Year: 2022

Throughout my career in education, teaching has been prodded, pushed, tweaked, nudged, and reformed. I author a K-12 Technology Curriculum. Each time I update it, I include a list of what has changed since the last update, something like:

• Windows updated its platform—twice.
• Student work is often collaborative and shared.
• Student work is done anywhere; it must be synced and available across multiple platforms, devices.
• Keyboarding skills are critical, especially to summative year-end testing.
• Technology is the norm, but teacher training isn’t.
• Education is focused on college and career with tech an organic, transformative tool.
• Teachers have moved from ‘sage on the stage’ to ‘guide on the side’.
• Students have been raised on digital devices. They want to use them as learning tools.
• Using technology is no longer what ‘geeky’ students do. It’s what all students want to do.
• Printing is being replaced with sharing and publishing.
• More teachers want to try technology authentically.

These are big enough to require an updated curriculum, but now, according to US Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, it may be time for a huge reset. Read this article and see if you agree:

With Few Details But Big Ideas, Sec. Cardona Pushes Total Reimagining of Education

From Edsurge

Education is closer to a reset than ever before, US Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said Wednesday during a keynote address at the SXSW EDU conference in Austin, Texas. During his address, Cardona said part of this shift must include providing more support for students and meeting the needs of teachers.

Read more

Ask a Tech Teacher has posted a plethora of articles about game-changers in education. Here are a few of them:

• 8 EdTech Trends to Watch Out for This 2020
• 14 Education Advancements in a Year
• Tech That Won’t Survive 2018

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A lot of teacher-authors read my WordDreams blog. In this monthly column, I share the most popular post from the past month on my writer’s blog, WordDreams: 

Tech Tips for Writers is an occasional post on overcoming Tech Dread. I’ll cover issues that friends, both real-time and virtual, have shared. Feel free to post a comment about a question you have. I’ll cover it in a future tip.

I can’t believe it took me so long to find this. Windows has a native clipboard (I see some of you rolling your eyes, like of course you know this. Bear with me). The one in MS Office tracks multiple clips, but the one in Windows–I thought–tracked only one. Not true. It tracks as many as MS Office.

Why is this so exciting to me? As I read blogs or articles, I like to copy the parts that I am inspired to comment on, or copy a quote that requires attribution. I created tedious workarounds, but they were… tedious… This Windows clipboard holds twenty-ish bits. Look at the scrollbar in this image (where the orange arrow points).

That’s a big list.

Here’s how you access it:

• Click the Windows Key and V.
• That opens the multi-clip clipboard.
• If you don’t have it activated, the shortkey will ask you to activate it.
• If the clip is one you want to save–maybe a template piece for a query letter to agents–the three dots on the right side of the clip provide the option to ‘pin’.

One handy characteristic: The clipboard saves these across all of your Windows devices. So, if you save it to your desktop and are later working on your laptop, WinKey+V will bring up the clipboard list.

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Here are a few of the popular resources teachers are using to teach about Biomes, Habitats, and Landforms:

1. Antarctice Environ—find the animals
2. Biomes of the World
3. Breathing earth–the environment
4. Ocean Currents—video from NASA
5. Rainforest Websites Videos
6. Rainforest—3 games
7. Rainforest—Jungle Journey
8. World’s Biomes
9. Virtual tours

Click here for updates to this list.

1. Feed the Dingo–from PBS
2. Habitats–a game from the Smithsonian
3. Wolves changed the rivers–how re-introducing wolves to Yellowstone Park changed the rivers (a video)

Click here for updates to this list.

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I read an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal discussing the dramatic decline in men applying for and graduating from two and four-year colleges. Here’s the introductory piece of the discussion:

Men are abandoning higher education in such numbers that they now trail female college students by record levels.

At the close of the 2020-21 academic year, women made up 59.5% of college students, an all-time high, and men 40.5%, according to enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit research group. U.S. colleges and universities had 1.5 million fewer students compared with five years ago, and men accounted for 71% of the decline.

While the reasons for the decline are varied and complicated, the solutions mind-numbing, if your high school students are looking for alternatives to traditional four-year college and University environment, run through this simple matrix to see which you’re better suited for:

Then, check out these articles discussing how to prepare for the choice best for you:

College or Career? Check out These

MS Career Planning: Moving in the Right Direction

Clutch Prep: When You Need Help With a Class

What to do when Johnny wants career, not college?

Whether you pick college or career, students need to prepare a resume. Here are resources to create one that’s professional and thorough:

1. Google Docs–go to Docs.Google.com and select Resume template
2. PorfolioGen–A free site that lets you collect all the pieces of your experience into one nicely-formatted digital place. 
3. Resume Builder
4. Resume Generator
5. Student CV Builder
6. Wix–This is free with lots of templates so you can share exactly the right image. Here are examples.
7. WordPress–Use a free WordPress blog, but instead convert the pages to topics discussed below. Here’s an example.

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Getting ready for St. Patrick’s Day? Try these fun websites with activities for different grade levels, different classes:

1. Puzzle–St. Pat’s Puzzle
2. Puzzle–St. Pat’s drag-and-drop puzzle
3. Puzzle–St. Pat’s slide puzzle
4. Puzzles and games
5. Physical Education St. Patrick’s Day Activities from Elementary PE Teacher.com
6. Resources for St. Pat’s Day from Education.com by grade and subject
7. St. Patrick’s Day history–video
8. St. Pat’s Day songs–video
9. Tic tac toe
10. Wordsearch

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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: My Desktop Icons are Messed Up

Category: PC, Problem-solving

Q:  I have several students who share a computer. Kids being kids, they love moving icons around on the desktop. What’s the best way to handle this?

A:  I’ve tried everything. Refusing to allow them to play doesn’t work and asking them to undo their play at the end of their time doesn’t either. The best solution is to teach them to organize their desktop:

• right click on the desktop
• select Sort by>Item type

This can be part of their start-up maintenance when they arrive at class.

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.

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Virtual Reality is one of the hottest newish education strategies that keeps getting better. Here’s an excellent article from eSchool News about using VR to better understand topics traditionally considered complex:

VR helps students visualize complex information

Educators can use virtual reality to bring learning into the real world and improve outcomes for students, assert Shannon Cox, superintendent, and Candice Sears, director of instructional services, both of Montgomery County Educational Service Center. In this commentary, they describe how using VR technology can answer the question students often ask: “When will I ever use this?”

Read on…

More from Ask a Tech Teacher on Virtual Reality:

• How Does the Metaverse Fit into Education?
• Using VR in Schools
• VR Resources
• The Impact of VR on Student Education

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

Two math celebrations are coming up on March 14th: Pi Day and World Maths Day

Pi Day

Pi Day is an annual celebration commemorating the mathematical constant π (pi). Pi Day is observed on March 14 since 3, 1, and 4 are the three most significant digits of π in the decimal form.

Daniel Tammet, a high-functioning autistic savant, holds the European record for reciting pi from memory to 22,514 digits in five hours and nine minutes.

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Invention Convention Worldwide is a global K-12 invention education curricular program mapped to national and state educational standards that teaches students problem-identification, problem-solving, entrepreneurship and creativity skills and builds confidence in invention, innovation and entrepreneurship for life.

Here are websites to help you and your students learn about the excitement of inventions:

1. A Guide to Inventions
2. Famous Inventors
3. How Inventions Change History (video)
4. How the popsicle was invented (a TEDEd video)
5. Invented by accident I
6. Invented by accident II
7. Inventions from the Military –crazy ones
8. Inventors and Inventions

Check back here for updates on this list.

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Teaching students about current events used to be as easy as picking a trusted newspaper and reading their headlines. Those days are gone with fake news, yellow journalism, and opinions dressed up as news stories. So how to you talk about what’s in the news? Marcee Harris over at Teaching Channel has a lesson plan to help you:

How to Talk About What’s in the News: A Lesson Plan

By Marcee Harris on March 31, 2021

When our students enter our classrooms, they come with bits and pieces of news from home, their social media feeds, and from conversations with friends. This news can create a sense of fear and worry for some, as well as generate lots of unanswered questions. Tackling these tough topics in the classroom can be a challenge, especially for educators who come from different backgrounds than their students. Despite the uncertainty of what to say, it’s imperative that we honor our kids’ news and engage in dialogue that explores their questions. This process will open students up to a range of perspectives and nurture critical thinking skills.

Read more…

More from Ask a Tech Teacher on news, sources, teaching with it:

• Fake News or Fact? How do you tell?
• News Sources for Kids
• Fake News Online Resources

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