Year: 2013

Every week, I share a website that inspired, excited, and/or informed my classes. Here’s one on a popular trend in education–awarding badges:

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This is always challenging, isn’t it? Finding evidence that students have learned what you taught, that they can apply their knowledge to complex problems. How do you do this? Rubrics? Group projects? Posters? None sound worthy of the Common Core educational environ–and too often, students have figured out how to deliver within these guidelines while on auto-pilot.

Where can we find authentic assessments that are measurable yet student-centered, promote risk-taking by student and teacher alike, inquiry-driven and encourage students to take responsibility for his/her own learning? How do we assess a lesson plan in a manner that insures students have learned what they need to apply to life, to new circumstances they will face when they don’t have a teacher at their elbow to nudge them the right direction?

Here are some of my favorite approaches:

Anecdotally

I observe their actions, their work, the way they are learning the skills I’m teaching. Are they engaged, making their best effort? Do they remember skills taught in prior weeks and apply them? Do they self-assess and make corrections as needed?

Transfer of knowledge

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As a working technology teacher, I get hundreds of questions from parents about their home computers, how to do stuff, how to solve problems. Each Tuesday, I’ll share one of those with you. They’re always brief and always focused. Enjoy!

Q: I’m paranoid of losing lesson plans, report card comments, and other school work. I back up, but is that enough?

A: Truth, I am the most paranoid person I know about technology. I have an external hard drive for back up, Carbonite in the cloud, a 128-gig flash drive for my ‘important’ stuff (which turns out to be everything), and still I worry.

Here’s what else I do: Every time I work on a document I just can’t afford to lose (again, that’s pretty much everything), I email it to myself. If you’re using MS Office, that’s a snap. Other programs–just drag and drop the file into the email message. I set up a file on my email program called ‘Backups’. I store the email in there and it waits until I’m tearing my hair out. I’ve never had to go there, but it feels good knowing it’s available.

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Thursday’s are my busiest days at school. I barely get a lunch break–the 5 free minutes between classes I must use for the restroom. Eat or pee? Hmmm…. Not really a choice.

So by the time I get home this Thursday, I’ll be exhausted, not interested in fighting the holiday lovers for a place at the Restaurant Table. My husband of 29 years and I will eat in, chat, catch up, and likely go to bed early (although maybe Elementary is new on the Telly).

But, I realize most of you would like a bit more so I have a few ideas for you.

First, go to my post last Friday and you’ll find 20 Great Valentine Websites for your students. If you already finished these, read on:

• Here’s Valentine history, according to Wikipedia. Who knew it all started with Geoffrey Chaucer?
• Three great Valentine love poems from new efriend, Chris Wood. You can also drop by St. Valentine’s Day website for an entire list of heart-jerkers
• Are you looking for pithy, concise Valentine sayings? Try Creating Really Awesome Free Things. Be forewarned: They belong on candy hearts. These are a bit longer, but still saccharin.
• You not a serious, mushy sort of lover? Click here for quotes with a sense of humor.

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Looking for something to spice up your classroom? Here are a variety of projects you can download for free. Just visit my TeacherPayTeachers store, click download, and they’re yours. If you enjoy them, please add a few stars to the recommendation list:

A Colonization Brochure in Publisher

A Publisher trifold on American colonies (or any
other topic you’re covering in your classroom). Includes step-by-step directions, standards addressed, time required, prior knowledge expected, vocabulary used, higher-order thinking skills addressed, samples, reproducibles, grading rubrics, and more.

His Words in Our Words

Students interpret the words of Dr Martin Luther King in their own words in a visual organizer. Great project that gets students thinking about impact of words on history. Common Core aligned

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As a working technology teacher, I get hundreds of questions from parents about their home computers, how to do stuff, how to solve problems. Each Tuesday, I’ll share one of those with you. They’re always brief and always focused. Enjoy!

Q: I have Windows 7 and I can’t find Explorer anymore. Where did it go?

A: Right click on the start button and select ‘Explore’.

DOS is a lot harder to find. Type ‘command prompt’ into the search field and it’ll pop up.

I still miss DOS…

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In my last post, we talked about “digital citizens”, the modern student who lives in two worlds. One he can touch with his hands, the other only with his mind. It’s this latter one that has revolutionized education, provided opportunities for students to talk to experts on astronomy, walk through the ancient ruins of Stonehenge, and dissect a frog without touching a scalpel. This world is scintillating, but challenging, demanding students be risk-takers and inquirers.

Inquiry and education

That last—inquiry—has changed the K-12 classroom from what many experienced just a decade ago, for students cannot be inquirers without being risk-takers. They take responsibility for their own learning by following practical strategies for uncovering information despite the billions (literally) of places to look. Consider this: If you Google ‘space’, you get over 4 billion hits. That much information is worthless. Digital citizens develop practical strategies for refining this list to a specific need.

Digital citizens also differentiate instruction so it works for themselves, not change their learning style to fit what the teacher delivers. They hear the big ideas, grasp the essential questions, and then develop a plan that delivers it in their own unique and personal way.

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Here are some fun Valentine sites to fill those few minutes betwixt and between lessons, projects, bathroom breaks, lunch, and everything else:

1. Apps
2. Drag-and-drop
3. Dress up the heart
4. Google Drawings Magnetic Poetry from Ctrl Alt Achieve
5. Games and puzzles
6. Games and stories
7. ‘I love you’ in languages Afrikaans to Zulu
8. Line up the hearts
9. Match
10. Mouse skills
11. Poem generator
12. Puppy jigsaw
13. Rebus game
14. Sudoku
15. Tic-tac-toe
16. Typing
17. Unscramble
18. Write in a heart

Do you have any I missed?

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Education has changed. Teachers no longer lecture from a dais with student learning contained within the schoolhouse walls. Thanks to the pervasiveness of easy-to-use and free web-based tools, 93 percent of teachers have one or more computers in the classroom with internet access (National Center for Education Statistics–2009). Global home Internet users with fixed Internet access is expected to grow from 1.7 billion in 2011 to 2.3 billion by 2016 (VNI-SA Research)—that’s almost one-third of the world’s population.

Because of these changes, educators have come to expect students to participate actively in the learning process and transfer their knowledge from the classroom to life. For example, when preparing a class project, a fifth grader will do the research using the internet, collaborate with classmates on Google Apps, write the report with a web-based tool (i.e., Google Drive), share it with the world using digital tools (i.e., Animoto or Glogster), and then use those learned skills in other classes.

Students have become digital citizens. The question is: How do we as educators teach them to thrive in the digital world?

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As a working technology teacher, I get hundreds of questions from parents about their home computers, how to do stuff, how to solve problems. Each Tuesday, I’ll share one of those with you. They’re always brief and always focused. Enjoy!

Q: I’m pushing the power button on my laptop (or desktop, but more commonly this happens with laptops), but it won’t turn off. What do I do?

A: Push the power button and hold it in for a count of ten. That’ll work. If not (there’s always that one that breaks all the rules), hold it for a count of twenty.

To get the complete list of 169 Tech Tips, click here.

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