Year: 2018
Should you Teach Typing? And Does it Work?
This topic that is close to my tech teacher soul. It has become a familiar argument between those who believe children intuitively learn to type (“see them on smartphones and iPads–they don’t need help”) and those of us who believe instruction makes them better, faster. Ask a Tech Teacher contributor, James Lovelock, discusses this:
Explicit typing, simulated application and practical application – Why is this not a thing?
When it comes to education, there has always been a call for approaches that are more grounded in context. For example, you could just look at a map and do some measurements, or you can get out there with a trusty surveyor’s wheel and chart a space and learn real applications. It makes perfect sense to do this, practical application proves relevance and also allows for greater engagement.
Having said that, one would not do this without first explaining the concepts and practicing the basics of measurement. Yet all too often, when it comes to touch-typing that is exactly what occurs, students are expected to just ‘pick it up’ as they go along because the work required to develop the skill correctly can be viewed as “unnecessary,” “too time-consuming,” or “artificial learning.”
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169 Tech Tip #28: My Sound Doesn’t Work
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: #28: My Sound Doesn’t Work
Category: Hardware
Q: I can’t get any sound out of my computer. Do I need a new sound card?
A: Before you invest that kind of money, try these easy fixes:
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Top Ten Education Blogs
I am honored to be selected as one of TutorFair’s Top Ten Education Blogs for 2018! Without a doubt, the credit goes to my readers. I am proud that the resources, reviews, and materials I curate for you resonate with your teaching needs.
Do check out their full article to see all ten selected blogs. It includes names of edtech experts you already follow and a few you’ll want to add to your list.
More edtech blogs:
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Gamechanger: Type to Learn is Now in the Cloud!
When I started teaching a decade ago, Type to Learn was the MS Word of typing programs–everyone used it. The game-based keyboarding program was fun, engaging, and actually worked. Students graduated from the thirty-forty lessons (that took about a year to get through) with the skills they needed to become fast and accurate typists who could use the keyboard as an effective tool in both classwork and homework.
At some point in the past, busy teachers moved away from a committed program that teaches typing to solutions that promised to automate the process with rote drills and games. With most of these freemium online programs, students log in and get started. No installation, no set-up, often little supervision, just typing. The problem is, they don’t work very well. With the push to move assessments online, students need good keyboarding skills. That means:
…fast accurate typing as a tool for writing and test-taking, not a distraction
If you’re one of the many who realize your students’ typing skills aren’t up to this standard, you’ll love Type to Learn’s game-changing update: It’s now in the cloud. No more software downloads. No more inability to sync between home and school. No more “runs only on desktops and laptops”.
Let me back up and describe Type to Learn Cloud. It’s a comprehensive typing program that teaches not just the basics but advanced skills necessary to become fast and accurate touch typists. It does this through a process of review, demonstration, practice, and assessment. Using avatar-like animation, engaging sounds, and colorful graphics, rolled out in a space-themed story, students progress through thirty-six lessons, five games per lesson, and seven assessments to complete the interactive missions that will save their world. It operates in the cloud, works on most digital devices (including Chromebooks and iPads with an external keyboard), and plays well with all browsers. Students can work from home or school and their progress syncs between the two.
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The Case for PDFs in Class
The biggest reason teachers report for NOT liking cloud accounts has nothing to do with money, security, or privacy. It’s that they aren’t reliable. No matter how many redundancies are in place, if a student can’t access their cloud storage for a project they’re working on, if a teacher can’t get to lesson plan resources, or if a student started a project at school and can’t finish it at home, the excitement of learning melts away like ice cream on a hot day.
I remember when web-based tools first arrived (yeah, that long ago), As good as they sounded, I insisted my IT folks install computer-based programs for when the Internet didn’t work or the school’s network lost its connection. It seemed the only reliable programs were those loaded onto the local computer, not floating around in the cloud.
Fast forward to today. Schools have moved many of their educational resources to the cloud. This might be to save money on maintenance or to make them accessible from anywhere or any number of other great reasons, but the change isn’t without its own set of problems. In particular, in the area of files and documents, there’s a rebirth in the popularity of Portable Document Formatted books and resources, commonly referred to as PDFs. While not perfect for every situation, they are exactly the right answer for many.
Here are ten reasons to consider when evaluating PDF vs. cloud-based resources:
PDFs play well with others
PDFs work on all digital devices, all platforms. No worries about whether they run better in Firefox or Chrome, Macs or PCs (or Chromebooks or iPads), Windows or MacOS (or Linux or iOS). They work on all of these as well as almost all others. With a free PDF reader (like Adobe or hundreds of others), students can open and get started right away. Even if they’re school system is a Mac and their home is a PC, the PDF (with or without annotations) opens fine.
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How can Teachers Increase Social Learning While Teaching Online?
It’s becoming more common to take online classes or blend traditional with online learning. Ila Mishra, a specialist in both LMS and virtual classrooms, has this informative explanation of how teachers can increase their social learning while teaching online classes:
Social Learning is defined as learning through observing behavior, attitudes, and outcomes of those behaviors. These help individuals to create a frame of reference of behaviors within themselves and prompt them to act. The main point of this theory is that social learning attributes human behavior to be an outcome of cognitive, behavioral and environmental influences (Bandura, 1977).
These cognitive, behavioral and environmental influences are:
Traditional classrooms were a conduit for social learning where students could sit together and collaborate on projects, group assignments, or make use of peer-to-peer learning opportunities. However, in the current educational environments where technology is used to enhance learning outcomes, educators have consciously allowed for and are making use of technology to facilitate learning online.
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What You Might Have Missed in May
Here are the most-read posts for the month of May:
- How to Wrap up Tech for the School Year
- Touch-Typing: Rote vs Integrated Learning or Rote and Integrated Learning?
- Kiddom’s Content Library Makes Differentiation Faster Than Ever
- Positive focus; Positive behaviors
- EdTech Magazine’s 50 Must-read K-12 IT Blogs
- 10 Ways to Wrap Up the School Year
- 5 Best Websites for IELTS Exam Prep
- Study.com Makes the College Dream a Reality for Lots of Students
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Seven Fun Math Activities for the Summer Break
Summer can be a challenging time not just for parents but kids. They are accustomed to cerebral challenges that keep them motivated and summer arrives with its sports, naps, and vacations. If your kids miss the thrill of problem-solving or if you worry about them sliding backward without the mental exercise that is integral to school, ORIGO has come up with seven fun math activities that use a blend of popular math apps and everyday activities (like cooking) to fill the summer break with the excitement of math:
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Seven Fun Math Activities for the Summer Break
The long weeks of summer break are wonderful for family time and vacations, but not so wonderful at keeping students on a positive learning curve. The Summer Slide is a very real issue, especially in mathematics instruction where students lose about one month of learning during the break and in some cases, 2.6 months of learning.
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World Environment Day: Living Responsibly with Nature
World Environment Day is June 5th. Catherine Ross, Ask a Tech Teacher contributor, has some great suggestions on how to celebrate that with children and students in a way that shows them how to be responsible stewards for the only planet we have. I think you’ll enjoy her article:
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We live in a millennium where technology has disrupted many of the traditional systems and ways. Cultural mores have morphed because of technology, leaving a discontinuity between the old and the new. Instead of snuggling into their grandmother’s lap and listening to dragon stories, do not be surprised to see kids persuade their grandmothers to play dragon games. Interestingly, grandmothers have coped and how; many senior women love gaming!
Wealth has been generated because of technology, but this has also increased the gap between the rich and the poor. Changes caused by technology have been beneficial, but there are side effects like loneliness and lack of social skills which individuals and society as a whole find hard to cope with.
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Subscriber Special: June
June 5th-10th:
BOGO
Buy one grade level school license; get the second free
Purchase a School License for one grade and get the second grade level for free on either of the following:
This is perfect for private schools, independent schools, charter schools, public schools–any school with classroom computer pods, 1:1 programs, Google Classroom, and more.
Benefits of a School License
- provide access to full text PDF from every digital device in your school, 24 hours a day. This maximizes productivity and student independence.
- provide PDF access that isn’t limited by the availability of the Internet or Wifi
- free desk copy and digital file for teacher use (for domestic customers only; MS keyboarding curriculum only available in digital)
Benefits of School License for Students
- provide easy access to monthly lessons, how-tos, rubrics, project samples, practice quizzes, grade-level expectations, homework, images, and checklists
- provide quick links to websites required in lessons
- provide full color instructions that can be zoomed in on for greater detail
- allow a convenient place to take lesson notes (using a PDF annotator)
- encourage students to be independent in their learning, work at their own pace rather than a one-size-fits-all class pace
- enable a quick way to spiral up to the next grade level for quick learners or back to earlier resources for student needing to scaffold their learning
- provide access to 10 companion videos (Ultimate Guide to Keyboarding curriculum license only) to take students through each month of their keyboarding journey. They’re approximately one hour, viewed at student’s pace
- prepare students for the rigor of end-of-year summative testing
Additionally, with each School License, you get:
- print copy of each ebook selected (international and digital-only books not included)
- free access to additional grade-level resources and videos (K-5 tech curriculum). This is guidance on using the technology curricula in your classroom.
How do you buy this?
- Check the links above and decide what curricula and grade level you’d like.
- Click here for a School License.
- Scroll down and select the curricula and the package.
- Pay via PayPal or contact us to purchase via PO.
- In the comments, tell us which grade-level you’d like as your free gift.