Year: 2024

Subscriber Special: January free-lesson-plan

January 8th-11th

the 53-page PDF, “25 Digital Tools for the Classroom”

for free!

“25 Digital Tools for the Classroom” is a thorough discussion on which are the most useful tools in a K-8 classroom. This includes popular digital tools such as blogs, backchannel devices, vocabulary decoding tools, avatars, digital portfolios, digital notetaking, as well as others you may not have thought of. Here’s what you do:

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What You Might Have Missed in December–What’s up in January

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

Here’s a preview of what’s coming up this month:

Top articles, tips, reviews for 2023
Free Lesson Plan: Holiday Memory in Word or KidPix
Subscriber Special
Free Lesson Plan: MLK Day
Tech Tips
Tons of online resources about classroom management
14 Websites About Landforms
13 Online Resources About Farms
National Handwriting Day
11 Online Resources About Puzzles

–image credit to Deposit Photo

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

https://forms.aweber.com/form/07/1910174607.htm

“The content presented in this blog is the result of my creative imagination and not intended for use, reproduction, or incorporation into any artificial intelligence training or machine learning systems without prior written consent from the author.”

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.

#16: A Holiday Memory in Word or KidPix

Use this not only to create a gift for parents, but to practice writing skills, grammar, MS Word’s spell check. I have student compose the memory one week and we format it the next. For beginning writers, use KidPix and its text tools. –from 55 Technology Projects for the Digital Classroom (more…)

Happy New Year! And Public Domain Day

Also on January 1st: It’s Public Domain Day! 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, 2024:

The picture above is interactive on the website. If you click it, you enter Public Domain Review’s website and can then explore each of these new sources of inspiration, free to use.

The big excitement this year that has everyone talking is Walt Disney’s original designs for Steamboat Willie–the precursor to Mickey Mouse. As of January 1st, it is available to all. Some history from Wikipedia:

“It could have entered the public domain in four different years: first in 1955, renewed to 1986, then to 2003 by the Copyright Act of 1976, and then to 2023 by the Copyright Term Extension Act (also known pejoratively as the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act”) of 1998. It has been claimed that these extensions were a response by Congress to extensive lobbying by The Walt Disney Company.”

Here’s a 7-minute animation of Steamboat Willie from YouTube, with over 13 million views: