Update: Added Coverr which is a resource for free stock video footage.

When creating digital projects students often need to find images, photos, videos, music, and sound effects to include in their projects. It is important to teach students how to find free multimedia that are allowed to use in their projects. The resources listed after the break are great to include in slide decks, photo slide shows, podcasts and videos. While not all of these resources require you to cite the source it is a good practice to provide credit to the author.

Google Classroom is a great learning management system that helps to facilitate the distribution of learning materials and allows teachers to provide feedback on student work. There are many features and best practices that students can utilize to make the most of Google Classroom. Here are some tips on how to make the most of Google Classroom

WIth the shift to hybrid / remote / blended learning many schools have purchased Chromebook for their students. The trackpad on Chromebook includes powerful features for multitasking. Robby Payne at ChromeUnboxed made a fantastic video that reviews all of the different gestures available on Chromebooks.

I like to call Padlet the swiss army knife of instructional technology tools. There are so many creative ways it can be used in the classroom. If you aren’t familiar, Padlet is a collaborative board that allows teachers and students to add various types of multimedia content including text, images, videos, links, drawings, audio, and video recordings. Padlet boards can be organized into several types including a wall to organize content in a brick-like layout, a free form canvas, stream, a shelf to organize content into columns, backchannel, map, and timeline. Let’s take a look at some creative ways to use Padlet boards in the classroom.

A weekly post about interesting articles, video, podcasts, and content I found over the past week. This week includes…

Out of the Box Media Literacy Initiative has an entire curriculum to support media literacy. One of the performance tasks for the units focuses on evaluating if the claim in a meme is accurate.

Today, some people take memes as their sources of news. As ridiculous as it is, this seems to be the rule in the post-truth era: “If it seems to be true, it must be true.” This is a very dangerous premise why “fake news” spread so easily and so widely today. Whether a meme is well edited or poorly edited does not matter; these fabricated and manipulated content rely on their emotional load. Memes, after all, are designed to be funny, sarcastic, or provoking–not be instructional or informative.

Project Zero is a resources from the Harvard Graduate School of Education that lists several instructional thinking strategies that can be used to engage students during instruction. They recently created categories for their thinking routines which makes it easier to filter the routines depending on your instructional activity.

The Toolbox organizes the Thinking Routines into categories that describe the types of thinking the routines help to facilitate. Some routines appear in more than one category, and some routines have different versions that offer modifications for specific age groups or more specific conceptual challenges. When clicking on a routine in the Toolbox, a separate page opens with links to the downloadable PDF of the routine. All routines use a common PZ template describing the purpose of the routine, offering potential applications for the routine, and often providing suggestions for its use and tips for getting started.

Radiolab is a great podcasts that focuses on long-form journalism and storytelling but not all of the episodes are classroom appropriate. If you are looking for curated episodes that are more appropriate the classroom Radiolab has released a new show called Radiolab for Kids. From the Radiolab for Kids website:

It’s a place where we’ve collected Radiolab’s most family-friendly content. (Because we all know that over the years, some of the content has been…er…NOT so family friendly!) From “What do dogs see when they look at the rainbow?” to “Do animals laugh?” the topics are squeaky clean (mostly) and all about curiosity. Radiolab for Kids is sure to delight and engage the most curious minds.