Category: 1st
Do you like Online Training?
I have just started working with an online teacher training group called Curriculum Study Group. We offer online training to teachers via Google Hangouts, YouTube, instant feedback, and lots of collaborative learning. I am very excited to be part of this venture…
…but I must confess, before I joined, I wondered if teachers would be comfortable hanging out with like-minded professionals for an hour a week? Well, my good friend Amy over at CSG sent me this survey run by Project Tomorrow, a nonprofit group based in Irvine, Calif (my backyard). It seems they had the same question so did a poll. Here are the results:
What’s the take-away: Yes, across the board, principals and teachers are comfortable with online training.
Book Review: K-8 Keyboard Curriculum
K-8 Keyboard Curriculum: The Essential Guide to Teaching Keyboarding in 45 Minutes a Week
You may think it impossible to find an effective keyboarding curriculum for the skimpy forty-five minutes a week you can devote to keyboarding. You teach what you can, but it always seems to be the same lessons—hands on home row, good posture, eyes on the copy. You wonder if it’s making a difference, or if it matters.
Yes, it does and there is a way. It requires a plan, faithfully executed, with your eye relentlessly on the goal, but if you commit, it works. In this book, The Essential Guide to Teaching Keyboarding in 45 Minutes a Week: a K-8 Curriculum, I’ll share a unique keyboarding curriculum for K-8 that I’ve seen work on thousands of students. The book includes:
- A summary of the literature
- Answers to the most-asked questions like ‘Can youngers learn to keyboard—and should they?’
- The importance of the teacher to early keyboarders
The K-8 curriculum includes a lot more variety than keyboard exercises on installed software. Here’s a rundown of the pieces used:
Book Review: K-8 Digital Citizenship Curriculum
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 the school bell’s chimes or the struggling budget of an underfunded program.
Now, education can be found anywhere, by collaborating with students in Kenya or 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 a class project. Learning has no temporal or geographic borders, available 24/7 from wherever students and teachers find an internet connection.
This vast landscape of resources is available digitally, freely, and equitably, but before children begin the cerebral trek through the online world, they must learn to do it safely, securely, and responsibly. This conversation used to focus on limiting access to the internet, blocking websites, and layering rules upon rules hoping (vainly) that students would be discouraged from using this infinite and fascinating resource.
It didn’t work.
Best practices now suggest that instead of protecting students, we teach them to be good digital citizens, confident and competent in the use of the internet.
This 70-page text (click for a peek inside) is your guide to what our children must know at what age to thrive in the community called the internet. It’s a roadmap for blending all the pieces into a cohesive, effective student-directed cyber-learning experience that accomplishes ISTE’s general goals to:
-
- Advocate and practice safe, legal, and responsible use of information and technology
-
- Exhibit a positive attitude toward using technology that supports collaboration, learning, and productivity
- Demonstrate personal responsibility for lifelong learning
- Exhibit leadership for digital citizenship
24 Keyboarding Websites for Summer
Did you promise that this summer, your child would learn to type with more than two fingers, keep his eyes off his hands, and learn to like keyboarding? Your teachers consider that important–Common Core requires
students type between 1-3 pages at a sitting without giving up from boredom, frustration, fatigue. To do that requires a knowledge of where the keys are on the keyb oard and what habits faciliate speedy, accurate typing.
It doesn’t have to be rote drills, drudgery. There are a lot of options that make it fun. Here are 32. I think they’ll find a few they like:
- ABCYa–Keyboard challenge—grade level
- Alphabet rain game
- Barracuda game
- Big Brown Bear
- Bubbles game
- Dance Mat Typing
- Finger jig practice game
- Free typing tutor
- GoodTyping.com
- Keyboard practice—quick start
- Keyboarding practice
- Keyboarding—lessons
- Keyboarding—more lessons
- Keyboarding—must sign up, but free
- Keyboarding—quick start
- Keybr–Online practice
- NitroTyping
- Online typing lessons — more
- Touch Typing Progressive Program
- TuxTyping
- Typing Club
- Typing Defense—fun word practice
- TypingTest.com
- TypingWeb.com—a graduated course
Tech Tip #49: The Fifteen Second Slideshow
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 kindergarten and first grade students are too young to create their own slideshows for Open House (or any parent day) and I’m just too busy. What’s an easy way to display their work digitally for parents that also involves the students in the preparation?
A: I had this problem last year. I simply ran out of time trying to prepare so I offloaded the work onto the students. I was worried it would be too much, but it turned into a wonderful experience for students and parents alike. Here’s all you do:
Weekend Website #127: Brown Bear Typing
Every week, I share a website that inspired my students. Here’s one that I’ve found effective in… Here’s a great website to answer that question.
Tech Tip #46: The Easiest Way to Explain Right and Left to (Little) Kids
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 teach kindergarten. They don’t always understand the difference between left and right.
A: There are two times kids get confused about right and left when I’m teaching:
- right mouse button
- clicking in front of a spot (to edit, use the tab key, format–stuff like that)
I’ve found an easy way to clarify. Here’s an example:
Weekend Website #125: Starfall Math
Every week, I share a website that inspired my students. Here’s one you may have missed. Starfall is a lot more than reading…
Easter Sites For Your Students
Many Christians celebrate Jesus Christ’s resurrection on Easter Sunday. The Easter date depends on the ecclesiastical approximation of the March equinox. This year, it’s March 31st. Here are some websites your students will love:
- Easter Color Me to print or import to drawing program
- Easter games II
- Easter games III
- Easter poems and songs (to play online)
- Easter Puppies–video
- Easter songs for kids
- Easter Word hunt (Starfall)
Great Websites–Stories
Check out our latest addition of great websites–Stories. There are 45 websites for grades K-5, everything from audio to international to write your own. Enjoy!
