Author: Jacqui

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

1. Tech Teacher Appreciation Week
2. Encourage Creativity in the Classroom
3. #CUE22 and Trending Edtech
4. 12 Tech Tasks To End the School Year
5. 5 Ways to Involve Parents
6. 3 Websites on Architecture/Engineering
7. 13 Websites That Provide Lots of Digital Books for Summer Reading
8. Kiddom’s Newest Feature–Lesson Launch
9. How to Clean Up Google Classroom for the Summer
10. Memorial Day Websites and Projects

Here’s a preview of what’s coming up in June:

• Mindfulness in the Classroom
• Internet Safety Month
• Subscriber Special
• Tech Tips
• World Environment Day
• Apps for Curious Students
• Evaluating Apps
• Tech in your Summer School Program
• Summer Activities
• Need a New Job?

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June 4th-6th:

Buy a K-8 School License

get 3 free print books of the grade level you purchased

(Please note: new orders only; domestic purchase or freight-forwarders only)

Usually, you get one desk copy for each grade level included in your school license. Between June 4th-8th get three per grade level. That’s enough for a team to each have one.

To take advantage of this special, purchase from Structured Learning with PayPal or a PO. Email us (admin at structuredlearning dot net) with your proof of purchase. We’ll send the extra books.

What is a school license?

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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: Laptop frozen? Do this.

Category: Security, Problem-solving

Q: My laptop is frozen. I can’t even turn it off. What do I do?

A: Do a hard reboot. Hold the power button until the laptop turns off for ten seconds and reboot. If that doesn’t work, remove the battery, wait ten seconds, put it back, and start up. Usually, that’ll fix it.

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.

Teaching Channel is one of my favorite hands-on resources for how to teach. They offer lots of videos from the classroom, showing teachers at work, but also well thought out discussions on topics that impact education. This one is on mindfulness. I hope you enjoy it:

Mindfulness to Calm, Focus, & Learn

By Alexa Simon on May 5, 2022.

Mindfulness is a health and well-being practice utilized by families from around the world. Maybe you’ve dabbled in mindful activities such as yoga or meditation, or mindfulness may still seem somewhat of a mystery! Either way, let’s drive into what it means to be mindful, including ways to use mindfulness in your classroom (in the midst of chaos). Mindfulness benefits everyone!

What is Mindfulness?

Mindfulness is the act of being mindful. Stating the obvious, mindfulness is allowing one’s thoughts to slow, and using the breath to cultivate self-awareness. Being mindful provides your body the space to calm and be present, allowing you to melt away stress and focus on what matters. The end result from this focus is to feel joy and contentment: a lovely place to be. 

Read on

We’ve written a lot about this topic on Ask a Tech Teacher. Check out these articles if you’re looking for more:

• Does Mindfulness Make Your Class Better?
• How to Incorporate Mindfulness into Your Class
• How to Put Kindness in Your Classes

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, 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.

I’m taking the day to honor our all soldiers on America’s Memorial Day. Without their sacrifice, where would we be?

As you end your school year, there are lots of details that must be taken care of . If you use Google Classroom, here’s a list, created by Ask a Tech Teacher contributor, Scott Winstead:

How to Clean Up Google Classroom for the Summer

As the school year comes to an end, teachers everywhere are getting ready for summer break. For many, this means cleaning out classrooms and organizing materials for the next year. However, it’s not just your physical classroom that needs to be cleaned and organized at the end of the year.

If you’re a teacher who uses Google Classroom, there’s one more task to add to your list: cleaning up your virtual classroom. 

I know, it sounds like a pain. One more thing to add to the list. But not to worry, it’s nowhere near as hard as it sounds. You’re just tying up loose ends and creating a blank state for the following school year. Just a little work now will help you to stay organized over summer break and make it easier to get started again in the fall. 

In this article, I’ll share the four simple steps you can take to close up your Google Classroom for the year in a neat, organized fashion. Let’s get started!

Step 1: Make sure all work is graded and returned.

The first step to close out your year in Google Classroom is make sure all student work has been graded and returned to them. You can do this on an individual assignment basis, but that might prove to be a huge job, with loads of assignments. Luckily, there’s an easy way to handle it all at once.

One in your Google Classroom, click the hamburger menu in the top right of your dashboard. From there, you’ll see a menu item that says “To-do” or “To Review.” You’ll then see your classes with assignments that have either been assigned, turned in, or graded. The turned in column is what you need to pay attention to. You still need to process these and get them back to your students.

To do so, just click “Turned In” assignments, then grade the assignments if necessary, and click “Return” to give them back to your students.

Not only will this clean things up for you, but it will also return ownership of individual assignments to the students. This allows them to keep the assignment even if you delete it all on your end.

Once finished, you can click the three vertical dots next to each assignment you returned and mark them as reviewed to finish cleaning up your list.

Step 2: Clean up your Classroom folder.

First and foremost, notice I didn’t say to delete your Classroom folder. In fact, let me say this as plainly as I can… do NOT delete your Classroom folder. This folder is created when you first set up your Google Classroom account. Deleting it can cause a lot of problems.

What you want to do is clean up the sub folders within the main folder. When you create individual classes, Google Classroom will create a subfolder for each class in your Classroom folder. Each of these folders will contain folders such as assignments.

If you want, you can delete all of this. But a lot of it is probably worth saving, and it’s likely you have plenty of drive space to do so. In that case, you could do something like create a subfolder for the school year in your Google Drive, and move all of the individual classes into it. Simple, easy, clean, and you lose nothing.

Step 3: Clean up Google Classroom calendars.

Just as Google Classroom automatically creates subfolders for each class you create, it also creates individual calendars that include due dates for everything you assign. And similar to your Classroom folder, I say “clean up” because you don’t want to just go in and delete everything right off the bat.

It’s important to note that if you delete all your calendars without saving anything, you might regret it. Referencing back to old assignments, due dates etc. can be helpful when planning for a new year, so I recommend saving your Google Classroom calendars before you delete them.

You can do this by saving as PDFs, printing them out if you want paper copies, or taking screenshots.

Once you’ve saved what you want, it’s time to hide or delete your old Google Classroom Calendars. It’s pretty easy. Just go to Google Apps next to your icon at the top right of the screen. Click on “Google Calendar.” Then scroll down and on the left, you’ll see the list of all your calendars.

Each calendar can either be hidden or deleted. To hide, click the three vertical dots and select “hide from list.” To delete, click “Settings and sharing.” Then scroll to the very bottom of the page and click “Delete.” You’ll be asked to confirm. If you’re sure, click “Permanently Delete.” Repeat for each calendar you want to get rid of.

Step 4: Archive your classes.

Almost done! This is probably the most important step when it comes to cleaning up your Google Classroom for summer break. Archiving your classroom does the following:

1) It freezes everything so students can’t make any changes.

2) It hides the class from your current view.

3) It makes your integrated meet link inactive.

To archive a class, go to the main page where you see all your classes. Click on the three vertical dots of the class you want to archive, and then click “Archive” from the dropdown. You’ll get a message asking you to confirm. Click “Archive” again and your class will disappear from the main screen. Quick and easy.

Note, you can get a class back after archiving by restoring. It’s not the same as deleting.

There you have it. Four simple steps and your Google Classroom is now ready for Summer Break. Enjoy your time off and rest easy knowing your Google Classroom will be nice and tidy at the start of next school year!

Bio

Scott Winstead is the founder of MyElearningWorld.com where he has shared his expertise in eLearning and instructional design for the past decade. 

–Images credit to Deposit Photos

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.

Turnitin has long been the go-to resource for uncovering plagiarism in student work, but there are reasons why that may not be a good choice for you or your students. Here is a good discussion on the pros and cons of Turnitin as well as options available, from the Ask a Tech Teacher crew:

Reliable Turnitin Alternatives for K12

It was never a mystery that teachers get so many papers to check before a specific deadline that they’re often ready to drop everything and fall asleep at the end of the day. Irritation and stress from such tasks are like poison that makes instructors lose energy and harms their nerves. 

Since the COVID-19 pandemic has made the workload even heavier, many instructors have felt how awful it is to use an unreliable plagiarism checker. Many institutions still rely on Turnitin, but the professionals who must check dozens of essays on a daily basis know that this expensive service can be way too slow. 

Although it’s nearly impossible to find a Turnitin alternative free, there are cheaper and more reliable options. In this article, we’ll look at the reasons why Turnitin is so popular, and then we’ll examine several replacement options to choose the one that can truly increase your efficiency.

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If you’re not familiar with Kiddom, you should be, especially in the changing environment of today’s classroom. Kiddom is an all-in-one education platform for remote or in-person learning or a hybrid of the two that provides a high-quality digital curriculum capable of integrating curriculum management, instruction, assessment, and communication tools into one location. It is easily personalized to the needs of a classroom meaning it saves teachers valuable time, resources and money, and simplifies technology for students who may be new to it or not quite comfortable. Because it is internet-based, it works well on any platform, any device, and seamlessly syncs between work started at school and finished at home.

In the past, I’ve written about many of Kiddom’s features–the Content Library, SEL Rubrics, its partnership with OUR Curricula Resources to name a few, One quality that has always stood out to me as I explore each of their new features is this company listens to customers and responds to their needs.

Kiddom’s newest feature, Lesson Launch, does it again.

What is Lesson Launch

Until now, teachers must manage multiple technology platforms to incorporate disparate lesson elements and then separately manage student interaction. This complexity takes time and attention away from what matters–a positive and engaging in-class learning experience. Kiddom’s Lesson Launch consolidates these key elements and gives teachers myriad tools to plan, build, schedule, deliver and engage in real-time anywhere.

With Kiddom Lesson Launch, lessons can be pushed out to students individually, in small groups, or an entire class and then monitored in real time through a teacher dashboard. Students are alerted as soon as the lesson is available and the teacher tracks their progress through the lesson. Teachers see which students have begun the lesson, their progress (by percent completed), and who has submitted the assignment. Teachers can check student work by hovering their mouse over a student’s avatar.

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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: Does MS Word Have ‘Research’?

Category: Google Apps, Keyboarding

Q: Is there a quick way to research on a PC, like we can do in Google Docs?

A: Sure. Use the ‘Reference‘ tab on the menu bar. It used to be Shift+F7 but that is now ‘Thesaurus’. That brings up the ‘Researcher’ sidebar (on the right side of the document).

In Google Apps, use Ctrl+Alt+Shift+I to Explore

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

***

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.

There are usual ways to find the most recent article written on a blog:

• Check the top of the blog--This might work, but often bloggers pin ‘Featured Articles’ to the top. It’s not always clear when those run out and the regular ones start.
• Check the menu for ‘All Posts’–All bloggers don’t have that option.
• Check the sidebar for ‘Recent Articles’–All bloggers don’t have that and some push it way (way) down the sidebar resources

So what to do if none of those work?

Here’s an example of what I did in one case. I’ll use a blog from a nature writer who wrote a book I loved (Christy Teglo–click to find out more–Christy has amazing adventures). Here’s what the home page looks like:

I clicked ‘Blog at the top and got:

It took a bit of sleuthing to realize these aren’t her most recent articles (though they are fascinating). I checked the sidebar, but you can see in the image above that there is none. Normal people give up at this point, but those who know me are more likely to ascribe ‘odd’ or ‘eclectic’ to me than ‘normal’. So I tried a trick that has worked for me in these types of situations:

• Go to the search bar
• Don’t type anything into it. Just push ‘Search’
• The default if you don’t provide direction is to list all articles in date order

Here’s what I got:

Victory! I haven’t had a time yet where this doesn’t work!

How about you? Did this work? Or do you know a better way?

Other Writer’s Tech Tips you might like:

• The Windows Clipboard Stream (over ten items)
• Easily Translate a Webpage
• Track Your Stuff

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.