Blackbird is a new platform for teaching programming to middle school and high school students. Blackbird is positioning itself as a platform that fills the gap between using a blocks-based service like Scratch and writing code in an IDE. Blackbird doesn't use blocks or even...
Earlier this week TED-Ed published a new lesson titled How Do Wind Turbines Work? The video covers the basics of how the turbines harness the power of wind to generate electricity. The basic math of wind turbine design is also explained to viewers of the video....
For many years teachers from all over the world came to Maine join me for the Practical Ed Tech Summer Camp. While I was hoping to return to an in-person format, this summer I’m going to host the Practical Ed Tech Summer Camp as a...
Bitly is a handy URL shortener that I've used for many years. As a registered user I can create custom, shortened URLs that people can actually spell. I use these whenever I need to share a link to a Canva or Google Slides presentation because...
On a fairly regular basis I get questions from readers that go something like this, "I'm trying to use Flipgrid but my camera won't work. What can I do?" A variation on that question asks for help with a microphone. When you're trying to use a...
A couple of days ago I wrote about the impending deprecation of the classic version of Google Sites and how to transition to the new version. A reader sent me a good follow-up question. That was, "is there an easy way to tell which version...
For nearly five years now Google has been saying that the old, "classic" version of Google Sites would be closing "soon." It appears that they really mean it this time. In an email to Google Workspaces domain administrators and in this blog post, Google has...
Like many of my students, I'm often guilty of writing in a rush. Doing that leads to three bad habits that appear in my writing. The first is omitting words that should be in a sentence. The second is repeating words in a sentence when...
It's school vacation week here in Maine. I have a long list of things that I want to accomplish on this blog and on Practical Ed Tech. To get that list done and still have time for fun things like riding bikes with my kids,...
