Year: 2022

Ready To Go Back To School? 7 Fun Lesson Ideas To Start The New Year

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Every teacher knows the struggle of getting a class full of children to cooperate the first few weeks back after the long Christmas vacation break. If you’re looking to avoid going hoarse from shouting at distracted kids all day then you need an organized plan of action that will keep you and your pupils entertained whilst learning. This article is aimed at teaching children in the 4th and 5th grade so if that’s you, read on for our top lesson ideas to keep everyone happy, entertained, and ready to learn!

Start With Your Resolutions

Before you pile straight back into hardcore learning (aka the boring bits!) give your kids a chance to settle in with a mindfulness session where they can write down their resolutions and wants for the year. You can have this session be as creative as you like. They could decorate their objectives, frame them or even add them to a jar. If you pick the latter, why not end the year by reading out everyone’s resolutions and seeing how far everyone has come?

Use Some Fun Worksheets

Rather than having your kids write pages of English and history right off the back, ease them back in with educational worksheets. There are a ton of great teacher resource center websites where you can download sheets for virtually every subject on the planet. Why not pick a fun subject such as foreign languages that can relate to their Christmas break? You can pick three countries that some of your children may have visited over the holiday season and work on sheets based on the languages of each country.

Plan A Horrible Histories Lesson

Most children love blood and gore, so incorporate these themes into your history lessons. Focus on the Roman Empire, which was full of deathly battles they can learn about, or you can teach them about the early origins of the toilets. Romans are a great subject as they invented many things that we still use in the modern-day. You could even have the kids re-enact famous Roman gods and goddesses or have them paint their ultimate roman feast.

Class Presentations

Let the children write and present what they did to celebrate Christmas to the rest of the class, or how others celebrate. If you can, set this task before the holidays begin as a homework task. You can ask them to pick one fact or tradition about Christmas and ask them to research it in depth. Bonus points to the child who explores a tradition and teaches the class some facts that even you don’t know!

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What You Might Have Missed in December

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

Here’s the sign-up link if the image above doesn’t work:

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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.

Top 10 Tips and Reviews in 2021

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Because Ask a Tech Teacher is a resource blog, we share lots of tips our group comes across in their daily teaching as well as materials shared by others we think you’d like. Here’s a run-down on what you thought were the most valuable in 2021:

Top 10 Tech Tips

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Top 10 Hits and Misses for 2021

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Since we at Ask a Tech Teacher started this blog thirteen years ago, we’ve had almost 5.6 million views from visitors, about 10,000 followers who have read some or all of our 2,731 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.

Here they are–my top 10 hits of 2021 (though I’ve skipped any that have to do with website reviews and tech tips because they’re covered in separate posts):

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How to Change the Dynamics of Peer-to-peer Learning with Tract

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As teachers move from a “teacher-lecturer” model of education to a “teacher-guide”, peer-to-peer learning–acquiring knowledge from a select peer group–has become a popular education strategy. Often, it is a less stressful way to support the long-held goal of developing lifelong learners. As a pedagogical strategy, it can be more effective in reinforcing critical thinking, cooperation, creativity, and problem solving–traits that are difficult to teach but essential for students who want to become productive, happy adults.

What most educators and parents innately know has become a truism of education:

“If you can’t explain something simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” –Albert Einstein

If you’re not familiar with Tract, you’re in for a treat. Tract is a new way to inspire students to become lifelong learners. It’s easy to use, intuitive to setup, enticing to students, and requires no professional development on the part of teachers to roll out. The platform focuses on student growth and learning, accomplished via videos, hands-on projects, and more, all with the goal of sparking student creativity and empowering them to explore their passions at their own pace. Lessons are given by young adults, your students’ peer group. They engage learners through multimedia, tasks, projects, and peer interaction. Content is vetted, curated, and reviewed by qualified teachers to ensure its educational rigor.

Click for a more detailed review of Tract or visit Tract’s website here.

I was thrilled when the folks at Tract partnered with me on their new platform. I’m a fan of peer-to-peer learning and I could tell right away that Tract did it well. If you’ve already heard about Tract and are ready to try it out, visit their website at https://teach.tract.app/ and use the access code ASKATECHTEACHER to get your free Tract teacher account.

Peer-to-peer learning is a second cousin to teaching and in many cases, more effective in solidifying understanding of a topic. Students often collaborate and share with peers in their education journey and careers. Becoming adept at giving and receiving feedback will help them negotiate the workplace and life diplomatically and effectively.

With educators struggling through the challenges of remote and hybrid teaching, there is renewed interest in how to deliver peer-to-peer learning beyond traditional approaches of discussion boards, forums, blogs, and collaborative projects. While the value of peer-to-peer learning is unquestioned, executing it is not always easy, and when executed poorly, students become confused and discouraged.

If you are looking for a fool-proof platform for deploying peer-to-peer learning in your class (and you should be), try Tract.

On the Tract platform, students learn through videos created by their peers but also by creating their own video or written projects (learning paths), developed either individually or in small groups. When completed, these are uploaded to a video gallery and shared with fellow students, giving everyone a chance to share knowledge and learn from each other. The combination of these essential pieces–learning from peers, teaching to peers, and sharing research–makes education dynamic and motivating, turning reluctant students into lifelong learners. Tract not only teaches topics of interest to kids, but encourages students to work together on projects and passions, and share their knowledge with classmates.

The importance of peer teaching and peer learning is well established:

The Roman philosopher Seneca declared: “docendo discimus” (“by teaching, we learn”).

If you want to put project-based, peer-to-peer learning into practice, you’ve found the right platform with Tract. Be one of the first 1,000 to request access at teach.tract.app. Use the access code ASKATECHTEACHER to get your free Tract teacher account.

Sidenote:

Tract considers it incredibly important to create a safe, supportive learning environment for students to share their classes, projects, and comments. While they trust all students, they also recognize the importance of taking the proper precautions to protect against inappropriate content that violates Community Guidelines. These guidelines include common sense policies like 1) be kind and respectful, 2) no bullying, 3) only upload age-appropriate content, and 4) be a good digital citizen.

–This post is sponsored by Tract. All opinions are my own.

@tractlearning #tractapp #p2plearning

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.

Public Domain Day and Happy New Year!

Every year, January 1st, is Public Domain Day. This is an observance of when copyrights expire and works enter into the public domain–free for all to use. According to Public Domain Review, here are some of the newly-available artistic works you might like a/o January 1, 2022: