Wednesday, July 17, 2019

Ten Handy Google Keep Features for Teachers and Students

Google Keep is a great tool that students and teachers can access through G Suite for Education and through Gmail. Google Keep works just as well in the Chrome web browser as in the mobile apps. There are many some obvious features of Google Keep, like bookmarking, and there are some "hidden" features that are also good to know about, like annotating images. In the following video I demonstrate ten handy features of Google Keep.

Ten Google Keep Features Demonstrated in the Video:
1. Bookmarking
2. To do lists
3. Sharing notes and bookmarks
4. Date and time reminders
5. Location-based reminders
6. Drawing notes
7. Annotating images
8. Sending notes to Google Docs
9. Using note labels and searching notes
10. Color-coding notes

What's the Fastest Tire Pressure? - A Science Lesson

Global Cycling Network is a popular YouTube channel that produces high-quality videos about all aspects of bicycle riding. The videos are hosted by retired professional cyclists. The topics covered by GCN range from basics like picking a proper helmet to more nuanced topics like finding the tire pressure that will make you fastest on your bicycle. That's the topic covered in this GCN video featuring Emma Pooley, a retired professional cyclist who also holds a PhD in Geotechnical Engineering.

In What's the Fastest Tyre Pressure? Emma Pooley does some road testing of tire pressures before then heading into the classroom to explain the physics factors that influence the speed.

Applications for Education
Before showing this video to your students they could do some of their own testing of tire pressure on bicycles. Have them make some hypotheses about which tire pressure will be the fastest on their own bicycles. Or if your school is one that has bicycles available in the physical education department, make this experiment an outdoor activity during the school day.

The video could also be useful in demonstrating to students the many variables that must be accounted for when conducting an experiment. For example, in the first few minutes of the video there are many opportunities for students to identify variables that could affect the outcome of the experiment.

Quik - Quickly Create Audio Slideshow Videos

Quik is a free app from GoPro for quickly creating videos on your Android or iOS phone or tablet. With the app installed on you can import pictures and videos that you have stored on your phone, in Google Photos, or in a GoPro Plus account. After you've selected a few pictures or video clips Quik then generates a video that combines those selected pictures and video clips. Quik automatically adds music and applies image effects to the video. You can change the automatically added music and image effects by simply selecting a different theme from Quik's menu of video themes. Watch my video that is embedded below for a demonstration of the Quik app. Get the Android version here and the get the iOS version here.

Applications for Education
Quik could be a good app for students to use to quickly create a video of highlights of a field trip, to showcase some highlights from a group project, or to simply make a little autobiographical video to share with friends and family.

It should be noted that Quik is also available as desktop software for Mac and Windows. The desktop version offers more features than the mobile version.