorks
Five Things Students Can Explain With Simple Animations
One of my all-time favorite tech coaching experiences was helping an eighth grade science class produce short animations to explain forms of energy. It was one of my favorite experiences for two reasons. First, the teacher came to me and said, “I’m sick of boring PowerPoints. Get them to do anything else.” Second, the kids really grabbed onto the project and were excited to work on it. In the end, everyone was happy with the project.
Creating simple animations to illustrate understanding of concepts isn’t limited to eighth grade science classes. It can be done […]
Why Does the Road Crack? – Another Question from my Daughters
One of my favorite things to do these days is to ride bikes with my daughters. Sometimes I even record those rides on Strava because my older daughter now wants to keep track of how fast she can go down a little section of road in our neighborhood (current record 10.5mph). When we were riding earlier this week she complained about the cracks in the pavement in one part of our neighborhood and asked, “why does the road crack?”
I did my best to answer my daughter’s question of “why does the road crack?” by explaining that […]
Some Great Social Studies Apps for Kids and Elementary Students
In today’s post, I am sharing with you this collection of some of the best and most popular social studies apps for kids and elementary students. The apps offer a wide variety of social studies games, challenges, adevtjrues, quizzes, and several other materials designed specifically for young inquisitive minds.
1. Stack the States
Stack the States is a good social studies […]
How Cloud Storage Benefits Education
Emerging technologies are revolutionizing how organizations across industries operate, and the education sector is no exception. Over the last 10 years — particularly after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic — schools and colleges have had to adapt and evolve their approaches to learning and collaboration, opening the door to the “learn from anywhere” world.
Even now, as schools firmly embrace in-person learning again, it’s clear that the education sector is in a period of great modernization. Chalkboards, pen and paper are a thing of the past. Today, students and teachers alike want digitally enabled experiences.
One of the most […]
‘Moss: Book II’ Gets Surprise Release on PC VR Headsets Today
Moss: Book II (2022) has finally made its way to PC today, as Polyarc has officially launched the exciting continuation of Quill’s adventures on SteamVR headsets.
If you own a PC VR headset, you can jump into Moss: Book II now on Steam, priced at $30.
The studio is also bundling both Moss (2018) and Moss: Book II for $42 on Steam, representing a 15% savings when purchasing them separately.
In the meantime, if you haven’t caught our spoiler-free review of Moss 2 where we gave it a [8.5/10] rating, here’s the gist:
Moss: Book II is a […]