ITP - 48: Richard Byrne Tech Tools for Teachers

Greg: All right, welcome to this episode of ITP, the International Teacher Podcast. This is Greg, the single guy. Matt, the family guy, is once again away, but he’ll be joining us soon. And Kent, the cat guy—how you doing, Kent?

Kent: I’m great. I’m happy to be here.

Greg: Great. And our new guest is Richard Byrne, and he is famous for tech tools for teachers. It’s a lot of free stuff online. He’s a great teacher himself, and we welcome him from Maine. How you doing, Richard?

Richard: Good, good. And it’s FreeTechForTeachers.com. So if anyone’s trying to find it, if you try to Google the phrase, it’s Free Tech for Teachers—you’ll find it. And it’s nicely warm here. It’s 27 Fahrenheit and snowing. It’s a beautiful Maine day.

Greg: I’m speechless. I’m freezing just thinking about it. I mean, we’re in the desert right now. What is it, Kent?

Kent: It’s 27 here too—but 27 Celsius. It’s going to go up to a balmy 50 degrees Celsius pretty soon. So for those of you out there speaking Fahrenheit, that’s over about 120. It usually gets here in the summertime. So yeah, we hit about 80 degrees Fahrenheit here in the desert. Greg and I are neighbors here in the desert. I can turn and wave to him. And we haven’t seen snow in 10 years.

Greg: All right, so listen. Usually on our podcast, we interview a lot of international teachers and would-be or soon-to-be international teachers—and maybe my mom. Other than that, we don’t really talk to a lot of people that are in your line of work.

But that’s why we wanted you on our show. Not only are international teachers listening to this, but I think—since I’ve been a follower of yours for years, Richard, and I know Kent is a fan also—international teachers could really learn a lot from what you have to offer online.

Whether it’s webinars, books, websites, or tools—that’s what I want to get into, and that was my goal for this interview. So can you tell us a little bit about what you do now?

Richard: Yeah. What I do now is I write FreeTechForTeachers.com, and I also have a website called PracticalEdTech.com where I offer online courses for teachers who want to learn new tech skills to use in their classroom.

My mission has always been, for the last almost 16 years now, to use the tools to create some cool learning experiences for kids. That’s the bottom line right there. The tech tools are there, and I want to use them to create interesting experiences for kids that they couldn’t get without the technology—or couldn’t get without a whole lot of extra work without the technology.

My goal is to help teachers figure those things out. So I offer some courses on how to do that. Kent took one of the courses this past fall about animated explanations and how to make little animated videos and explanations of different concepts. So that’s what I do primarily these days.

I do some workshops in schools from time to time, and I spend a lot of time taking my kids to school in the morning and picking them up in the afternoon.

But before that, I got started in education about 20 years ago. My very first job was teaching high school language arts, and then I taught social studies for a number of years. I also taught computer science.

Greg: You seem to be someone who’s been around the business for a long time—and you’re a young guy, you’ve got young kids—but it feels like you’ve been around forever. When did you start putting it out there with technology? And when did you enter the YouTube world?

Richard: In 2007, I started writing FreeTechForTeachers.com. I did that as kind of an offshoot of a grant-funded workshop that I went to. My school was part of a consortium, and we had three different tracks we could pick from to study and pursue.

The one I picked was technology, and one of the things we had to do was write about what we were doing—write about our experiences. So I started that as a little blog, and then I realized people were actually reading it, much to my surprise. I enjoyed doing it, so I just kept going.

The YouTube channel—I think I started in 2009, but I didn’t really put emphasis on video until around 2014 or 2015. You can go back and find videos from 2009, but the real push started later.

Now there are around 1,700 or 1,800 videos and over 17,000 blog posts. I’ve written a lot.

Greg: That’s mind-boggling.

Kent: That’s a lot of videos.

Greg: And you do a lot of how-to content—screen share walkthroughs so people can follow along and pause while they’re working, right?

Richard: That’s the goal. I try to make everything easy to follow. I always think about the grumpiest person in my department—the one who doesn’t want to use their computer—and how I can help them get started.

That’s why my videos are short. It’s rare that I go beyond five or six minutes. I’d rather have someone watch a few short videos than try to sit through a long one where they lose focus.

So my videos are straightforward. I don’t do the typical YouTube “like, share, subscribe” stuff, and I try to keep my face out of it for the most part.

Greg: But you’ve got that voice, though—you mentioned it in one of your videos—that Ray Romano voice.

Richard: Yeah, I had never heard that until I gave a keynote years ago, and people kept telling me I sounded like him. I still don’t hear it unless I play it back.

Kent: Is that the mammoth from Ice Age?

Greg: Everybody Loves Raymond.

Richard: I never watched the show, but I’ll take your word for it.

Greg: For someone who doesn’t push the typical YouTube persona, you’ve built a strong following—around 45,000 subscribers, right?

Richard: Yeah, around there.

Greg: And you come across as energetic and positive. Do you ever have moments where you feel like you’re not reaching some teachers?

Richard: Not at night—I’ve got little kids, so I go to bed early. But I do have moments during the day.

Honestly, it’s not teachers that wear on me. It’s the business side—the PR people who have no experience in education but try to pitch their “revolutionary” apps.

Every morning, I get 15 or 20 emails from PR firms trying to sell me something. Maybe once a week, one of those is worthwhile. The rest are not.

What really gets me is when they clearly haven’t done any research about me or my work. I once had someone start a call by asking if I was familiar with Common Core standards. That tells me they haven’t read anything I’ve written.

That’s the kind of thing that frustrates me—not teachers.

Greg: That’s fair. I’ll tell you, one thing that’s kept me going over the years is your newsletter. It’s incredibly useful. Every week, you send out tools, updates, and links to videos—it saves teachers a lot of time.

Richard: Thanks. I try to send it out every Sunday evening Eastern time. If you’re in other parts of the world, it might show up Monday or Tuesday. I actually write it on Friday and schedule it to go out later.

Greg: You just ruined the magic.

Richard: Yeah, but Sunday is family time.

Greg: Tell us a little bit about your kids. We can see some drawings in the background—people listening can’t see it, but we can.

Kent: They’re lucky they can’t see us.

Richard: As we’re recording this, I’m actually flying to Chicago tomorrow to speak at an event. My six-year-old made me this little carry-along picture book for Christmas—pictures of our family that I take with me when I travel.

I also carry a notebook everywhere I go for ideas and daily planning. I put that little picture book in there and take it with me on trips.

Greg: I thought you’d be carrying an iPad. Kent and I are such tech people that we carry iPads everywhere.

Richard: I know, but it’s actually quicker for me with a notebook. I also like that I have stacks of them going back for years. I use unlined paper because I do a lot of mind mapping.

I’ve filled out six notebooks just in the last year.

I have a six-year-old who’s in kindergarten and just learning to use her Chromebook, and a five-year-old in preschool who’s very ready for kindergarten.

My partner works in the medical field, and a lot of my time each day is spent with my kids.

Greg: How do you describe what you do when someone asks you?

Richard: It depends on the situation, but the simplest way is to say I’m a technology consultant focused on education. That’s kind of the catch-all—and it’s what I put on my tax return.

Really, my goal is to help teachers use technology to create cool learning experiences for kids, but that’s harder to explain quickly.

Greg: You’ve been doing this alongside teaching for years. How did you find time for it?

Richard: When I started, I was a single guy with no kids, so I had more free time. I’d sit at night watching TV and writing.

It was also the early days of Web 2.0. There was a lot of excitement—new tools, new platforms, and people experimenting with ideas.

I got connected with people in tech through Twitter and started realizing there was crossover with education.

The moment it really clicked for me was when I saw an interview with Pete Cashmore, who started Mashable. He said he basically locked himself in a room and just kept writing about tech.

I thought, I can do that—and I did. It was fun, and I made time for it.

Now, 15 or 16 years later, it’s a balancing act. Writing is more formulaic for me now, but videos still take time, even if they look simple.

At this point, what keeps me going is hearing from teachers. I got an email recently from a teacher who said a short video I made solved exactly the problem she had.

That kind of feedback is what makes it worth it.

Greg: That’s what it’s all about—helping people. Have you ever played a joke on someone with your content?

Richard: Not directly on a person, but years ago I did an April Fool’s post about a fake product called Magic Grade that would automatically grade essays.

At the end, the link went to the Wikipedia page for April Fool’s Day.

Some people got really upset—one guy wrote a long response about how misleading it was. After that, I decided not to do that kind of thing again.

Greg: People take things seriously.

Kent: I’ve seen that too—like putting signs on printers saying they’re voice-activated.

Richard: One thing I’ve learned is that people don’t always understand how things work online. I’ve had people email me about ads on my site, thinking I personally chose them, when it’s just based on their browsing history.

Greg: You’re dealing with a wide range of users.

Kent: How have teachers changed over the years when it comes to technology?

Richard: The biggest change is how cautious people are now. Fifteen years ago, teachers would try almost any website. Now there’s more awareness about data privacy and security.

There’s also a tendency to stick with a small set of tools people are comfortable with—like Kahoot or Screencastify—and not branch out unless something is really compelling.

Another change is how we define technology integration. It used to be something simple like making a PowerPoint. Now it’s more about students creating things and being in control of their learning.

That’s the shift I’d like to see more of—students building, creating, and doing something meaningful with technology.

Greg: We’ll take a moment to remind listeners how to reach out to us. You can find us on Instagram and Twitter at ITPExpats, or email us at [internationalteacherpodcast@gmail.com](mailto:internationalteacherpodcast@gmail.com). You can also visit our website.

Greg: Back to the show—one thing I wanted to ask is about getting students more involved in creating with technology. What are some tools or approaches you’re really excited about right now?

Richard: One of the things I always come back to is putting students in the driver’s seat. Instead of just interacting with something a teacher or company has created, I want them building something themselves.

There are tools like Construct 3, where students can create their own video games—not just quiz-based games, but actual interactive experiences. That’s really powerful.

Another one I like is MIT App Inventor. It’s been around for a while, but it allows students to take an idea for an app and actually build it. They can see their idea come to life.

I remember the first time I presented MIT App Inventor at a conference years ago, only a couple of people were interested. Now I can run an entire session on it and have a full room of people who want to try it.

That shift toward creation is something I think is really important.

Kent: I’ve definitely seen that too. Younger teachers, especially, are more willing to jump into these tools and experiment.

Richard: Yeah, and that’s encouraging. But I also think it’s important to support teachers at all levels of comfort with technology. Not everyone is going to jump in right away, and that’s okay.

Greg: That’s a good point. Not everyone is at the same place, and teachers have a lot on their plates already.

Greg: Let me ask you this—have you traveled much outside the U.S. for your work?

Richard: Yeah, I’ve been fortunate to travel quite a bit. I’ve spoken at conferences in Australia and all over Europe. I was supposed to go to Singapore, but that got canceled when COVID started.

Greg: That’s still a pretty impressive list.

Greg: What’s the biggest audience you’ve ever spoken to?

Richard: Probably in Texas—everything’s bigger in Texas, right? The Texas Library Association conference was a big one. I’ve also spoken at events in North Carolina that had over a thousand people.

Greg: That’s huge.

Richard: One of the moments where it really hit me that people were actually reading my work was when I was traveling in Iceland. I was there for a mountain biking trip, and the guide’s wife turned out to be an English teacher who had been reading my blog for years.

That was a surreal moment.

Greg: That must have been wild.

Richard: It really was.

Greg: All right, let’s talk about something fun. Have you ever had any interesting experiences going through customs or traveling for work?

Richard: Yeah, one that stands out was when I was traveling to Alberta in Canada. I had a long travel route—Maine to Arizona to Edmonton—and by the time I got there, I was exhausted.

When I went through customs, they were suspicious because I was traveling to an area near the oil fields. I guess I fit the profile of someone going to work there.

They pulled me aside, asked for documentation, and went through everything. Eventually, they stamped my passport with a special designation as a “performer,” which I thought was funny.

Greg: That’s amazing.

Richard: Yeah, so technically I have the same designation as a performer that someone like Mick Jagger would get.

Greg: That’s going on your resume.

Greg: Before we wrap up, I want to bring it back to teachers who are listening to this—especially international teachers. If someone is feeling overwhelmed with technology, where should they start?

Richard: Start small. Pick one tool or one idea and try it out. You don’t need to overhaul everything you’re doing.

The biggest mistake people make is trying to do too much at once. That’s when it becomes overwhelming and frustrating.

Find something that solves a problem you already have. Maybe it’s a way to give feedback more efficiently, or a way for students to demonstrate understanding in a different way.

Once you get comfortable with one thing, then you can build from there.

Greg: That’s really practical advice.

Kent: Yeah, I think a lot of teachers feel like they have to master everything right away, and that’s just not realistic.

Richard: Exactly. It’s a process. And it’s okay to take your time with it.

Greg: One last question—if teachers want to find your work, where should they go?

Richard: The easiest place is FreeTechForTeachers.com. That’s where I post everything—new tools, tutorials, and ideas.

If you’re interested in more in-depth learning, PracticalEdTech.com is where I offer courses and workshops.

Greg: Perfect. Richard, thank you so much for coming on the show. This has been really helpful, and I think a lot of our listeners are going to get value from this.

Richard: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Kent: Yeah, thanks a lot. This was great.

Greg: And to our listeners, thanks for joining us. This is Greg, the single guy, along with Kent, the cat guy, signing off from the International Teacher Podcast.

Greg: And for those of you listening, definitely check out Richard’s work. There’s a lot there, and it’s all designed to make your life easier as a teacher.

Kent: Yeah, there’s a ton of value in what he puts out.

Greg: All right, that’s it for today. Thanks again for joining us.