EdTech Spotlight - Felt

EdTech Spotlight posts are shorter entries (as compared to my normal full-sized posts) that highlight a specific educational technology resource.

These normally contain a video clip of me talking about and demonstrating the resource. These video clips are taken from my weekly live streams that I record on Monday nights at 7pm EST. These videos are more casual and conversational than my pre-recorded edited tutorial videos.

For this entry we are taking a look at Felt.

See below for a video clip about this resource, as well as a brief explanation and relevant links. If you use this resource, I would love to hear about your experience!

15+ Awesome Article Sites for Students

Current event and general interest articles are a wonderful resource for students. They can be used for researching a topic, staying informed on what's happening in the news, pleasure reading, and more.

In the past I have shared some creative ways to use online articles as part of technology activities for student creativity and reading comprehension. For example:

• Improve Reading Comprehension with Google Docs "Black Out" - Blog Post Link 
• Black Out Poetry with Google Docs - Blog Post Link 

Additionally Google recently added a new lesson to their Applied Digital Skills curriculum called "Annotate Text in Google Docs". This activity covers how to take an article, copy and paste it into Google Docs, and then make digital notes to understand the article using comments, highlighting, tables, and more.

One big question, however, is where to find good articles. Over the years I have come across many excellent resources for articles that are written specifically for students. See below for my current list of these sites.

Spreadsheet Activities for all Subjects

I had the opportunity to present the following webinar recently:

Holy Sheets! Google Sheets Activities for all Subjects
Google Sheets is not just a tool for crunching numbers. It is a powerful tool for learning, inquiry, exploration, and inspiration in any subject area. In this session we take a look at several practical activities for a wide range of content areas including random writing prompts, flash cards, educational games, student-created learning databases, art and creativity, conditional formatting feedback for students, task lists, and of course analyzing data to draw conclusions and make predictions.

In the training I covered lots of creative ways that Google Sheets can be used for student activities including:

📊 Analyzing Data

💡 Learning Databases

🕹️ Educational Games and Activities

🎲 Random Generator Activities

🖼️ Art Activities

✔️ Tasks Checklists

💬 Conditional Formatting Feedback

💻 Activities from Google's Applied Digital Skills

See below to view the full 1-hour recorded webinar, and access to all of the links, templates, and resources covered in the session.

Have Students Build Learning Databases with Google Sheets

Google Sheets is an amazingly flexible tool, allowing you to randomly generate writing prompts, create pixel art, and discover mathematical properties. Another great use for Google Sheets is for students to create interactive learning databases.

"What exactly is that?" you ask.

Here's the idea. While in your class, students have to process a large amount of data. Maybe it is:

• Characters in the novel they are reading
• Animals in their elementary science class
• Careers they are exploring in high school
• Countries of the world they are studying
• Artists and the works they created
• Properties of geometric shapes

Using Google Sheets your students can

• Collect important details as they are learning, and build their own database of information, either individually or collaboratively. 
• Once complete, students can use the sorting and filtering features in Sheets to answer questions about the content they have been learning.

See below for several examples from a variety of subject areas, as well as directions on how to build these spreadsheet learning databases and use the sorting and filtering tools.

5 Emoji Learning Activities with Google Docs

A while back I did a blog post on the "Emoji Random Writing Prompt Generator" I had created with Google Sheets. Basically the sheet randomly selected a set of emojis that the student could use as inspiration for writing a story, poem, or such. With a simple reload, a new random set would be produced. You can see the post and get your own copy of the template here: Emoji Random Writing Prompt Generator

In this post we are going to dive deeper into creative ways to use emojis in Google Docs beyond just writing prompts. As mentioned in my previous post, emojis are a great tool to use in student learning activities for many reasons:

• Since emojis are images, they can be used with students of any age, language, or reading ability.
• Also since they are images, they can provide and represent a wide range of ideas since each student will have their own interpretations of the pictures.
• Emojis are very popular with students, so they will likely have familiarity with the images.
• They are fun!

See below for details on how you can insert emojis into Google Docs, and five fun ideas for learning activities the involve emojis.

Note: Emojis appear differently on different operating systems. Because of this, the images may not look the same on every device. If you are using any modern computer or device (Chromebook, Android, iOS, Mac OS, Windows), the emojis should display well. However if you are using an older version of Windows earlier than Windows 8.1, the emojis do not appear in color and many may be missing.

20 YouTube Channels for Social Studies

YouTube is a fantastic resource for schools to teach content and for students to learn content. For pretty much any topic you can think of, someone has made a video explaining it (which I greatly appreciate when I have had to replace parts in my clothes dryer three times in the last few years).

The same thing is true for social studies. YouTube hosts thousands of educational videos on history, politics, geography, and more. Some are created by talented teachers sharing their classroom creations with the world, while others are made by companies, museums, and more.

Recently I had the chance to curate a list of YouTube channels for a social studies inservice I was leading. Below are 20 of the channels I found that are worth checking out for your classroom if you teach social studies. I am sure there are many more channels beyond what I have listed, so I would love to hear about others. Please use the comments section at the bottom to share links to your favorite YouTube channel or playlist for social studies.

Using Google Maps Bike Directions to Teach Math and Social Studies

National Bike to School Day is celebrated in May each year as part of May being recognized as National Bike Month. Many schools around the country celebrate the day with a focus on bike safety and encouraging students to ride their bikes to school that day.

Technology can be integrated into Bike to School Day by incorporating Google Maps. In addition to driving directions, Google Maps also provides directions and details for different modes of transportation including walking, riding a bus, or riding a bike.

See the rest of the blog post below to learn how to use this feature, as well as other ideas for how this can address curriculum topics in math and social studies.