I’m taking Memorial Day (the last Monday in May here in the USA) to honor our soldiers, hang the American flag and call my two soldier children. Say hi, how are you.

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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, and author of the tech thrillers, To Hunt a Sub and Twenty-four Days. You can find her resources at Structured Learning.

If you’re looking for a science background (everyone gets a BS), the US Naval Academy where everyone gets a BS is one of your best choices. Besides that, it includes a massive work load that must be done in a short amount of time (while holding down a part-time job–yes, you’re paid for the labor), the requirement to incorporate physical with mental calisthenics, a patriot’s approach to serving your countrypeople. The result often is a successful national leader. Specifically:

• 1 President of the United States
• 3 Cabinet Members
• 21 Ambassadors
• 32 Members of Congress
• 6 State Governors
• 10 Secretaries of the Navy
• 1 Secretary of the Air Force
• 5 Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
• 4 Vice Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
• 31 Chiefs of Naval Operations
• 9 Commandants of the Marine Corps
• 2 Nobel Prize Winners
• 72 Medal of Honor Recipients
• 56 NASA Astronauts
• 56 Rhodes Scholars
• 34 Marshall Scholars
• 4 Churchill Scholars
• 122 Olmsted Scholars
• 39 Fitzgerald Scholars
• 1 Beyer Scholar
• 43 White House Fellows

Who are some of these? (more…)

In these 169 tech-centric situations, you get an overview of 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: Tips for the Inquiry-based Teacher

So how do you create the inquiry-based classroom? Here’s advice from a few of my e-friend teachers: (more…)

The end of the school year is a time when both students and teachers alike are distracted by thoughts of vacation, sleeping in, and no deadlines. For many, this means the last few weeks of school, learning limps to a grinding halt, but increasingly, teachers use this time to introduce curricular- and standards-aligned activities that “color outside the lines” — step away from the textbook to blend learning with dynamic activities that remind students why they want to be life-long learners. Many of these, educators would love to teach but “just don’t have time for“, even though they align well with broad goals of preparing students for college and career.

If you’re looking for meaningful lessons to wrap up your school year, here are my top picks:

• Digital Passport
• Cool book reports
• Practice keyboarding
• Dig into cyberbullying
• Applied Digital Skills

Digital Passport

Common Sense Media’s award-winning Digital Passport is the gold-standard in teaching digital citizenship to grades 3-5 (or Middle School). This free-to-schools online program mixes videos, games, quizzes, and the challenge of earning badges to teach students the  concepts behind digital citizenship:

• Communication
• Privacy
• Cyber-bullying
• How to search
• Plagiarism

It includes certificates of achievement, badges at the completion of units, and a classroom tracking poster to show how students are progressing.

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As you prepare to regenerate for the next school year, Ask a Tech Teacher contributor, Jenny Wise, has some ideas on strengthening your school community with collaborative projects. Jenny is a homeschooling mom of four children, including her youngest daughter, Anna, who is on the autism spectrum. She and her husband chose to begin home-educating when their oldest was just four years old, embarking on a journey filled with both challenges and meaningful rewards. Along the way, Jenny has navigated the complexities of raising a growing family, supporting her children through life’s difficulties—including the recent loss of her father—and finding strength through faith, resilience, and connection.

Through her platform, Special Home Educator, Jenny shares her family’s homeschooling experiences, offering practical advice, encouragement, and resources for parents considering or navigating homeschooling, especially those raising children with special needs. Her mission is to support and inspire other families by honestly sharing the ups and downs of creating a personalized education at home.”

How Collaborative School Projects Build Stronger Campus Communities

K–12 educators working to integrate technology often face a tough mix of social challenges in schools and uneven digital habits that can quietly weaken day-to-day connection. When engagement slips, classroom tech can feel like another management problem, and student-staff relationships can become transactional instead of trusting. Collaborative school projects offer a practical way to bring students and adults back into shared purpose, giving learning a visible, collective reason to matter. Done well, these experiences strengthen educational engagement and set the conditions for lasting campus community building. (more…)

The National Personal Finance Challenge

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A lot of teacher-authors read both Ask a Tech Teacher and my writer’s blog, WordDreams. In this monthly column, I share a popular post from the past month: 

National Tell A Story Day

National Tell A Story Day is celebrated every year on April 27th. This day is dedicated to the art of storytelling and encourages people to share their stories and connect with others through the power of narrative. This can involve reading a book, listening to a podcast or audiobook, watching a movie or TV show with a great story, or even just having a conversation with someone and sharing personal stories. (more…)

Dear Otto is an occasional column where I answer questions from readers about teaching tech. If you have a question, please add a comment below and I’ll answer it here. For your privacy, I use only first names.

Here’s a great question I got from Barbara, a principal at a local school:

Dear Otto,

May I ask your thoughts on giving grades in Computer Class? I can’t find research on this topic.

..

Anecdotally, grading tech classes is all over the board–whether teachers grade or not, and if they do–how. The short answer to this question is: It depends upon your expectations. If it’s fully integrated into the classroom, treated more as a tool than a ‘special’ class (some call them ‘exploratories’, akin to PE, Spanish, music), then you probably want to hold it rigorously to the grading scale used in the classroom. The projects created will be evidence of learning, more like summative (or formative) assessments of academic work than tech skills.

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This is always a difficult topic in education–how to serve the many varied needs of students. We’ve talked about it often in the past (check out articles here and here). The Ask a Tech Teacher team has a few more ideas for you:

Building Healthier Learning Environments for Diverse Student Needs

Photo by Stephen Andrews on Unsplash

Every student walks into a classroom carrying a different story. Some learn best through visuals, others through conversation, and others through hands-on activities that let them move and explore. When schools recognize this reality and design spaces around it, something shifts. Students feel seen, engagement rises, and the whole environment becomes a place where growth actually happens.

Building healthier learning environments is not about a single policy or a trendy new framework. It is about a sustained commitment to understanding what different learners need and then making thoughtful, practical changes to meet those needs. (more…)