Year: 2019

2 Free Martin Luther King Day Lesson Plans

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Subscriber Special

Until January 18th:

Free Martin Luther King Day Lesson Plans

Two lesson plans to prepare for Martin Luther King Day in January: 1) Students research events leading up to Dr. Martin Luther King’s impact on American history and share them with an Event Chain organized visually, including pictures and thought bubbles. 2) Students interpret the words of Dr. Martin Luther King in their own words in a visual organizer. Great project that gets students thinking about the impact of words on history.

Designed for grades 4-7, it’s aligned with Common Core and ISTE Standards.

What’s included in each lesson plan:

brief summary of the project
Essential Question
Big Idea
Common Core and ISTE alignment
materials required
teacher prep required
step-by-step instructions
extensions to dig deeper into the subject
assessment strategies
sample grading rubric
sample project
resources

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What You Might Have Missed in December

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Here are the most-read posts for the month of December:

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2019, I Resolve…

New Years–a time for rest, rejuvenation and repair. A time to assess life. Do we settle into our routine, enjoy where it’s headed, or is it time to grab our purse, iPhone, car keys, and get out of there?

As a teacher-author, New Year’s Resolutions are more of a To Do list. I break it down into Edtech Coaching/Mentoring, Blogging, and Fiction Writing (my novel writing):

Edtech Coaching/Mentoring

Focus on podcasts, webinars, online classes, and other web-based learning outlets for Ask a Tech Teacher. I have some great partners in this:

If you’re looking for this sort of extension in your platform, let me know.

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10 Hits and 10 Misses for 2018

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Since we at Ask a Tech Teacher started this blog eight years ago, we’ve had over 5.3 million visitors to the 2,112 articles on integrating technology into the classroom. This includes tech tips, website/app reviews, tech-in-ed pedagogy, how-tos, videos, and more. We have regular features like:

If you’ve just arrived at Ask a Tech Teacher, start here.

It always surprises us what readers find to be the most and least provocative. The latter is as likely to be a post one of us on the crew put heart and soul into, sure we were sharing Very Important Information, as the former. Talk about humility.

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Starting This Week: MTI 562

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MTI 562: The Tech-infused Teacher

MTI 562 starts Monday, January 7, 2019!

Click to sign up

The 21st century lesson blends technology with teaching to build a collaborative, differentiated, and shared learning environment. In this course, you will use a suite of digital tools to make that possible while addressing overarching concepts like digital citizenship, internet search and research, authentic assessment, digital publishing, and immersive keyboarding. You will actively collaborate, share knowledge, provide constructive feedback to classmates, publish digitally, and differentiate for unique needs. Classmates will become the core of your ongoing Personal Learning Network.

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 and sign up. Email askatechteacher at gmail dot com with questions.

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Social Media Trends you Need to Be Aware of this School Year

Have you heard of the wildly-popular Netflix series, 13 Reasons Why, dramatizing a teenager’s thirteen reasons for committing suicide? Though it warns watchers about what can cause teens to take their lives, to everyone’s surprise, suicides in that age group went up by 30% in the immediate months following the release.

No one knows why a movie dramatizing teen suicide increased them but it did shine a bright light on the problem of teenagers, gossip, culture, and ultimately social media. Here are two statistics that may shock you:

95% of teens have access to a smartphone

45% of teens say they are online “almost constantly”

Do they have time for anything else? And what are they doing with all that time?

I can’t help with the first question but the second one, I know. I dug into the research — anecdotal and statistical — to find out which social media platforms have so engrossed teens that they barely want to sleep, eat, or watch TV (too much TV — now there’s a quaint problem). Why the mix of anecdotal and statistics? Because teen interests change on a whim. What was hot (like Facebook and Twitter) one year is no more. As a result, I used quantitative data balanced against anecdotal experience.

Let me start by confirming: Yes, the news that kids are no longer in love with Facebook seems to be true. They still use it but precipitously less each year and the number of teen users is behind many other popular social media platforms (like YouTube, Instagram, and Snapchat). Kids have their own methods of chatting, staying up to date, and sharing media with friends, ones that their parents didn’t introduce them to.

Before I share what’s trending among teens, I need to remind readers that most require users to be 13+ to create an account (that’s High School age). But no one verifies that nor does it prevent adults from signing up and then turning access over to the child. It’s the honor system, which works or doesn’t.

Here are the top social media trends kids now use in alphabetic order:

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