Here’s a preview of what’s coming up on Ask a Tech Teacher in January:

• Best-in-Class Resources Competition
• Subscriber Special: January
• Questions Parents Ask about Technology
• MLK Lesson  Plans
• Free Webinar on Building Digital Citizens
• How Cloud Computing is Revolutionizing Education
• Teaching Tolerance
• Making Kindness Part of Your Classes
• Trusted Tech Ed Advisors
• Preparing HS Students for Cybersecurity Careers
• Wearable Technology

These are all penciled in. If anything changes, you’ll be the first to know!

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I’ll be taking a few weeks off–until after the New Year–to edit/format my website, work on writing projects with a deadline, prioritize life, and wish my two adult military children could come home to visit. I may drop in on you-all as you enjoy your holidays, but mostly I’ll be regenerating.

I wish you a wonderful season, safe and filled with family.

See you shortly!

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Through the Midwest Teachers Institute, I offer four college-credit classes that teach how to blend technology with traditional lesson plans. They include all the ebooks, videos, and other resources required so you don’t spend any more than what is required to register for the class. Once you’re signed up, you prepare weekly material, chat with classmates, respond to class Discussion Boards and quizzes, and for some, participate in a weekly video meeting. Everything is online.

Questions? Email me at [email protected]

Here are the four I’m currently offering:

Building Digital Citizens

MTI 557

Open for enrollment

If students use the internet, they must be familiar with the rights and responsibilities required to be good digital citizens.  In this class, you’ll learn what topics to introduce, how to unpack them, and how to make them authentic to student lives.

Topics include:

1. copyrights, fair use, public domain
2. cyberbullying
3. digital commerce
4. digital communications
5. digital footprint, digital privacy
6. digital rights and responsibilities
7. digital search/research
8. image—how to use them legally
9. internet safety
10. netiquette
11. passwords
12. plagiarism
13. social media

At the completion of this course, you will be able to:

1. Know how to blend digital citizenship into lesson plans that require the Internet
2. Be comfortable in your knowledge of all facets of digital citizenship
3. Become an advocate of safe, legal, and responsible use of online resources
4. Exhibit a positive attitude toward technology that supports learning
5. Exhibit leadership in teaching and living as a digital citizen

Assessment is based on involvement, interaction with classmates, and completion of projects so be prepared to be fully-involved and an eager risk-taker. Price includes course registration, college credit, and all necessary materials. To enroll, click the link above, search for MTI 557 and sign up. Classes start in May!

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DialMyCalls (an AATT sponsor) has a special Christmas offer for kids:

Free Santa Calls To Your Family This Christmas

This Christmas we have a great gift for everyone! Whether you’re an existing DialMyCalls user or not, you can take advantage of our completely free phone call from Santa. Imagine the look on your child’s face when they receive a personalized phone call from Santa with his or her name on it!

• Simply select your child’s name and the message from Santa you want sent on this link.
• Pick the time, date and phone number you want the call sent to.
• We create a personalized message and send the call when you want it sent!
• Each household can send up to 3 free calls from Santa Claus.
• Additional Santa Calls may be purchased for a small fee.

What an amazing gift to any child for Christmas!

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This week, I’m sharing three holiday activities that will get your computers, technology, and social media ready for the new year. Here’s what you’ll get:

1. 19 Ways to Speed Up Your Computer
2. Update Your Online Presence
3. Backup and Image your computer

Today: Image and Backup Your Digital Devices

Two critical maintenance tasks that lots of people skip are:

• image your computer
• back up your documents

Image your computer

Every computer must be reformatted eventually. Every time you download from a website or open an email attachment or update one of your online tools, you collect digital dust and grunge that affects the speed and efficiency of your computer. Performing the cleanup items suggested in 19 Ways to Speed Up Your Computer helps, but eventually not enough. The only way to return your computer to its original zippy youthful self is by reformatting.

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This week, I’m sharing three holiday activities that will get your computers, technology, and social media ready for the new year. Here’s what you’ll get:

1. 19 Ways to Speed Up Your Computer
2. Update Your Online Presence
3. Backup and Image your computer

1. A note: The third link above won’t work until the article publishes!

Today: Update Your Online Presence

For most teachers I know, life zooms by, filled with lesson planning, meetings, classes, collaborations with their grade-level team, parent meetings, and thinking. There are few breaks to update/fix/maintain the tech tools that allow us to pursue our trade.

But, that must happen or they deteriorate and no longer accomplish what we need them to do. Cussing them out does no good. Buying new systems takes a long time and doesn’t fix the problem that the old one wasn’t kept up. If they aren’t taken care of, we are left wondering why our teacher blog or website isn’t accomplishing what it does for everyone else, why our social media Tweeple don’t answer us, and why our TPT materials languish. There’s a short list of upkeep items that won’t take long to accomplish. The end of the calendar year is a good time to do these:

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This week, I’m sharing three holiday activities that will get your computers, technology, and social media ready for the new year. Here’s what you’ll get:

1. 19 Ways to Speed Up Your Computer
2. Update Your Online Presence
3. Backup and Image your computer

1. A note: The above links won’t work until the articles publish!

Today: 19 Steps to a Speedier Computer

There are two ‘speed’ problems that arise when using computers:

• the computer itself is slow, for lots of reasons
• you are slow–meaning: You have too much to do. We’ll deal with this later…

Here’s what you need to do:

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Life is much simpler when you–as a parent or teacher–can point to one solution for a problem, solve it, and everything is golden. Success in school was like that when grades were the barometer and studying harder was the tool. Now, we know that academic achievement is much more complicated.

“Students are telling us there’s a big missing piece in their education” –John Bridgeland, CEO of Civic

Today’s educators realize it has as much to do with academics as how students get along with themselves and others. This is called “Social Emotional Learning” or SEL. It’s akin to the importance of play in teaching kids to socialize with others, develop tenacity, and learn respect for those around them. If you’re not convinced of the importance of SEL, here’s what students say:

“Students and young adults believe SEL schools would create a more positive social and learning environment” — report by the Collaboration for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL)

A positive attitude about themselves and others is linked to not only academic success but positively correlated to lessening the negative impact of future-ending problems such as drug use. It should surprise no one that twenty-three states are now working on SEL standards.

Free Holiday Activities to Promote SEL

An emerging leader in SEL is Sunburst SafeSchools and their suite of products and curricula that focus on building safe and positive school environments.  This holiday season, Sunburst is offering three free activities for parents and kids (click for the bundle of all three and page through for the one you want).

They’re fun, positive, supportive to kids, and–while based on Sunburst’s award-winning Safe School tools (Q Wunder, reThinkIt, and Mightifier)–designed as stand-alone activities rather than part of their comprehensive SEL-oriented curricula.

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If you participated in December’s Hour of Code, you may have come to realize the importance of Computer Science to students.  Greg Beutler is the Director of Techscool.org, a school devoted to teaching kids this fundamental skill through the lens of robotics, coding, competitions, and more. The school’s tagline is Learn to code; Code to learn. Pretty pithy.

Here’s Greg’s informed perspective on this question:

Beyond job opportunities, why should all K-12 students learn about computer science?

Computer Science is an important subject for all students because it teaches you how to think. The act of writing a computer program requires you to think about how to create sequences which are step by step procedures on how to solve a given problem.  CS also teaches the student, what sequences are run, what sequences should run if that sequence fails. CS teaches the student how to present that failure or success of that operation to the user via a GUI, and how the GUI should look and what the next outcome should be of the interactions between the user, the software and the computing device. Computer Science is an integrative subject, not siloed like other subjects taught at school.

Starting children early is best. To illustrate this I’ll use my favorite analogy, which is the baseball analogy. Both the little leaguer and a major leaguer perform the same operations, they catch a ball, throw a ball and hit a ball. But the major leaguer is much more talented and skilled. They have done all of those actions thousands of times in practice and games. They have honed their skill to a very great extent with competition and practice. They have a keen understanding of the game, the rules, and the winning strategies. They know where to hit the ball against a particular team in a particular situation. They know where to throw the ball in a particular situation. They can anticipate the actions of their teammates and opponents and react accordingly. Starting children early
gives them a wide arena of problems and problem-solving skills. The same applies to computer science. At a young age we can solve simple problems such as sorting different colored beads into different cups, then when we are older we can solve more complex problems such as writing a program using sorting algorithms for all sorts of items; including colored beads., which is called abstraction.

Here are the top five skills that most successful computer science students possess.

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