Ideal Verge - Your Daily Dose of Knowledge and Inspiration.

Chromebooks and the Chrome OS are constantly improving and offering more features to more students and teachers. An example of this is found when you consider that earlier this summer Google started supporting the use of some Android apps on some Chromebooks. Initially, the list of supported Chromebooks was small. That list has steadily grown over the last few weeks. You can see the list on the Chromium Projects website. Likewise, the list of Android apps that can be used on a Chromebook as steadily expanded. That list can be seen on this Chrome Web Store page (note, the page only displays the apps if you are viewing it on a Chromebook).

Jim Mendenhall has created a great webpage for comparing the features of various Chromebooks to help you find the best one for you and your students. Jim also recently published a video about how to use Android apps on Chromebooks. That video is embedded below.

Why the Metric System Matters is the title of the latest TED-Ed lesson. The lesson explains how measurement systems evolved through history including the historical event that hastened the adoption of the metric system throughout most of the world. The lesson also explains why the United States doesn't use the metric system.


As is noted in the video above, many Americans are not comfortable with the metric system despite the fact that it's the universal standard in mathematics and science. The Buzzfeed video embedded below captures the trouble that Americans have with the metric system.

This morning during the Practical Ed Tech Chromebook Camp I shared some of my favorite strategies and ideas for helping students improve their online research skills. The slides that I used today were an updated version of slides that I have previously shared here on Free Technology for Teachers. The latest version is of the slides is embedded below.

Another question that appeared on the Free Technology for Teachers Facebook page over the weekend read,

Hello Richard, I love your blog and thanks for sharing . Do you know a good free site for preschoolers to practise phonics?

My suggestion for that reader was to take a look at Teach Your Monster to Read. Teach Your Monster to Read is a great series of online games designed to help students improve the speed and accuracy with which they recognize letters and sounds. The website gets its name from the friendly monster avatars that students help learn to read through the course of the games.

The Teach Your Monster to Read games are designed to help students improve the speed and accuracy with which they recognize letters, sounds, and word. The games have eight levels (or islands as they're called in the game) each containing four activities. Students play the game as a friendly monster avatar. On each island students can earn prizes for their monsters and customize the look of their monsters.

Over the weekend a reader posted the following message on the Free Technology for Teachers Facebook page,

Hey Richard, would you be able to recommend a free site for audio feedack to students? I want to record my feedback on essays and have kids listen. Don't know where to start. Is it an audio file that can be emailed? They have to log on somewhere and listen? Thoughts? Thanks for any help.

My suggestion was to try Kaizena for adding voice comments to students documents. Kaizena can be used in your web browser or as an iPad app. Kaizena's YouTube channel has some helpful tutorials including the three embedded in the playlist below.

This afternoon during the Practical Ed Tech Chromebook Camp Beth Still and I shared some ways to use Google Sites with students. One of the features that I showed was using page level permissions (this video shows you how to enable those) to have students manage individual pages within a site. That raised the question of how to keep track of updates that students make to their pages. There is a simple way to do that by subscribing to page changes. Watch my video below to learn how to track changes to Google Sites.

Digital Dialects offers a nice selection of educational games and activities for learning more than 50 different languages. Most of the games are designed to learn and practice the basics of each of the languages listed on the Digital Dialects homepage.

Another good website for learning and practicing language basics is Literacy Center.net. Literacy Center offers games for learning and practicing French, Spanish, German, and English. The Literacy Center is a 501c non-profit with a contract from the US Department of Education.

Applications for EducationThe educational games and activities found on Digital Dialects and Literacy Center are great for students just beginning to learn a new language. The games provide instant feedback to students and parents so that they can monitor progress and choose a skill or set of vocabulary terms to practice. 

Read Write Think's Compare & Contrast Map is a template for creating a comparative essay. Using the template students are guided through writing three styles of comparison essays. To get started students identify two things that they wish to compare and or contrast. Then they choose if they want to write a "whole to whole" essay, a "similarities to differences" essay, or a "point to point" essay. Whichever essay type they choose, students are guided through the types of information they should put in each part of their essays. When their essays are complete students can share them via email or print them.

In the video below I provide an overview of RWT's Compare & Contrast Map.


Applications for Education
For younger students who need help formatting an essay, the Read Write Think templates can be very helpful. If you haven't spent much time exploring the resources on Read Write Think's classroom resources page, I encourage you to do so.

Scholastic's Character Scrapbook provides a nice template that elementary school students can use to write about and reflect on the characters in their favorite stories. The template is quite simple to use. Students enter the name of a story and the name of their favorite character on the first page. On the next pages students list ten attributes of the character. The Character Scrapbook also allows students to create pictures of their favorite characters.

As you can see in the image above, Scholastic's Character Scrapbook doesn't limit students to human characters. Students can write about and create images of animal characters too.

Applications for Education
Scholastic's Character Scrapbook could be a great tool for getting students to think about their favorite stories. The Character Scrapbook has an easy print option so that you can print and display all of your students' works in your classroom.

Mission MapQuest is a great map game creation tool developed by friend Russel Tarr for his ClassTools.net website. The concept behind Mission Mapquest is rather straight-forward one. On Mission Mapquest you create a series of clues that your students need to follow to identify places around the world. You can add as few or as many clues to your MapQuest as you like. When you're ready to have students try your MapQuest just give them the web address assigned to it. Mission Mapquest games are created in HTML5 which means that they can be played on iPads and Android tablets as well as on laptops. Watch the video embedded below to learn how to create your own map-based quizzes on Mission MapQuest.

There is certainly not a shortage of map quiz on games on the Internet. GeoGuessr and Spacehopper have been two of my favorites for a long time. Now I have another to add to my list of favorites. That addition comes in the form of GeoQuiz.

GeoQuiz is a map game that shows you a placemarker on a map. Once the placemarker appears you have to speak or type the name of the country in which the marker was placed. The object of the game is to identify as many countries as possible within 60 seconds.

In my testing of GeoQuiz I had to be sure to enunciate when I said the name of a country. GeoQuiz did a good job of recognizing what I was trying to say, most of the time. Be sure to use the Chrome web browser and enable microphone access in order to play the game.

Applications for Education
GeoQuiz could be a good game for students to play to review their knowledge of the locations of countries around the world. The option to speak a name rather than type it might give some students the opportunity to prove that they know more than they could actually demonstrate by typing.

H/T to Maps Mania. 

For a long time I have used Evernote as my primary tool for personal bookmarks. That's about to change because today Evernote announced that their free plan will soon only allow you to use Evernote on two devices. As I use three devices or more in the course of a typical week, the new Evernote free plan won't work for me. So instead of using Evernote I'm going to start using Google Keep for bookmarking.

Google Keep can be used on any device on which I sign into my Google Account. As you can see in the video embedded below, you can add labels to your Google Keep notes. Those labels can also be applied to bookmarks. All Google Keep notes and bookmarks can be shared with others.

Buncee is a nice tool that makes it easy for young students to craft digital stories. Recently, Buncee updated their iOS app to optimize for iPad and iPhone displays. The latest version of Buncee's iOS app brings the best content creation tools of the Buncee Edu web app to the iOS environment.

Buncee Edu provides students with a wide variety of multimedia elements to their presentations. To add multimedia content to their Buncee slides students simply tap the "add" button then they can choose from videos (available from Vimeo and YouTube), animated characters, animated text, animated stickers, static stickers, audio from SoundCloud, images from Pixabay (filtered public domain images), and upload their own content from their iPad camera rolls. Students also have the option to draw directly on their slides.

Applications for Education
Buncee's free iPad app provides students with a great way to tell fiction and non-fiction stories. Students can create visual and audio stories about field trips, summer adventures, or a favorite personal story. Buncee's iPad app could also be used by students to create an alternative to the traditional written book report. They could use images and sounds to summarize the highlights of a favorite book.

Disclosure: Buncee is a client of MindRocket Media Group. I am a partner in MindRocket Media Group.

This morning at the ISTE 2016 conference Google announced some great new features for teachers. One feature that immediately jumped out at me is the new Google Cast for Education Chrome app. The Google Cast for Education Chrome app enables teachers and students share their screens over wireless networks. The app integrates with Google Classroom to make it easy for you to quickly share your screen to your students' Chromebooks or laptops and for them to share with you. See the Google Cast for Education Chrome app in action in the video embedded below.



Applications for Education
The Google Cast for Education Chrome app will solve a problem that has plagued teachers for years. That problem is getting all of your students to look at the same webpage or app at the same time without having to rely on them to accurately enter a web address or click the correct link.

This afternoon at the ISTE 2016 conference I had a nice meeting with Melanie Broder from Padlet. She told me about some of the things that Padlet is working on developing during the rest of the year. One of things is a community for educators. That community should help teachers find creative uses of Padlet as well as sharing lesson activities in general. Until that community gets going, take a look at Padlet's Best of Education wall.

Padlet's Best of Education wall features twenty-seven Padlet walls created by teachers. One of my favorites in that collection is 100 Picture Books to Read and Share. All of the books in that Padlet wall are linked to Goodreads pages. Another good wall in Padlet's Best of Education is a collection of student blogging prompts.

Watch my video embedded below to learn how to use the latest version of Padlet's website.

Creating videos is one of my favorite activities to do with students. I never get tired of seeing what students create and I never tire of their enthusiasm for the creative process. I'm a big fan of letting students choose the video creation tool that they like best rather than prescribing that they all have to use the same app. By letting them choose the app they like the best, they have more flexibility in the format of their final products. That said, some students will look for recommendations from you. These are the Android apps that typically recommend for creating videos on Android devices.

Clarisketch is a free Android app that has great potential for classroom use. The app allows you to take a picture or pull one from your device’s camera roll and then add your voice to it. While you are talking about your picture you can draw on it to highlight sections of it. Completed projects are shared as links to the video file hosted on Clarisketch. You can share the link to your Clarisketch video and have it play on nearly any device that has a web browser.

WeVideo’s Android app allows you to create and edit videos on your tablet or phone. WeVideo offers the most features of the three apps in this list. Those features come with the trade-off that it takes a while to understand all of the intricacies of the app. The baseline use of the app allows you to record live video and edit it by trimming or clipping sections, adding or deleting audio, and by adjusting color saturation. You can also use WeVideo to create a video in a slide-by-slide format to which you add your voice or other audio recording.

Magisto is a free video creation and editing application for Android and iOS. Using Magisto you can mix together raw video clips, pictures, and sounds on your phone or tablet to create a video. The Android version allows you to draw on frames in your video clips and add borders to your frames. Magisto can be integrated with your Google Drive account allowing you to add video clips stored in your Google Drive account to your Magisto projects. All of the processing and editing of Magisto videos happens in the cloud so you will need an internet connection to use the app.

Stop Motion Studio is a great app for creating stop motion videos. The app is available for iOS, Android, Windows, and Mac operating systems. The basic (free) version of Stop Motion Studio lets you take as many pictures as you like and string them together in a sequence that plays back at a frame-per-second rate of your choosing. Each frame can be edited individually before you produce the final video. You can also add narration to your video in the basic version of the app. Completed projects can be saved to your device and from there you can share them on YouTube or on your favorite social network.


The Stop Motion Studio editor does offer upgrades that can be purchased in the app. Those upgrades include various background themes, templates, and audio track options.

Applications for Education
Creating stopmotion and timelapse videos can be a good way for students to tell a story that they have developed. Stopmtion and timelapse videos can also be helpful when teachers are trying to help students see how a lengthy process like osmosis works. While good stopmotion and timelapse videos can take a long time to create, tools like Stop Motion Studio make that process a bit easier.

Over the last month I have spoken at conferences all over the United States. Creating videos with students is was the topic of one of my most popular break-out sessions during that time. In that session I try to offer resources and ideas for teachers of all grade levels. I also try to provide resources that work on iPads, Android devices, on Chromebooks, and on Mac & Windows computers. The following are three of my favorite apps for elementary school students to use to create content on their iPads.

ChatterPix Kids is a free iPad app that students can use to turn pictures into talking pictures. To create a talking picture just snap a picture with your iPad or import a picture from your iPad’s camera roll. After taking the picture just draw in a face and tap the record button to make your picture talk. Your recording can be up to thirty seconds in length. Before publishing your talking picture you can add fun stickers, text, and frames to your picture. Finished Chatter Pix projects are saved to your camera roll and from there you can export it to a number of services including YouTube. ChatterPix Kids doesn’t require students to create an account in order to use the service. Using the app can be a great way to get students to bring simple stories to life. Check out the video below that was made, in part, by using ChatterPix.




Tellagami is a free iPad that elementary school students enjoy using to create narrated animations. Tellagami allows your students to create customized animated scenes in a matter of minutes. To create a narrated, animated scene students simply open Tellagami and tap "create." After opening the create menu students will see a default character and background scene. The characters can be altered by selecting from a big menu of customization options. The background scenes can be changed by selecting from a menu or by inserting a picture from the iPad's camera roll. To add their voices to their animations students simply tap "record" and start talking. Completed animations are stored on the camera rolls of your students' iPads. Tellagami does not require students to create accounts or have an email address.

Shadow Puppet Edu is a free iPad app that students can use to create audio slideshow videos. The app offers an integrated search tool that students can use to find pictures from the Library of Congress, to search for images from NASA, and to find Creative Commons licensed images from Flickr. Students can also import pictures from the camera roll on their iPads. After selecting a set of images students can arrange them into any sequence by simply dragging and dropping them into order. Then to create a story students press the record button and talk while flipping through the images. Shadow Puppet Edu allows students to add text and stickers to each image too. When they're happy with their work students can share their Shadow Puppet Edu projects through a variety of methods including YouTube and email. Shadow Puppet Edu projects are automatically saved to the camera roll on a student's iPad. Students do not have to register for an account or have an email address to use Shadow Puppet Edu.