Year: 2025

8 Projects to Teach Digital Citizenship–by Grade

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Education has changed. No longer is it contained within four classroom walls or the physical site of a school building. Students aren’t confined by the eight hours between school bells or the struggling budget of an underfunded program. Now, education can be found anywhere — teaming up with students in Kenya, Skyping with an author in Sweden, or chatting with an astrophysicist on the International Space Station. Students can use Google Earth to take a virtual tour of a zoo or a blog to collaborate on class research.

Learning has no temporal or geographic borders and is available wherever students and teachers find an Internet connection. This vast landscape of resources is offered digitally, often free, but to take that cerebral trek through the online world, children must know how to do it safely, securely, and responsibly. This used to mean limiting access to the Internet, blocking websites, and layering rules upon rules hoping (vainly) to discourage students from using an infinite and fascinating resource. It didn’t work.

Best practices now suggest that instead of cocooning students, we teach them to be good digital citizens, confident and competent. Here are projects to teach kids authentically, blended with your regular lessons, the often complicated topic of becoming good digital citizens, knowledgeable about their responsibilities in an Internet world.

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Digital Citizenship Resources–Lots of Them

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Ask a Tech Teacher has a passel of online resources to help you introduce, teach, and reinforce digital citizenship to your students. Here’s our long list–and click here for updates if you arrive at this page late: (more…)

Digital Citizenship Week: What to Teach When–a video

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Digital Citizenship Week — October 20-24, 2025

Digital Citizenship Week occurs every year during the third full week of October. It is an annual awareness campaign dedicated to promoting safe, responsible, ethical, and balanced use of technology and media among young people, particularly K-12 students. It emphasizes skills like digital literacy, online safety, media balance, cyberbullying prevention, privacy protection, and navigating emerging technologies such as AI. The initiative encourages educators, parents, and schools to integrate these topics into lessons, fostering positive digital habits that support mental health and well-being in an increasingly connected world.

You can get a lot of great ideas from Common Sense Education on their Digital Citizenship Week page:

Digital Citizenship Week calendars, with fun activities and suggested lessons for each day
AI literacy resources, like AI foundations course for educators, and AI literacy lesson collection for students
Webinars and events to help build your teaching practice and implement digital citizenship in your classroom
Family engagement resources to share in your community

Here at Ask a Tech Teacher, we will offer three days of Digital Citizenship resources and lessons. I’ve provided links, but they won’t work until live:

Digital Citizenship Week: What to Teach When–a video (this one)
Digital Citizenship Resources–Lots of Them
8 Projects to Teach Digital Citizenship–by Grade

We’ll start with a great video (40 minutes) we use in training, available for free today to Ask a Tech Teacher readers. It is a reprint so you may have seen it last year. If not, enjoy!

Digital Citizenship: What to Teach When

Summary

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Your Daughter is Going to a Military Academy. What’s Ahead of her?

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Your Daughter is Going to USNA (or another Military Academy). What’s Ahead of her?

If you are one of the 1,000+ who got an offer, and you accepted, you’re wondering what to do with yourself until I-Day at the end of June. This webpage on USNA.edu will provide black and white details, but there’s so much more. A question I often get from women concerns women in a male world. How’s that work?

I asked my daughter to help me with this. She graduated in 2008, served on the USS Bunker Hill and the newly-commissioned USS San Diego for her two sea tours, then assigned to Washington DC for her stateside tours. Along the way, she was promoted from Ensign to Commander and is on track to become Captain. She has a responsible position, lots of decision making, makes a difference in the lives of those around her and the future of the nation. When she retires, it will be with a solid pension, continuing health care, the feeling that she did something good for twenty years, and still young enough to start a second career.

Here’s her advice to women preparing to attend USNA or another Military Academy:

Ok, you got in! Cheer up, that wasn’t the hard part. There are a million ways to mess it up now. You’re not a big fish in a small pond anymore. Everyone is Type A and out to succeed. We operate like a team and look out for each other, but we all need to individually get through the same obstacles, too. It’s unfortunately common these days for women to play dumb. DON’T! No one respects dumb people at USNA. People who earn the greatest respect are the ones who get the grades, run the fastest, tell the funniest stories, ooze charisma, and seem to do it all effortlessly. Basically, at USNA we are so used to operating in a world where you out perform the people around you that the way to earn respect is to outperform the out performers. You have to be more than a jack of all trades; you have to be a master of all trades. But trust me, you’ll be better for it! Never settle. Always look for your deficiencies (won’t have to try hard because the upperclassmen will be there to point them out to you) and ALWAYS fix them before they snowball.

Women also have leverage over men with their femininity. DON’T USE IT. While the man is under your spell, he still knows he’s under you spell. Don’t dilute your righteous accomplishments with your femininity. Guess what? You’re feminine without any extra effort on your part. God made you that way. Leverage your intelligence, wit and knowledge of trivia—NOT your sexual organs for which you cannot take credit. Enough said.

Don’t forget to smell the roses. It’s hard to remember when you’re being yelled at and bells are going off for classes you’re not prepared to attend, but the Naval Academy is a beautiful, historic place. There are tons of opportunities to maximize your time there and you’ll really regret it if you don’t make the effort. Go to the museum, read the plaques on all the statues, go to church, put up a huge sign for Army/Navy week in T Court, play sports on Hospital Point, try to jump the wall one time (don’t get caught), visit the cemetery, take the sailboats out. People don’t get to do this stuff in regular college. You do, so don’t abuse the opportunity by ignoring it.

Above all, have fun! Get that diploma and start tailgating in the alumni tent at the football games. It’s way more fun on the outside!

Taken from Building a Midshipman This college-and-career series delves into making the military part of college career choices. All the links are there but some for future dates:

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 are the result of 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, 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.

Excel (or Spreadsheets) — the series

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One of the most popular applications of math is through spreadsheets (like Excel) that make numbers relevant to everyday life. Many think this is too complicated, too cerebral, someone can do it but not them–they’d be wrong. I start my students in 1st grade with spreadsheets (though they don’t call it that) like this art exercise:

and build on their skills until they have the basics by fifth grade.

[gallery type="columns" columns="2" size="medium" ids="67800,67801"]

Then, we spend middle school applying those skills to lessons.

Over the next few months, we’ll provide a series of lessons on spreadsheet basics you can use in your K-8 classroom. Here are some of the topics we’ll cover:

–from 55 Technology Projects for the Digital Classroom. (more…)

Opportunities Driving Broader Educational Reach for Students Today

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Education is changing as the world does, too. It’s not just undergrad and then grad or trade school. Here are more ideas from the Ask a Tech Teacher team of what’s available:

Opportunities Driving Broader Educational Reach for Students Today

Education today isn’t locked into classrooms or bound by rigid schedules. Students can build their learning around their lives instead of the other way around. Whether it’s joining an online program, traveling for a short-term study experience, or tapping into free materials, the doors are wide open.

What’s changed the most is the range of choices available. Students can learn from international experts without leaving home, explore career-focused programs that fit into part-time hours, or find specialized courses that match their personal goals. The variety means each learning path can look completely different, shaped around what works best for the individual. (more…)

Tech Tip #45: Your Screen Upside Down?

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As a working technology teacher, I get hundreds of questions from parents about their home computers, how to do stuff, how to solve problems. Each Tuesday, I’ll share one of those with you. They’re always brief and always focused. Enjoy!

Q: My screen is sideways 90 degrees. How do I fix that?

A: If you ever needed this, you’re going to be blessing me. If you’ve never faced that off-kilter screen, you’re going to wonder why I’d post this tip.

Of course, I’ve faced it–I run a tech lab and there are always those pesky prodigies who want to outsmart me. They know if they push Ctrl+Alt+(down arrow), it’ll turn the screen upside down. The first time it happened, I was at a loss. That’s when a different pesky prodigy told me how to fix it:

Ctrl+Alt+(up arrow)

I used it at least once a month when I was in the classroom.

Note: This is a reprint of an earlier tip. I left the comments because they may be helpful to readers. (more…)

Tech Tip #58: 7 Ways to Use Social Media for Professional Development

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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. These tips are quick, short. If you’d like more, search the blog for more details, or add a question in the comments.

Today’s tip: 7 Ways to Use Social Media for Professional Development

Keep your social media streams pure.
Don’t mix personal and professional.
Always answer visitors.
Keep your lights on—add new content daily or weekly.
Keep entries short.
Include pictures.
Keep your profile up-to-date.

For more detail: Visit “7 Tips for Using Social Media for PD” on Ask a Tech Teacher.

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Is a Military Academy Right for You?

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It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Man in the Arena, a speech by Theodore Roosevelt

You didn’t even know the US Naval Academy existed until your brother decided to attend a Service Academy Night at the School District. He’s a year younger and a passionate student of military history. Mom joined him and when they returned, pronounced, “It’s you.”

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Subscriber Special: October New Teacher Survival Kit Extended

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Every month, subscribers to our newsletter get a free/discounted resource to help their tech teaching.

K-5 New Teacher Survival Kit

9 ebooks, 65 digital posters

$222.95 Marked down to $178.95

ends October 7, 2025

K-5 tech curriculum textbooks (Common Core aligned)–a year’s worth of skills-based, project-based learning that ties into class units.
Ultimate Guide to Keyboarding: K-5–K-5 keyboard curriculum–essentials of keyboarding in 45-minutes a week
K-8 Digital Citizenship curriculum–click for more information
169 Real-World Ways to Put Tech into Your Class you’ll be expected to know how to solve common computer problems. Click for more information
65 ePosters to share most-important tech details with students