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First up is a tutorial on Jellybean Writer. The video is embedded below. Jellybean Writer is a free tool for creating picture books. Students can import pictures from their computers then write captions for each image. All stories can be saved online or downloaded and printed. If picture books are too simple for your students, they can skip using pictures and select one of the text only templates for the pages in their books. As you will see in the video below, teacher can create and manage student accounts in Jellybean Scoop.

Teach Your Monster to Read is a great series of online games designed to help students improve the speed and accuracy with which they recognize letters and sounds. The website gets its name from the friendly monster avatars that students help learn to read through the course of the games.

Richard Byrne exlainshow teachers can make the best use of the 2016 version of Padlet. "Padlet introduced a revamped version of their online corkboard tool. The core functions of Padlet are still the same, but the user interface has changed a little bit. The primary changes are in the way that you customize your Padlet boards. In the video that is embedded in the posthe provides an overview of this version of Padlet"

A lot of good ideas for writing.

A couple of Chrome extensions explained here that that Richard Byrne uses when he finds himself falling into social media vortex and not being as productive as he should be. These extensions are equally useful to students as they are to adults.

"Common Craft recently produced a new video on that topic. Through Bias Detection Explained by Common Craft students can learn about common signs of bias in media, problems that occur when bias is ignored, and why bias is common in communication. GIFs from the video can be seen here. The video itself is embedded below."

"Copyright can be a difficult subject for some students to understand. That said, in a world filled with digital media, it is very important for students to learn how copyright affects them. Taking the Mystery Out of Copyright could be a great resource for introducing elementary school students to the regulations and rights associated with copyright."

"A new service for locating and reading newspapers from locations all around the world. Newspaper Map claims to have put placemarks for more 10,000 newspapers on one Google Map. To find a newspaper you can browse the map then click on a placemark to open the link within to read a newspaper."

"With the rise and prominence of eBooks have come a number of resources for educators and students to access free content on virtually any device. Using e-readers, tablets, or computers; in conjunction with apps such as Kindle, Nook, iBooks, Google Play Books, and OverDrive; you can access libraries of books for free on virtually any device. By downloading these free apps, you make your device a digital reading device that is not dependent on a specific vendor. "

"Creating storyboards are a good way for students to plan video projects. They can provide a frame-by-frame outline of the plot of a video and so it is very helpful to have students plan their videos before jumping into any tool. Making simple, printable storyboard templates is easy to do in Google Slides and in PowerPoint." There are 2 videosin the post to learn how to use some common presentation tools to make storyboard templates."

"While none of the following tools have as many features as Padlet, they all provide the core element of a digital wall to which you apply digital sticky notes. Five alternatives to Padlet are discussed in this post."

"ytCropper lets you share just a portion of a YouTube video by specifying the start time and end time of the video that you want others to see. To do this simply go to the ytCropper site then paste in the URL of the YouTube video that you want to share. Once you have done that you can specify the start and end time of the portion of the video that you want people to watch. ytCropper will generate a link to the cropped version of the video. Share that link to have people watch your specified portion of the video."

Factitious is a game that is designed to help students practice identifying real and fake news stories. It has been around fro a little while but the 2020 version of the game features stories about COVID-19.