Latest education updates from around the world
How Ed-tech Empowers and Educates Children Through Developmental Delays
Ed-tech, or educational technology, can have numerous benefits for children. It can enhance the learning experience, provide them with more opportunities, teach them real-world skills, and it can even help with developmental delays.
Developmental delays are essentially skills or functions that are not quite at the level of what is considered average for a child at their age. While having a child with a developmental delay can be scary for a parent, it doesn’t mean they have a disability or cannot overcome the delay.
No two children are the same, and just […]
What is Ready Maker and How Can it Be Used to Teach? Tips & Tricks
Ready Maker is a simple game design tool that helps teach coding basics and more.
Best of 2022 So Far – QRToon
QR codes are handy for making long URLs easy to access on mobile devices. Last year I used QR codes to make my classroom sign-in/sign-out forms easy for students to access on their phones. I typically use either QRCode Monkey or the QR code generator built into Chrome. Recently, I discovered another neat QR […]
Best of 2022 So Far – Mote
One of my absolute favorite new tools in 2021 was a Chrome extension called Mote. With Mote installed you can add audio comments to Google Docs, Google Classroom, and Google Slides. You can also use Mote to add audio to Google Forms and insert audio into Google Slides with just one click. Mote also […]
Internet Safety Tips: The Do’s and Don’ts (Infographic)
Digitality has radically transformed almost every facet of our life for the better, well at least in certain aspects. For us in education, our dependence on technology is growing bigger and bigger…
….read more
Top Teacher-approved Websites for Kids
After I covered the best search engines kids can use to safely navigate the web, I am sharing with you another equally helpful collection of websites for kids. These are platforms where…
….read more
Cas & Chary Present: Which is the Better VR Cloud Gaming Service? Shadow vs. PlutoSphere
There are currently two cloud streaming services that work with VR and are available to consumers: Shadow and PlutoSphere. These services allow Quest users to play PC VR games without needing a gaming PC, which is a big investment if you’re only looking to play a few SteamVR titles like Half-Life: Alyx.
Cas and Chary VR is a YouTube channel hosted by Netherland-based duo Casandra Vuong and Chary Keijzer who have been documenting their VR journeys since 2016. They share a curated selection of their content with extra insights for the Road […]
Reading Bear: Free Phonics and Vocab Lessons to Help Kids Learn to Read
Reading Bear, an educational project of WatchKnowLearn.org, helps kids develop reading and vocabulary skills through presentations, review activities, and quizzes. The site contains over 50…
….read more
Summer Reading, Notebooks, and Thinking
If you’ve joined one of my webinars about search strategies or taken my Teaching History With Technology course, you probably know that I advocate for two very non-techy activities. Those things are reading physical books and writing in a physical notebook.
I have always found that when I read physical books, regardless of whether they’re fiction or nonfiction, there at least three things that happen. I get new ideas to dabble with in my head. I have ideas that I want to remember. I have to stop and write my ideas down. All of […]
What I Do When a Website Steals My Work
I’ve been writing this blog for fifteen years this year. For most of those years I have been battling with people about copyright. Some people think that because it says “Free Technology for Teachers” that they can take anything they want and republish it wherever they want. Other people have a misunderstanding of what fair use means. And some people simply don’t care about copyright at all. That’s often the case with super scuzzy and slimy websites that use automated scripts to take all of my blog posts and republish them.
Unfortunately, over the […]
The 7 Skills Kids Can Develop from Playing LEGO
Since its creation in 1940, LEGO has grown into a worldwide phenomenon with ripples extending to the field of education. LEGO was created in Denmark and started as ‘a set of…
….read more
5 Google Drive Collaborative Features Teachers Should Know about
Google Drive is in a continuous flux in terms of the functionalities and built-in features it offers to its users. A great deal of these features are especially useful for us in education. In today’s…
….read more
Interactive History Timelines for Teachers and Students
Below is a collection of educational websites that offer interactive history timelines spanning world history from the early stages of the emergence of human life to the modern period. Whether you…
….read more
How Do Fireworks Work? – Another Question from my Daughters
Tomorrow is the Fourth of July and that means there will be fireworks displays in towns all over the United States. My little town is having small display that we’ll actually be able to see from our backyard. And this year my kids are old enough to stay up to see the fireworks display. Of course, that also means they’re old enough to ask “how do fireworks work?”
If your kids are also curious about how fireworks work, take a look at the following videos from NPR’s SkunkBear, National Geographic, and Reactions to learn […]
Geo Artwork – A Fun Game About Geography and Art
If you and or your students enjoy online geography games like GeoGuessr, you need to try Geo Artwork from Google Arts & Culture.
Geo Artwork is a game in which you view an image of an artwork and then have to guess where in the world that artwork belongs. There are categories for visual arts, sculpture, textiles, books, and places. The places category is based on Google Street View imagery of places associated with or featuring an art work.
Geo Artwork is played by looking at the image and then placing a pin […]
Best Platforms to Create A Classroom Website and Blog
Creating a digital presence for your class is now a required pedagogical investment to help you boost your teaching and enhance students learning. Now that the world is going digital, having a…
….read more
8 Great Digital Workspaces for Visual Collaboration
Here is a collection of some of the best visual collaboration platforms that you can use to streamline your collaboration workflow and drive engagement around shared projects. These are digital…
….read more
Best Teacher Movies of All Time
Best teacher movies is a list I compiled based on ratings from various authority sites such as Amazon Prime Video, Show Times, Ranker, among others (see the list of sources at the bottom of this…
….read more
A Good Place to Find Free Images and Music for Classroom Projects
In my guide to finding media for classroom projects I provide a list and description of my favorite resources. The next time I update that guide I’ll include Openverse.
Openverse is the replacement for the old CreativeCommons.org search tool. The Creative Commons organization has handed-off oversight of Creative Commons search to WordPress. WordPress now operates Creative Commos search as Openverse.
Openverse can be used to find Creative Commons-licensed and public domain pictures and audio files. The best aspect of Openverse is that it provides a clear explanation of how you can and can’t […]
Tomatoes, Templates, and Fireworks – The Week in Review
Good morning from Maine where sun is rising and it’s going to be a nice summer day to start a long weekend. I’ll be mowing before setting up a water bounce house for my kids to play in. The bounce house is one of the best “pandemic purchases” we made in the spring of 2020. My kids love it and I do too. I hope that you have something fun to do this weekend!
This week I wrapped up my Teaching History With Technology course. I’m not hosting any more courses until the fall, but will be […]
10 Excellent Economics and Financial Literacy websites for Teachers and Students
The purpose of this post is to share with fellow teachers and parents a collection of educational economics websites that they can use with their students and kids to teach them financial literacy…
….read more
CS First- A Free Computer Science Curriculum to Use in Your Class
The purpose of this post if to introduce you to this interesting resource to use when teaching kids coding. CS First is a free computer science curriculum from Google for Education…
….read more
‘Beat Saber’ Earned Nearly $100M in Revenue Last Year Alone
Beat Games, the Czechia-based studio known for VR’s most popular game Beat Saber (2018), revealed it’s managed to generate nearly $100 million in revenue over the course of last year thanks to the block-slashing rhythm game.
Czech language publication CzechCrunch confirmed that Beat Games earned 2.3 billion Czech koruna in revenue last year alone, or around $97 million USD.
This places it as the top-earning game studio in Czechia, as it now sits above Bohemia Interactive (Arma, DayZ), SCS Software (Euro Truck Simulator 2), and Warhorse Studios (Kingdom Come: Deliverance).
It is crazy that 4 years since we founded Beat Games, it became […]
Update: PSVR 2 to Include Tech from the Biggest Name in Eye Tracking
Tobii, a global leader in eye-tracking, announced earlier this year that it was in talks with Sony to include its tech in the upcoming PlayStation VR2. Now the company has confirmed its eye-tracking is integrated in PSVR 2.
Update (July 1st, 2022): Tobii has officially announced it is a key manufacturer of PSVR 2’s eye-tracking tech. The company says in a press statement that it will receive upfront revenue as a part of this deal starting in 2022 and revenue from this deal is expected to represent more than 10% of Tobii’s revenue in 2022.
“PlayStation VR2 […]
Seven Summer Webinars With Me!
.png){kind=link}
As I announced last week on Practical Ed Tech, starting on July 6th and running through August I’m hosting a series of webinars on a wide range of edtech topics.
All of the webinars will be held live and will also be recorded for those who register in advance. You can register for one, two, or all of them! Watch the following video or click through the list below to learn more and register for the webinars.