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What tech ed can I help you with? |
I’m taking a trip with my daughter to visit my son who is stationed in Okinawa with the Army. We’ll spend two weeks traveling the area. I haven’t done this in fifty years (when I traveled through the old Soviet Union and Europe) and am beyond excited!
Teacher Appreciation Week is May 6th-10th. In honor of these tenacious, creative individuals, here are some of our favorite teacher articles:
18 Things Teachers Do Before 8am
10 Steps to Become a Better Geek
21 Reasons Why You Know You’re a Teacher
You Know You’re a Techy Teacher When…
Just Another Day In Computer Lab
May 28th-31st:
BOGO — Buy one month; get the second free
Do any of these sound like you?
More and more teachers–new and experienced–are looking for coaching or mentoring to fill gaps in their learning, keep up to date on the latest teaching strategies, and solve problems they didn’t expect. Many turn to the personalized approach Ask a Tech Teacher and Structured Learning offer. Coaching is completed via Google Hangouts or Webroom.net or email if that is your preference. After only a short time, teachers find they are better prepared with tech-infused lesson plans, able to teach to standards more fluently, can integrate tech into core classroom time, easily differentiate for student needs with tech, and more.
“Once a month, pick my brain. I’ll share what I’ve learned and what works from 30 years of teaching.” –Jacqui Murray
Normally, we charge a $150 per month with a two month minimum (for a total of $300). This month between the 28th and 30th, get both months of coaching or mentoring for only $150.
Click our PayPal Me here. Add $150.00 to the line.
Because it’s PayPal, you can enter as a guest with any credit card–no PayPal account required.
We wrote the books. We’ll help you deliver on keyboarding, integrating tech into your curriculum, digital citizenship, Common Core, and more. Questions? Ask at askatechteacher at gmail dot com.
Here are the most-read posts for the month of April:
Jacqui Murray has been teaching K-18 technology for 30 years. She is the editor/author of over a hundred tech ed resources including a K-12 technology curriculum, K-8 keyboard curriculum, K-8 Digital Citizenship curriculum. She is an adjunct professor in tech ed, Master Teacher, webmaster for four blogs, an Amazon Vine Voice, CSTA presentation reviewer, freelance journalist on tech ed topics, contributor to NEA Today and TeachHUB, and author of the tech thrillers, To Hunt a Sub and Twenty-four Days. You can find her resources at Structured Learning.
In these 169 tech-centric situations, you get an overview of pedagogy—the tech topics most important to your teaching—as well as practical strategies to address most classroom tech situations, how to scaffold these to learning, and where they provide the subtext to daily tech-infused education.
Today’s tip: How to Move Pics Around in Docs
Category: Images
Sub-category: MS Office, Google Apps
Q: I added an image to my Word document, but I can’t move it around the page. How do I fix that?
A: Word’s default for inserting a picture on a page is ‘inline’–it treats it as text. Like words on a document, it can’t be easily moved. Here’s how to fix that:
Now drag and drop it anywhere you’d like.
For detail, and how to do this in Google Apps, visit Tech Tip #12.
Sign up for a new tip each week or buy the entire 169 Real-world Ways to Put Tech into Your Classroom.
Nearly three million students currently attend online programs and six million take at least one online class. This means learning online has become one of the most popular approaches to education.
I am an adjunct profession who teaches solely online for a variety of big-name colleges and Universities. Each year, the classes grow in size. Whether you like it or not, this is the future of education, where people pursue learning without the need for a car, expensive gas, parking fees, campus-based meals, housing (if you live on campus), traffic delays, absent teachers, wait lists for full classes, inflexible time schedules, conflicts with personal schedules, and all those details that make attending college a juggling act. Done right, you don’t have to give up the collaboration, camaraderie, and new friends to get the passion of learning, the huzzah of amazing knowledge, and the high of improving yourself.
What I like best about online classes is that they are personalized learning that differentiates for varied student needs, learning styles, and communication methods. Don’t get me wrong. I know it’s not for everyone but for some, it allows them to achieve their goals without the suffocating structure usually associated with attending on-campus classes.
Before I get into how I teach online classes, here are some of the factors to consider when you weigh online or on-campus:
Here’s a preview of what’s coming up on Ask a Tech Teacher in May:
Education has changed. No longer is it contained within four classroom walls or the physical site of a school building. Students aren’t confined by the eight hours between school bells or the struggling budget of an underfunded program. Now, education can be found anywhere — teaming up with students in Kenya, Skyping with an author in Sweden, or chatting with an astrophysicist on the International Space Station. Students can use Google Earth to take a virtual tour of a zoo or a blog to collaborate on class research. Learning has no temporal or geographic borders and is available wherever students and teachers find an Internet connection.
This vast landscape of resources is offered digitally, freely (often), and equitably (hopefully), but to take that cerebral trek through the online world, children must know how to do it safely, securely, and responsibly. This used to mean limiting access to the Internet, blocking websites, and layering rules upon rules hoping (vainly) to discourage students from using an infinite and fascinating resource.
It didn’t work.
Best practices now suggest that instead of cocooning students, we teach them to be good digital citizens, confident and competent. Here are eleven projects to teach kids authentically, blended with your regular lessons, the often complicated topic of becoming good digital citizens, knowledgeable about their responsibilities in an Internet world.
In these 169 tech-centric situations, you get an overview of practical strategies to address most classroom tech situations, how to scaffold these to learning, and where they provide the subtext to daily tech-infused education.
Today’s tip: #49–The 15-second Slideshow
Category: Images
Sub-category: PCs, Macs, Chromebooks, iPads
Q: What’s an easy way Kindergartners and first graders can share a slideshow of their work?
A: If you have PCs:
Here’s how you do it in Macs:
For Chromebooks:
Ask a Tech Teacher contributor, Lisa Griffin, has an interesting AI-inspired tool to share with readers. It brings the best of today’s AI functions to classroom writing programs. See what you think:
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We live in a digital era where the kids are in contact in all sorts of technological solutions that help them learn, connect, and have fun. Furthermore, recent tech advancements are facilitating the inclusion of kids with different sorts of disabilities, allowing them to attend regular classes without any trouble.
Nowadays, Artificial Intelligence is becoming more and more accepted in classrooms all over the world. The benefits of technology usage in schools are vast, including everything from grading tests to analyzing weak spots in courses, providing improvement suggestions. The use of AI in writing and education is also displayed through overwhelming employment of various forms of writing checkers powered by AI. One of these writing assistants is Robot Don, an AI-driven software which we are going to discuss in this article.
Writing essays on any given topic includes more than just performing deep research and understanding the issue at hand. It’s about practicing the ability to articulate your knowledge in a manner that is easy to understand and follow. In order to accomplish these goals, proper writing skills are a necessity. This includes impeccable spelling, punctuation, wording, and an extensive vocabulary. According to research, most common undergraduate writing errors include faulty sentence structure, misplaced words, poor punctuation, and pretty slim vocabulary.
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