Richard byrne's blog: free technology 4 teachers
To visit the blog, please click the button below. You will be able to open the blog in a new window:
This is a very useful website for teachers to find technology resources online. More importantly, it is free. It is developed by Richard Byrne, a former high school social studies teacher. It is said that he is a five time winner of the Edublogs Award for Best Resource Sharing Blog. What's more, this website reaches a subscriber base of more than 60,000 educators on a daily basis. Unbelievable! Anyway, it is pretty awesome. So let's have a look with me of this amazing website.
Once you open the website, you are at the blog home, and you will see Richard Byrne's photo and navigations on the top. On the left side, there is a brief introduction and week's most popular posts. Then, when you scroll down, you will see the official advertisers that help keep this blog going. You can visit those advertisers' site by simply clicking on the links. On the right side, you will see tons of other advertisement as well. This is what it looks like:
Once you open the website, you are at the blog home, and you will see Richard Byrne's photo and navigations on the top. On the left side, there is a brief introduction and week's most popular posts. Then, when you scroll down, you will see the official advertisers that help keep this blog going. You can visit those advertisers' site by simply clicking on the links. On the right side, you will see tons of other advertisement as well. This is what it looks like:
Now, let's follow the navigation and see what he's got in his blog.
Click on Work With Me, you will go into a page like this:
Basically, this page is a work related information for those who would like to cooperate with Richard, or those who would like to invite him to speak at school or conference. You can see his email here, and you will just need to email him directly and talk about the work. Also, it briefly describes what services Richard offers, including Workshop for Faculty, Keynote for Conference, Webinars for Faculty, and Virtual Keytones. Lastly, it lists the reasons why it is great to hire him. I guess blog could really be a good advertisement for selling ourselves to people.
Next, when you click on iPad Apps for School, you will actually go to another brand new website that looks like this:
This website is also written by Richard Byrne. It is a website that introduces some applications from iPad that teachers can use for their students' learning. But it is more focusing on elementary school. There are some applications like Country Mouses and City Mouses, Draw and Tell etc. I think elementary school teacher might find it helpful.
Going back to his website Free Technology 4 Teachers. The same thing happens when you click on Android 4 Schools, which is also another website that written by Richard Byrne. The difference is just that it is for Android system. The content and features of this website is pretty much the same as iPad Apps for School. This is what it looks like:
If you click on Practical Ed Tech, you will go to another website as well, which is also written by him. There will be a pop out like below asking you if you want to subscribe by email. It is a specific website for PD Webinars.
If you go to Google Tutorials, you can watch lots of tutorials for using google tools. You can use these tutorials to your own blog, website, or professional development session. It includes things like Google Docs, Google Map, and Google voice etc.
Let's move on to Free Guides. It is said that the free guides will give you a sense of what this blog is all about. However, personally, I think it is not organized and random things show up. For example, there is a video titled "How to insert videos into Google Slides", which I think "shouldn't it be put under the page of Google Tutorials"? And then I scroll down, there is something like "Google Earth Across the Curriculum ". After that, it is something titled "Beyond Google -- Tips and Tools for Improving Internet Search Experience". I just feel like these things just randomly showed up, and most of them are about Google, and he has a page is specifically about Google, why bother creating another page called "Free Guides" and out some other stuff about Google here? And what's more, the resources here are not accessible except the first video. Here is what it looks like:
Above, you can see the first video. And then, as you scroll down, you can not load anything, but can only see the titles. Probably Richard Byrne will need to fix this problem:
Moving on, we are getting to "Alternatives to YouTube". This page is for those teachers who can not access YouTube. Richard Byrne listed other sites that those teachers could be using to find educational videos, which includes School Tube, Teacher Tube, Next Vista, and Academic Earth. I think this is a good resource. And usually we are all finding videos on YouTube, even for those who can access YouTube. These sites might be good places to discover some other interesting educational videos that are not on YouTube. See down below:
Advertise Here. This page is for advertisement. It shows evidences like datas about how popular this site is and how many teachers are visiting this site everyday, therefore, encouraging companies to advertise here:
Next one, About the Author. This is a page functioning like an About Me page. It talks about this blog. It introduces his experience. Maybe he could put another photo here just because it is an introduction about himself.
And next, Creating Blogs and Websites. This is a page that teach us how to create our own blogs and website. There are tutorials about Blogger blog, Edublogs blog, Wordpress.com blog and Google sites website. There are some good tutorials here for these four blogs websites. However, it then also talks about how to create online quizzes. He provides several sites like Proprofs, Poll Daddy and Google Moderator etc. Personally, I think he should create another page for these information. Because if I am looking for resources about where to create online quizzes, I would not think that they would be under this page. It is most likely that I don't know these information would be here. Therefore, I think he needs to orgnize his website more. Take a look down below:
Firnally, the last page is Video Creation. This page is designed to introduce and show you how to use various free video creation resources, including YouTube, WeVideo, Shadow Puppet Edu and Wideo:
In conclusion, this blog written by Richard Byrne is a good place to find free resources for technology. It basically cover the most common questions and tools that teacher might be using in the class for their students. However, I personally feel like this site includes too many ads, and those ads cover The Who,e right side of the page, which occupies a lot of space and it kind of hurts my eyes. And there are a lot of navigations on top, so I feel like this website lack orgnization. Even in those pages, the organization of the texts and videos could be improved. But after all, it is free and you are really welcome to go up there and look up anythung that you could possibly be using. And you can even contact Richard Byrne and have some sort of cooperation with him because I believe that he is very active in giving different presentation about technology in class!
If you are interested in Richard Byrne, here are some social medias of Richard Byrne for you. Just click the button and you will be able to open them in new windows: