Summer Professional Development Opportunities

We all need a break after the last 14 months. We need fresh air, sunshine, and time away from the stress that has accompanied being an educator in the midst of a global crisis. At the same time, we should probably spend some time reflecting on what practices we would like to continue to implement in the classroom and/or what new skills we would like to have, moving forward. When you find yourself ready to engage in professional development  these are some opportunities to consider. 

• Matt Miller has put together an extensive Wakelet collection of free summer PD opportunities.

• Check out the two Global GEG free summer bootcamp opportunities if you have ever considered amping up your Google skills and becoming a Google Certified Educator. 

• EdWeb a free learning community with professional development opportunities for educators in all disciplines. Check out this post to read more.

• Log into Hoopla Digital using your BPL eCard and read one of these books from renowned educators: titles by Dave Burgess Consulting, Inc;  titles by ASCD; titles by International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE); and titles by Solution Tree Press. Read this post to learn how to sign up for your eCard and create a Hoopla account. 

• LinkedIn Learning (BPL) Be sure to log in through the Boston Public Portal to keep your data private!!  With courses in diversity and inclusion, creativity, skills building,  and more, there is something here for any educator who wants to learn.
(Please note that you MUST log in using the link provided by Boston Public Library using your BPL eCard in order to take advantage of learning opportunities for free.)

• KQED Media Academy for Teachers offers free hands-on professional learning opportunities focused on media literacy. The first upcoming course, Video Production for the Classroom starts June 7th. 

• Earn Badges, Certificates, and Accreditations from various EdTech companies. Rachel Coathup, a Global GEG leader and Google Certified Innovator, curated these BadgEdTech resources as part of her innovator project. 

• Not ready to engage in Educator PD yet? With a FREE BPL eCard and a Kanopy account you can check out The Great Courses and learn a new skill or explore one of your hobbies or passions! Some courses contain supplemental materials (available as a PDF download) See Course to locate supplemental resources (not available in individual videos. See Learning French as an example to view supplemental materials. 

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Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash

 

Monday Medley: Freely Licensed Images, Icons, and ClipArt

Let's talk for a minute about copyright, fair use, and using images from the internet. When creating a presentation for your students how often do you consider whether the images you have selected meet copyright guidelines? While it is unlikely that the "copyright police" will come looking for you if you use an image or images without permission or proper attribution, we really should try to be good role models for our students. An easy way to model good digital citizenship is to ensure that the images that you use are freely usable and do not violate any copyright rules. You might be wondering where to look for copyright free images. 

Here are a few good places to start: 

Unsplash has a collection of over 2 million free, high-resolution photographs that can be downloaded and used for free, even for commercial use. Attribution is not required although it is recommended as a best practice. You can search for images by topic, collection, and more. Unsplash even has a collection of images that can be downloaded and used as desktop wallpaper. This is my favorite place to find images! 

EDUImages by All4Ed are free to use, share, and adapt with proper attribution as long as it's not for commercial use. There are more than 700 images in the collection, all revolving around education. You can do a general image search or filter your search by educational topic, grade level, or photo location. All images in the collection were taken in 7 schools across the United States. BIPOC are represented in these photos.

Pics4Learning has copyright friendly photos and illustrations that are safe and free for education. Images can be downloaded or saved to Google Drive. Citation information is included so that images can be properly attributed. 

Use CC Search to locate images that are available for reuse. You can filter your search to locate images that you are free to modify or adapt. Each image contains information about how the it can be reused. Citation information is available so that you can credit the creator. Some images can even be used for commercial purposes. 

Iconsmania has free, editable icons, illustrations, and clip art images. (The creator of this collection is the same person who created Slidesmania, the free Google Slides template website.) 

Google Fonts has an icon library that is free to use as long as you don't try to sell them. If you are trying to create a directions sheet for students or other educators and you need an image of an icon to accompany your text you can download the image as a PNG and insert it into your document. For example, this undo icon: 

Public Domain Clipart contains over 25,000 images that are free to use. However, the site does have a disclaimer stating, " As we would like to continue to offer this collection of images to the public, we require that users intending on utilizing images research the copyright and public domain status of the images for themselves prior to any use, such as commercial use." You have to contend with advertising on this site but with a huge library of images it's worth overlooking the ads if you want a lot of choices for clipart!

These are just a few options available if you are looking for freely licensed images, icons, and clipart. If you are interested in learning more about copyright, creative commons licensing, and fair use I would recommend checking out this extensive resource, posted in this Campus Press blog post: The Educator's Guide to Copyright, Fair Use, and Creative Commons.

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Photo by Umberto on Unsplash

Monday Medley: Bookmarking Tools (Wakelet)

How do you save all of the useful Articles, Websites, PDFs and Documents that you come across in your daily life as an educator? You may go "old school" and save scraps of paper with notes scribbled on them, or add a star to helpful emails that you receive. Unfortunately this can lead to forgetting about resources or having difficulty locating things when you need them. So, what's the solution? There are several free tools available that can help you to bookmark things and stay organized. 

Wakelet for Educators is a free tool that allows teachers to "save, organize and present multimedia content with students, teachers and learning communities." North Reading Public Schools already has a signed data privacy agreement with Wakelet, which means that you can feel comfortable using it with your students. The image below illustrates the versality of Wakelet as a curation tool.

Read this free Wakelet eBook to get started today!

Visit the Wakelet Help Center.

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Photo by pure julia on Unsplash