Author: Jacqui

Dear Otto is an occasional column where I answer questions I get from readers about teaching tech. If you have a question, please contact me at askatechteacher at gmail dot com and I’ll answer it here. For your privacy, I use only first names.

Here’s a great question I got from Sandy:

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Every teacher I know juggles an exhausting teaching schedule with parent conferences, administrative tasks, and specialized student needs. They take work home evenings and weekends and often are forced to choose between family and job when it comes to allocating a finite quantity of time over what surely seems to be infinite needs.

The teachers I know are also positive thinkers. They always start the new school year with a promise to be more organized, work more efficiently, use available tools to complete tasks faster, and prioritize needs.

There’s a problem, though: Where does one start? Scholastic offers a list of one hundred tips, but most require set up time (yikes!)–and worse, non-existent classroom real estate–before they can be used. For my short list, I looked for:

• a net savings of time
• a way to quickly accomplish common tasks
• easy access from digital devices that teachers commonly carry
• simplicity, so even when my mind is somewhere else (like on the child across the room or the admin peeking in my door), it performs flawlessly
  

Here are three that meet all of these qualifications:

Waze (http://www.waze.com) Free

Waze is a free navigation app for GPS-equipped smartphones that bills itself as ‘the largest community-based traffic and navigation app’. It includes spoken turn-by-turn directions and the ability to search for destinations by address, category, place name, or landmark. Thanks to its over fifty million users, Waze gives you real-time crowd sourced reports about which highway is jammed, the location of  accidents, where to find the cheapest gas, and when your friends are arriving at the same destination as you. You can even send an ‘I’m on my way!’ comment to whoever needs to know with a click.

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Mother’s Day in the United States is annually held on the second Sunday of May. This year, that’s May 11th. It celebrates motherhood and it is a time to appreciate mothers and mother figures. Many people give gifts, cards, flowers, candy, a meal in a restaurant or other treats to their mother and mother figures, including grandmothers, great-grandmothers, stepmothers, and foster mothers.

• Mother’s Day activities
• Mother’s Day cards
• Mother’s Day cards–more

Anyone have some favorite websites to share? My list isn’t terribly robust.

Enjoy your day with your children!

Jacqui Murray has been teaching K-8 technology for 15 years. She is the editor/author of dozens of tech ed resources including a K-8 technology curriculum, K-8 keyboard curriculum, K-8 Digital Citizenship curriculum. She is webmaster for six blogs, CSG Master Teacher, adjunct professor, 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. You can find her resources at Structured Learning

This is for both younger and older students so check these out–pick the ones that work for you:

1. America’s Story
2. America–Colonies
3. American Indians
4. Civil War I video
5. Civil War II video
6. Civil War—reconstruction—video
7. Colonial America–life
8. Growth of the USA
9. Historic speeches
10. Jamestown Adventure Game
11. Mt. Vernon
12. Native American Conflicts
13. Oregon Trail—all about 
14. Oregon Trail—virtual tour
15. Patriot Spy–Deliver a covert message to Paul Revere
16. Picturing America
17. RR—inventing
18. Timelines
19. Transcontinental Railroad video
20. Underground Railroad
21. US History Map Game
22. USA Games

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Sometimes, it takes a picture to really show what you’re trying to say. It doesn’t have to be drawn with pencils or paint brushes. Sometimes, it’s a graph or a chart, formatted to clarify important points.

That’s called Excel. Words and numbers are always black and white and the same size. Excel never is. There are twenty-two Excel skills I teach grades 3-5 that turn Excel into a useful tool in their classroom. This covers the first fourteen.

If the lesson plans are blurry, click on them for a full size alternative.

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Coding has become the poster child for a tech-infused classroom. Over 15 million kids participated in Hour of Code this past December. So many teachers took students to Code.org’s curriculum offerings, the website crashed.

So what is ‘coding’? According to the Urban Dictionary, it’s another word for ‘programming’ which means:

The art of turning caffeine into Error Messages

Let’s go to Webster’s definition instead:

The act or job of creating computer programs

Not much better. To techies, ‘programming’ or ‘coding’ is

a series of symbols, used synonymously as text and grouped to imply or prompt the multimedia in the games and programs that happen on computers, websites, and mobile apps.

This complicated definition is why–historically–programming, IT, and Computer Science have been of interest only to the geekiest of kids. But there are good reasons why kids should like this activity. According to Computer Science Education Week:

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Space units are always exciting. Part of it’s the history, but a lot is that space is our final frontier, a wild  untamed land that man knows so little about. I have a list of over 20 websites I use to support this theme for K-8. Here are 10 of my favorites:

100,000 Stars

100,000 Stars is an interactive visualization of the stellar neighborhood showing the real location of over 100,000 nearby stars. You can zoom in on 87 major named stars including our Sun. There’s a brief introduction and a longer tour students can take to get acquainted with the program. From there, it’s intuitive to use with many of the same browsing tools students are used to from other programs.

100,000 Stars is programmed by space enthusiasts at Google. The introductory music is mesmerizing. Put your headphones on and fly.

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Teach students using whichever email program is installed at school, but warn students that theirs will be different. Also warn parents they will have to guide students to the correct spots on their particular version. This will avoid confusion when students go home and try to email homework. Teach To:, From:, cc:, bcc:, subject:, attachments, and basic rules of emailing (I’ll share a list that I’ve created from working with students and parents. It should keep you out of the trouble I got into in my early years).

If the lesson plans are blurry, click on them for a full size alternative.

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April 22nd is Earth Day. Celebrate it with your students by letting them visit these websites:

1. Breathing Earth
2. Breathing Earth YouTube Video–of CO2 use, population changes, and more
3. Conservation Game
4. Earth day collection
5. Earth Day—NASA Ocean Currents
6. Eco-friendly house
7. Eeko World
8. Ecotourism Simulation–for grades 4 and above
9. Electrocity
10. Footprint calculator
11. Home of the Future
12. My Garbology
13. NASA City

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