Last week I didn’t have time to publish here because I was engrossed in meeting a deadline for the Legal Writing and Research class I’m taking this semester. That work provided the inspiration for this post.  Highlight and Save I often heard from my students and now from some of my classmates that they struggle to keep track of their research in a manner that makes it efficient to include citations while they’re writing. The solution is to not just bookmark sources, but to also highlight the passages you want to save for future use. In my pre-Internet middle school days we were taught to ..read more

As some of you know, on the weekends I teach skiing lessons at Mt. Abram Ski Area. Yesterday, I taught the second-to-last class of an eight-week class that I teach to kids of intermediate ability. In yesterday’s class I asked the kids to pick their favorite skiing tip and teach it to the class. They all had fun with it because I was the “crash test dummy” who had to do exactly as they instructed.  What does that have to do with educational technology? In short, I was the live “animation” of my students’ instructions. Making animated explanations is a project my students did at least once ..read more

Earlier this month Google rebranded Bard to Gemini. Why they did that isn’t terribly important (presumably to be able to monetize it better). What is important is that you know Gemini offers the same functionality as Bard. On that note, here are a few functions of Gemini that are helpful to teachers and students.  Draft Outlines and Export Them to Google Docs Give Gemini a prompt like “outline the causes of the American Revolution in terms elementary students understand” and it will give you an outline. That outline could be helpful in building a more detailed outline with your students a ..read more

In Teaching Search Strategies to History Students I wrote about the importance of identifying the goal of a research task before ever typing a query into a search box. I was reminded of that last week when someone asked me “what does the research process look like in the age of AI?” My short answer was that it is still important to complete a short pre-search checklist before typing a query into a search box. In fact, in the age of AI it might be even more important than ever to have a clear goal for a research task before typing that first query into the search box on any search engine.  ..read more

Last week my seven-year-old came home from school excited to tell me that her teacher had her play a new game called Mad Libs! The game has been around since the 1950’s, but it was new to her and she loves it. That prompted me to make some Mad Libs games for her to play.  Mad Libs To make online Mad Libs for my daughter I headed to Flippity.net where I used their free Mad Libs generator. It quickly created six fun story templates for my daughter to complete. Initially, I manually generated the templates as shown in the video here. Later, I enlisted the help of Google Bard to speed up the ..read more

As you may know, back in August I returned to the classroom on a full-time basis. Not as a teacher, but as a student. That experience has reinforced my belief that prompt feedback is one of the most important things you can give to students. On that note, this week I have some tech tips that can help you quickly provide feedback to your students. Faster Essay Feedback When I taught social studies, grading my students’ essay assignments was always the second most time-consuming task I had to do. The most time-consuming task was providing feedback on rough drafts. I wish that the tools available ..read more

I started the Practical Ed Tech weekly newsletter ten years ago this month. It was an off-shoot of the daily FreeTech4Teachers.com posts that started in 2007. Over that time I’ve answered a lot (well into the thousands) questions from readers. But there is one question that comes up more than any other every year. Every year the most frequently asked question is, “what are you using to make your videos?” For the majority of those years the answer was Screencast-o-Matic. Last year Screencast-o-matic changed its name to ScreenPal. I still use it to make the vast majority of the videos appearing ..read more

It’s a holiday week for most of us. So rather than present a new tip, I’m sharing the five best tips of the last year as chosen by readers like you. To pick them I went through analytics for all issues of this newsletter over the last year and chose the most read and shared issues in 2023. A couple of the results were a little surprising to me. Take a look at the tips below and see if any surprise you too. 1. Magic Design Canva’s Magic Design tool can be used to create a complete slideshow presentation from just one sentence. To be clear, it doesn’t just design the layout of the slides. I ..read more

Greetings from Maine where I’m writing this with the help of a generator. No, not an AI-powered writing generator. The power is out and I’m running a “portable” electric generator. On the topic of generators, AI-content generators can be fun to play with. For example, you may have noticed the Funko figure trend circulating on social media right now. That’s a little AI-character generator powered by Microsoft Designer. The process of creating the character is a lot like completing a Mad Libs story. Making a Funko figure is one of a few fun tech things to do before the winter (sum ..read more

Next weekend I’m taking final exams for the first time since Clinton was in office. (If you missed the news, I’m a full-time student again). This has given me an opportunity to test some modern takes on classic study methods including flash cards and Jeopardy-style games. Flashcards From the first day of the semester I started making flashcards on standard 3” x 5” index cards. Initially, I digitized them along with my notebook notes using Google Keep. While that was helpful as a method of backing-up my work, it wasn’t great for studying things like Federal Rule of Civil Procedur ..read more