Latest education updates from around the world
You Should Write About Rainbows!
Today is my youngest daughter’s 5th birthday! When I told her that I needed to do some writing this morning she said, “you should write about rainbows!” So that’s what this post is all about (for the record, the writing that I had planned to do this morning was about some cool resources for Geography Awareness Week coming up in November).
Best VR Headsets for Schools
The best VR headsets for schools improve school learning in a more immersive and engaging way.
What is ClassDojo? Teaching Tips
ClassDojo connects the classroom and home in a more digitally engaging way by improving communication.
Now You Can Import PDFs Into Book Creator
Earlier this fall Book Creator added some helpful new features in the form of audio, video, and text commenting. This week the folks at Book Creator rolled-out another new and helpful feature. That feature is the ability to import PDFs to use in your Book Creator multimedia books. Here’s a thirty second demo of the new import PDF option in Book Creator (I’ve caught a cold and lost my voice otherwise I’d make a longer and more detailed demo video).
Applications for Education
The new import PDF option […]
Virtual ASL Interpreters: 5 Tips for Using Technology to Improve Accessibility
Live streaming virtual ASL interpreters can help schools overcome a shortage in ASL educators. Here are some best practices.
Making the Grade: Standards-Based, Traditional, or Both?
Replacing traditional grades with a competency or standards-based assessment isn’t easy but it often gets an A+ from educators.
Another Good Place to Find Free Drawings for Classroom Projects
Earlier this year I published a list of good places to find free images and drawings to use in your classroom projects. Thanks to something that Troy Patterson Tweeted earlier this week I have another good resource to add to that list.
CocoMaterial is an online library of nearly 2,500 drawings that you can download and re-use for free. Unlike some similar sites, CocoMaterial doesn’t offer anything but drawings and doesn’t litter the search results page with advertisements for other images that you have to purchase.
Here Is How to Easily Watermark Photos
Unreal Engine 5’s New Rendering Tech is Beginning to Make VR Look Startlingly Real
Unreal Engine 5 brings two key features which stand to radically improve the realism of both 3D geometry and lighting. While the features aren’t yet fully optimized for VR, early developer experiments are showing impressive results.
Unreal Engine 5 launched earlier this year, but unfortunately its two new key features—Lumen for global illumination lighting and Nanite for micro-geometry—weren’t supported for VR out of the gate.
However, Epic has been working on subsequent versions of of Unreal Engine 5, and though they aren’t ready for a full release yet, preview builds of Unreal Engine 5.1 and 5.2 show that Lumen & […]
Quest Store Now Supports Timed App Trials Without Devs Creating a Standalone Demo
Meta has announced that developers will be able to opt their apps into providing users with a free timed trial which the company hopes will increase conversion while giving developers an easier path compared to creating and maintaining a standalone demo app.
VR apps can be harder to sell than traditional games because the VR experience can’t always be effectively conveyed through screenshots and videos alone. In an effort to create a better way for developers to sell to their customers, Meta has announced a timed trial system which developers can opt into.
The system, which Meta calls Try […]
What is Juji and How Can It Be Used to Teach? Tips & Tricks
Juji is an artificially intelligent chatbot system designed to help engage students and guide them, freeing up teacher time.
How to Play GeoGeek AR
Last week I wrote a brief overview of a fun geography app called GeoGeek AR. The “AR” in the app’s name stands for augmented reality. The use of AR makes it possible to put a digital globe right into your classroom or anywhere else that your students are standing when holding an iPad or Android tablet. Yesterday, a reader emailed me for an explanation of how to use the app. Like most things, it’s easier to show it in a screencast than it is to write out directions. So I made
Halloween-themed Physical Education Lesson Plans
Halloween is less than two weeks away. I don’t know about your students and children, but mine are very excited about it! That’s why I was excited to get an email from OPEN Phys Ed earlier this week that linked to more than a dozen Halloween-themed lesson plans for physical education classes. The collection is titled Pumpkin Patch Games and you can access all of them as PDFs and or Word files.
Like all of the OPEN Phys Ed resources that I’ve reviewed over the last few years, the Pumpkin Patch Games are designed […]
4 of The Best Random Letter Generator Tools
Quest Store Surpasses $1.5 Billion in Content Revenue, Showing Continued Growth
At Connect 2022 this month, Meta announced the Quest content store has surpassed $1.5 billion in purchased VR content since its launch in 2019, representing continued but decelerating growth likely due mostly to market seasonality.
Update (October 18th, 2022): Article updated with the latest Quest platform revenue milestone from Meta of $1.5 billion. The article previously covered the $1 billion milestone.
Though Meta has still yet to share official unit sales for its Quest headsets, at Connect 2022 this month the company confirmed that the Quest store has surpassed $1.5 billion in purchased software since the platform launched in 2019.
The 20 Best Rated & Most Popular Quest Games & Apps – October 2022
While Oculus doesn’t offer much publicly in the way of understanding how well individual games & apps are performing across its Quest 2 storefront, it’s possible to glean some insight by looking at apps relative to each other. Here’s a snapshot of the 20 best rated Oculus Quest games and apps as of October 2022.
Some quick qualifications before we get to the data:
Paid and free apps are separated
Only apps with more than 100 reviews are represented
App Lab apps are not represented (see our latest Quest App Lab report)
Rounded ratings may appear to show ‘ties’ […]
‘DAVIGO’ Brings Quest Support & Online Multiplayer in Third Alpha Tomorrow
DAVIGO is an upcoming asymmetric game that tosses you into a David vs. Goliath-style battle, offering up a unique PC and VR cross-play experience. Now nearly 18 months since the release of its second alpha phase, the indie developers behind Davigo announced they’ve reworked the entire game in effort to release a new multiplayer alpha, this time featuring Quest support and online multiplayer.
In a nutshell, Davigo pits a VR giant against pint-sized PC players, something that makes for some pretty wild and frenetic gameplay.
First launched into public alpha back in May 2020, Davigo moved on to its ‘Alpha […]
Making and Teaching With Animated Explanations – A New Practical Ed Tech Course
At the end of this week’s Practical Ed Tech newsletter I teased a new online course that I’ve been developing. That course is Animated Explanations. It will begin on November 1st.
In Animated Explanations you’ll learn why creating animations is a great teaching and learning activity in elementary school, middle school, and high school classrooms. Of course, you’ll also learn how you and your students can create animated explanations of a wide range of topics and concepts.
This course is going to be delivered in […]
Five Google Workspace Tips That Can Make Your Day Better
The best part of a being a teacher is making connections with kids. Making those connections takes time. Unfortunately, teaching also comes with a lot of procedural and administrative tasks that take away from the time that can be used to build those connections with students. But you can get some of that time back when you use helpful systems to streamline administrative tasks. In this new video I highlight five Google Workspace tips that can make your day a little better by streamlining some routine tasks.
Watch the video above to learn about: […]
Pico 4 Shipments Delayed in Europe Due to High Global Demand
Pico released its standalone VR headset Neo 3 Link this summer, marking its first real push to launch a consumer device outside of Asia. Now it’s getting ready to ship the follow-up standalone Pico 4, and the company seems to be struggling to keep up with demand in some regions.
Pico opened up pre-orders of Pico 4 in late September with the aim of initially releasing the headset today across several regions, including 13 European countries, Japan, and Korea.
Note: there’s still no word on whether Pico 4 is coming to the US, although Pico Interactive, owned […]
Boom Cards Lesson Plan
This Boom Cards lesson plan can help educators integrate the tool into their instruction
Using Data to Inform Teaching & Change School Culture
Barrington School District 220 leaders gathered data from students and staff during the pandemic to ensure the spirit of innovation and change would continue.
C-SPAN Offers a Free Electoral College Poster
C-SPAN Classroom is one of my go-to sources of ideas for lessons on current events related to U.S. government and politics. Membership in C-SPAN Classroom is free and provides members with lots of digital and physical resources. One of the resources C-SPAN Classroom is currently offering to members is a poster about the Electoral College. This is an update to the one that they offered back in 2016. You can request a printed, full-size copy of the poster right here and get a smaller JPG version of it […]
