Author: Jacqui

In fifteen years of teaching K-8, I have learned that one factor provides a reliable barometer for student success: Parent involvement. In fact, it’s crucial. According to the National Coalition for Parent Involvement in Education Research Review and Resources, no matter income or background, students with involved parents are more likely to have higher grades and test scores, attend school regularly, have better social skills, show improved behavior, and adapt well to school. According to the School Community Journal, “There is a sizable body of research literature supporting the involvement of parents in educational settings and activities”.

The data is so overwhelming, one of our important jobs as teachers must be to facilitate the involvement of parents in their child’s education. There are as many ways to do that as there are parents who need alternatives to the traditional parent-teacher conference and back-to-school night. Here are some of my favorites:

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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 week, I’ll share one of those with you. They’re always brief and always focused. Enjoy!

Q: So many colleagues are embedding documents to their blogs and websites, but I don’t know how to do that. Can you help?

A: I love this part of Google Apps. When your Google document is complete–that includes Docs, Spreadsheets, Slides, and Drawings:

• Go to ‘Share’ in the upper right corner; select the option you prefer–allowing viewers to just view or edit
• Click File>Publish to the Web (on the menu bar)
• Select the link and copy-paste to your website (I’ve done this below) OR select Embed
• Copy the HTML code that starts with ‘<iframe…’
• Paste into blog, wiki, website like I did below:

Let’s try this out. Here’s a collaborative spreadsheet to share Exit Ticket ideas. Your name is optional. Strongly consider adding the linkback so we can add each other to our PLN–a great way to share ideas and knowledge. Access the spreadsheet and tell us your favorite warm-up activities and exit tickets:

Here’s the embedded document:

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America, we love you.

School’s back and it’s more important than ever to integrate technology into your curriculum. Why? Consider these thirteen changes to technology-in-education since 2013:

1. Windows has updated their platform—again.
2. IPads have been joined by Chromebooks as a common classroom digital device.
3. There is a greater reliance on internet-based tools than software. This underscores the importance of teaching digital citizenship to even the youngest learners.
4. Student work is often collaborative and shared.
5. Student work is done anywhere, not just the classroom and home, meaning it must be synced and available across multiple platforms, multiple devices.
6. Keyboarding skills are more important than ever, often critical to summative year-end testing for PARC, SB, and other formats.
7. Technology in the classroom is the norm, but teacher training isn’t.
8. Education is focused on college and career with tech an organic, transformative tool.
9. Teachers have moved from ‘sage on the stage’ to ‘guide on the side’.
10. Students have been raised on digital devices. They want to use them as learning tools.
11. Using technology is no longer what ‘geeky’ students do. It’s what all students want to do.
12. Printing is being replaced with sharing and publishing.
13. More teachers are willing to try technology when used authentically.

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Every Earth Day, someone in your school, maybe the parent group, raises the question of WHY NOT a paperless classroom? Everyone nods their heads, agrees this is a revolutionary idea, and moves on as Earth Day passes.

Really, though: Why not? There are benefits to adopting web-based alternatives to paper:

• it’s easy to collaborate when everything’s online
• nothing gets soda dripped on it or eaten by the dog
• students can collaborate without requiring parent time and gas fumes
• teachers can answer questions in a timely manner
• teachers can provide feedback on projects that students respond to and resubmit
• student work is simple to copy, back up, and share as needed

To kickstart your paperless digital classroom requires a modicum of preparation. Take a few weekends this summer to set up a class blog and class website and get comfortable with the digital side of your school. This may include:

• Google Apps for Education and/or Google Classroom–this serves as a basic digital portfolio for students, a collaborative tool with classmates, the teacher’s inbox, and her tool for returning graded and analyzed student work.
• an LMS like Edmodo, Otus, or MyBigCampus–these often include an interactive gradebook, parent inclusion devices, a student discussion forum, polls, a way to collect and share resources, a class calendar, and access across a variety of digital devices.
• digital portfolios for students–this can be accomplished with the LMS you use, Google Apps, Google Classroom, or even Dropbox

Four school-based pieces you’ll need:

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Labor Day is annually held on the first Monday of September (this year, September 2nd). It was originally organized to celebrate various labor associations’ strengths of and contributions to the United States economy. It is largely a day of rest in modern times. Many people mark Labor Day as the end of the summer season and a last chance to make trips or hold outdoor events.

Labor Day is a US holiday dedicated to workers across the country. The public holiday always falls on the first Monday in September. The first federal observation of the holiday occurred in 1894 however the first Labor Day observed in a state was in Oregon in 1887.

Today, I honor the warrior, his job to fight for America’s way of life, invisibly and heroically, across the globe.

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Jacqui Murray has been teaching K-8 technology for 15 years. She is the editor of a K-8 technology curriculum, K-8 keyboard curriculum, K-8 Digital Citizenship curriculum, and creator of dozens of technology training books that integrate technology into education. She is webmaster for six blogs, CSG Master Teacher, an Amazon Vine Voice book reviewer, Editorial Review Board member for Journal for Computing Teachers, CAEP reviewer, CSTA presentation reviewer, freelance journalist on tech ed topics, a tech ed columnist for Examiner.com, and a weekly contributor to TeachHUB.

This is a reprint of an article I posted last Spring. By starting these tasks in Fall, you’ll be ready when yearly assessments arrive in April-May:

Between March and June, 2015, nearly five million students in 11 states and the District of Columbia completed the PARCC and Smarter Balanced testing to measure student accomplishment of Common Core State Standards in the areas of mathematics and English/language arts. Tests were administered via digital devices (though there are options for paper-and-pencil). Besides measuring student achievement, they also were an indicator of school facility to administer green digital tests instead of the traditional paper-and-pencil versions. Lots of schools discovered that, though student knew the material, they were unable to adequately communicate their knowledge using unfamiliar digital tools as basic as keyboard familiarity.

I polled my PLN to find specific tech areas students needed help with in preparing for the Assessments. It boils down to five tech areas. Pay attention to these and your students will be much more prepared for this Spring’s Common Core assessments:

Keyboarding

Students need to have enough familiarity with the keyboard that they know where keys are, where the number pad is, where the F row is, how keys are laid out. They don’t need to be touch typists or even facilely use all fingers. Just have them comfortable enough they have a good understanding of where all the pieces are. Have students type fifteen minutes a week in a class setting and 45 minutes a week using keyboarding for class activities (homework, projects–that sort). That’ll do it.

Basic computer skills

Skills that were listed by teachers as difficult for students included:

• Drag-drop
• Compare-contrast
• Write a letter
• Watch a video
• Fill in boxes on table
• Mouse manipulation
• Keyboarding
• Know keyboard layout—delete, arrows, space bar
• Drop-down menus
• Highlighting
• Unselect
• Scroll
• Use calculator, protractor, ruler
• Use video player
• Use multiple windows/tabs
• Use online dictionaries, thesauruses
• Plot points
• Read and comprehend online

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I’m a teacher, have been for 35 years. I teach a lesson to my Middle School students that uses Twitter to improve writing skills. There’s a lot this popular social media tool can bring to the education world:

• it’s non-intimidating. Anyone can get through 280 characters
• it forces students to focus on concise, pithy writing. Wasted, fluff words are not an option
• it’s fun. Students want to try it because it’s the ‘forbidden fruit’.

I also have a class that kickstarts the author in students, getting them set up to write and digitally publish the book that festers inside of them (well, statistics say 73% of us have a book inside screaming to get out).

What I haven’t done is blend the two: Write a novel on Twitter.

Anna over at Imaginette reminded me that I should. She’s not the only one, either, who thinks Twitter is an excellent forum for novel writing. Japan popularized it as the microblogging novel or the micro novel. Wikipedia defines it as:

…a fictional work or novel written and distributed in small parts

Just to be clear: We’re talking about squeezing all those novel parts that writers slave over…

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This special on site licenses has been extended a month. When September ends, prices increase for the first time since we’ve offered multi-user licenses.

Let me step back. What are site licenses?

• They are for multiple users rather than just the teacher–students, other teachers, even parents
• They offer grade-level student workbooks (in PDF format) for the SL tech curriculum and keyboarding curriculum
• They include the grade-level teacher manual for free
• Also free: weekly videos showing how to teach the lesson
• New this year: Office Hours. This is a weekly Google Hangouts anyone using the curriculum can attend and talk real time with a teacher using the curriculum

Why are prices going up? During the beta phase, we priced site licenses low while we worked out bugs. The price increase applies to licenses for:

• student workbooks
• teacher resources
• teacher webinar–training

If you’re planning to purchase one, save 25% (off the future increased price) by purchasing yours now:

• Room
• School
• District

If you already purchased a teacher manual and want to trade it for the site license, just provide a receipt showing you purchased in the last six months.

Questions? Email [email protected] or [email protected]. The slideshow below includes samples of site license products:

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: I’m paranoid of losing my documents so I back them up to an external drive, a flash drive, and in the cloud. My blog, though–It’s become an important cog in my teacher PLN. If it blew up, I’d be lost. What do I do about backing it up?

A: If you use Wordpress, it’s easy, they provide a native tool for that. Here’s what you do:

• Go to Tools>Export
• Select the bubble for ‘all’
• It’ll back it up as an XML file (you don’t have to understand what that is. Just know it’s the file that will save you if Wordpress crashes)
• Save that backup file somewhere safe in case you need it. Preferably where your Cloud automatic back-up will grab it (assuming you have one of those. If you use Carbonite, you do)
• Do this once a month–or a week if you’re active

This will back up your posts, pages, comments, categories, and tags. For the entirety of the blog–similar to a time machine, where you can restore the entire website–you’ll need an external service. My Wordpress.org blog is hosted by WPEngine. Part of that service is a back-up of the blog. It’s worth it to me to pay a bit extra for that function.

That’s it. Now you’re safe.

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