The last time my daughter visited, life became different than the norm. That inspired two easy tech solutions I had no idea existed and you’re going to love. Here they are:

BTW, I cross posted this to my writer’s blog so my writerly friends could read about these also. If you subscribe to both, you’ll see it there too:

Hey Siri! Where are You?

I have an iPhone. I kept losing it–putting it in places I didn’t normally. My daughter would call me and I’d find it, usually one room over. But then, I discovered if I say, “Hey, Siri. Where are you?” She answers. Then I can follow her voice. Since often, losing a phone occurs when no ones around to call it for you, this was a great discovery.

Walking directions

We went to Fashion Island–a large outdoor mall in Newport Beach–and got separated from my husband. I found him on iPhone’s Find My app and thought I’d follow his dot but it’s easier than that. Find My offers walking directions. They took me direction to the store he was shopping in.

What cool tech tricks have you discovered to improve your everyday life?

(more…)

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

• Useful Tech Tips
• Useful shortkeys
• Must-have apps for curious students
• Free posters
• The hardest tech problem revealed
• Lessons learned from teaching
• Lots of tech resources for your classroom

(more…)

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 Create a Chart Really Fast

Category: MS Office, Google Apps

Q: What’s an easy way to create charts?

A: When students have completed spreadsheet basics, they’re ready to create a chart:

• Collect class data on a spreadsheet.
• Divide into categories.

In Excel: Highlight the labels, categories, and data; push F11. That’s it–a simple chart.

In Google Spreadsheets: Use the icon on the toolbar.

Sign up for a new tip each week or buy the entire 169 Real-world Ways to Put Tech into Your Classroom.

What’s your favorite tech tip in your classroom? Share it in the comments below.

(more…)

I get thousands of visitors a day–over a million since I started. The most common reason why you-all drop by is for resources. I have lots of them–lesson plans, tips and tricks–but one area I have not enough depth is the experiences of fellow teachers:

• your personal teaching experiences
• your informed take on tech ed topics
• Education pedagogy

If you’re interested in guest posting on this blog or having your own column, leave a comment below and I’ll be in touch. It’s a challenging time but one we-all can get through if we talk to each other.

(more…)

I get a lot of questions from readers about what tech ed resources I use in my classroom so I’m going to take a few days this summer to review them with you. Some are edited and/or written by members of the Ask a Tech Teacher crew. Others, by tech teachers who work with the same publisher I do. All of them, I’ve found well-suited to the task of scaling and differentiating tech skills for age groups, scaffolding learning year-to-year, taking into account the perspectives and norms of all stakeholders, with appropriate metrics to know learning is organic and granular.

Today: K-8 Keyboard Curriculum

Overview

K-8 Keyboard Curriculum (four options plus one)–teacher handbook, student workbooks, companion videos, and help for homeschoolers

2-Volume Ultimate Guide to Keyboarding

K-5 (237 pages) and Middle School (80 pages), 100 images, 7 assessments

K-5–print/digital; Middle School–digital delivery only

Aligned with Student workbooks and student videos (free with licensed set of student workbooks)

Student workbooks sold separately

__________________________________________________________________________

1-Volume Essential Guide to K-8 Keyboarding

120 pages, dozens of images, 6 assessments

Great value!

Delivered print or digital

Doesn’t include: Student workbooks

(more…)

Every month, we’ll share five themed posters that you can share on your website (with attribution), post on your walls, or simply be inspired.

This month: College and Career

–for the entire collection of 65 posters, click here

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 author of the tech thrillers, To Hunt a Sub and Twenty-four Days. You can find her resources at Structured Learning.

In the grad school classes I teach and my coaching sessions, the biggest problem facing teachers is not the 3R’s or equity or differentiation. It’s technology. In an education environment that is taught remotely as much as in person, this has become a big deal.

A few months ago, I took a poll. Here are the results:

If you’d like to see the earlier poll (from over ten years ago), here it is. It’s interesting to see what has changed in both the computer problems that were spotlighted and what teachers considered common!

Do you agree? Does this match your experience?

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 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: Open a New Word Doc without Program

Category: MS Office

Q:  I can’t find the icon that opens MS Word. What do I do?

A:  These things happen and always at the worst time. You might have pinned it to the start menu (see Tech Tip #53: How to Pin Any Program to the Start Menu), but what if you didn’t?

No problem. Right click on the desktop and press New>Word Doc. That’s what it does–opens a new Word doc for you without opening the program first.

Sign up for a new tip each week or buy the entire 169 Real-world Ways to Put Tech into Your Classroom.

What’s your favorite tech tip in your classroom? Share it in the comments below.

(more…)

MTI 558: Teach Writing With Tech

Starts Monday, June 21, 2021! This is the last chance to sign up. Click this link to sign up.

Educators participate in this five-week hands-on quasi-writer’s workshop to learn about widely-available digital tools that will help their students develop their inner writer. Resources include videos, pedagogic articles, lesson plans, projects. Strategies introduced range from conventional tools such as quick writes, online websites, and visual writing to unconventional approaches such as Twitter novels, comics, and Google Earth lit trips. These can be adapted to any writing program be it 6+1 Traits, Common Core, or the basic who-what-when-where-why. By the time educators finish this class, they will be ready to implement many new writing tools in their classroom.

Assessment is project-based so be prepared to be fully-involved and an eager risk-taker.

What You Get

• 5 weeks
• 3 college credits
• Price includes course registration and all necessary materials.

(more…)

Ask a Tech Teacher contributor, Jeremy Keeshin, is the CEO and co-founder of CodeHS, a leading coding education platform for schools, used by millions of students. He believes educators must focus on teaching students the building blocks of technology–coding, problem-solving, and the vocabulary that clarifies both. Here are a few of the essential tech words that should be part of a students’ daily conversation not just in a tech class but in all learning. OK, maybe not ‘Assembly Language’ but definitely ‘coding’, ‘bits’, ‘debugging’, and ‘apps’ with all of its cousins:

Your Coding Vocab Lesson: 7 Words You Need To Know 

There’s a lot of new vocabulary to pick up as you enter the world of coding. Here’s a few words to help you get started navigating code.

1. Code and Coding 

Let’s start at the beginning: What is code? What is coding?

Coding is giving instructions to a computer. Code is the instructions for the computer.

Your first line of code might look something like this:

print("Hello")

This prints “Hello” out to the screen. When you type an email and hit send, someone has written code to make that work. When you open your phone, hit an icon that looks like a camera, take a photo, and it saves to the cloud—that is code. Code is what powers any technology or software you use.

2. Programming Language

Code is written in a particular programming language, which is the set of rules, or language, for giving instructions to the computer. The language may have some specific syntax about what code you can write.

There are many different programming languages used for different things. A few popular programming languages include JavaScript, Python, C++, and Java. They are built for different use cases and have different tradeoffs.

Just like foreign languages, programming languages are often related to each other; they have different histories and taxonomies; and they evolve over time.

(more…)