Succeeding in college is both easy and hard. It takes planning, drive, and dedication, but once you commit to the required changes, the payback is worth it. The first big tip: College is not like High School. Succeeding in the former in no way predicts success in the latter.

With High School graduation close, college on the horizon, one of our Ask a Tech Teacher contributors put together a list of great tips and ideas to help you prepare for one of the biggest steps you can take to build your future:

How to Prepare for College

College preparation is crucial to ensuring that your college life is successful. It helps boost your independence and self-discipline to tackle the difficulties you might encounter while giving you a holistic view of the whole preparation process. Excellent college preparation makes you self-aware and helps you evaluate what you’d love to do in school. It enables you to choose a learning institution depending on your strengths. While preparing for college can be challenging, knowing how to do it well can help make the process more successful. Here’s how to prepare for college.

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Spring websites, lesson plans, printables, activities:

1. 7 Science Experiments that Teach About Spring
2. Books from Scholastic about Spring
3. Life cycle of a snake
4. Life Cycle Lesson Plans
5. Life Cycle resources
6. Life Cycles
7. Life Cycle Symbaloo
8. Plant life cycle
9. Spring Puzzle
10. Spring Garden–click to find flowers
11. Spring Games
12. Spring Vocabulary (video)
13. Spring Word Scramble
14. Spring Word Search
15. What Happens in Spring (video)
16. What Happens in Spring–PS (video)

Ideas from TeacherVision:

Printables

1. The Very Hungry Caterpillar Activities Booklet
2. Butterfly Life Cycle Worksheet
3. Baseball Fun
4. May Day
5. Butterfly Facts and Questions
6. Butterfly Life Cycle Quiz
7. The Very Hungry Caterpillar Poster & Activities
8. More Spring Printables

Lesson Plans

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Here are popular resources teachers are using to share stories:

1. Aesop Fables—no ads
2. Aesop’s Fables
3. Audio stories
4. Childhood Stories
5. Classic Fairy Tales
6. Fairy Tales and Fables
7. Listen/read–Free non-fic audio books
8. Owl Eyes (classics)
9. Starfall
10. Stories read by actors
11. Stories to read for youngsters
12. Storyline
13. Unite for Literacy

Click for more online story resources (or to update this list)

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One post-high school career that is equal amounts challenging, exciting, and rewarding is journalism. It’s not an 8-5 job that you can call in. You work hard, leave everything on the table, and have an opportunity to feel like you’ve made a difference.

One of our Ask a Tech Teacher contributors has these suggestions for how to stand out in journalism, make it a career you’ll be proud of:

How to Stand Out in Your Journalism Career

Whether you’re a newbie looking to get started in the journalism industry or an experienced professional hoping to advance, it can be challenging to stand out. No matter where you are on your journalistic journey, an effective technique for making yourself known is essential! In this blog post, we’ll be delving into tried and tested methods of marketing yourself and your work so that editors take notice of your skills, passion, and knowledge. From networking at conferences to ensuring that your online portfolio stands out, read on for our top tips on how to stand out in print media.

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The skills required to succeed in your post-High School life, be it college, a vocational training program, the military, or a job, are surprisingly similar. Commitment to the task at hand by doing your best all the time is a great start, but it isn’t all you need. One of our Ask a Tech Teacher contributors came up with a short list of five skills that will make a big difference in whether you succeed or fail in your post-High School endeavors:

1. Communication
2. Adaptability and Flexibility
3. Leadership
4. Time management
5. Technical skills

Here’s what you need to know:

5 Skills Graduates Need to Be Successful 

The job market is competitive, and having the right skills and the courage to use them can be the difference between success and stagnation. Graduates looking to hit the ground running should be sure to cultivate a good balance of soft and hard skills. Creativity and problem-solving will come in handy in brainstorming solutions and revolution steps for projects, while communication and networking are invaluable when interacting with team members or potential clients. Below are five of the most critical skills that graduates should possess to make their mark on the job market:

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Technology has been part of math education for decades, mostly as rote drills and a replacement for worksheets, often to assist in memorizing tables. But it’s grown up since those early days. Check out this article from one of our Ask a Tech Teacher contributors addressing why tech+math are good partners and where that will go in the future:

The Future of Math Education: Integrating Technology in the Classroom

Introduction

In today’s digital age, it is increasingly necessary to integrate technology into the classroom. This inevitable change is particularly true for math education, as interactive math lessons for kids are becoming more commonplace online. Therefore, traditional schools should change their mindsets, adopt tech and adapt it for the classroom or risk getting left behind in the race to enhance students’ math learning experience. But to encourage school administration boards to make this integration, they must first know the advantages of tech in math education.

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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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I’ve used flipped classrooms in my Middle School classes. After the initial excitement that something changed, it fell into a routine with not much better results than any other teaching method. But not worse, either. I tossed it into the category of something to try when whatever I was using didn’t work.

That’s why this article from EdSurge caught my attention:

Does ‘Flipped Learning’ Work? A New Analysis Dives Into the Research

A new meta-analysis looked at the effectiveness of flipped learning, a model that asks students to watch lecture videos before class so that class time can be used for active learning. The authors argue that while the approach can be done well, there’s lots of hype and failed attempts.

Read more…

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This is a question I get often from teachers: Technology is always an extra layer of work in my classroom. How can I blend it into what I already do without taking time I don’t have? When I first addressed this issue fifteen years ago, it was all about replacing traditional classroom tools with one on a computer. For example, book reports were typed on the computer instead of handwritten, or math facts were practiced with a math game instead of flash cards. But that quickly became cumbersome. Teachers didn’t know how to use the digital tools and there was never enough training to untip that balance. At the end of the day, paper-and-pencil was easier, faster, and perfectly understood. Soon, even the most stalwart tech-infused teachers discovered it was just as effective to use traditional tools and pull out the tech stuff for special occasions.

What happened? How did such a good idea go so wrong? The problem was four-fold:

• students didn’t have the technology foundation to smoothly incorporate digital tools into projects. Too often, the effort to provide evidence of learning suffered as students (and teachers) became mired in efforts to get the technology to work. Where is the tool? How do you do **? Why is the program not working?
• teachers didn’t have training in the tools. Even schools that made herculean efforts to train teachers in technology found themselves flailing. Even teachers who understood the tool would struggle with the inadequate infrastructure, the undependability of the technology itself, and the non-intuitive nature of so many of the programs they wanted to use. As a result, they used tools they understood rather than those best-suited for the project and learning.
• projects always–really, always–took longer using technology than the traditional low-tech approach.
• school infrastructure often struggled to support the exciting plans that tech-savvy teachers wanted to try. Computers froze or the network became over-burdened or the internet went down just as students required them the most. The money required to fix these problems was measured in the thousands of dollars–tens of thousands. Too many schools just didn’t have that budget.

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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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