Click to enlarge lesson plan

A Holiday Calendar

Kids love making this calendar. They get to talk about their upcoming vacations and hear what their friends are doing. It’s simple enough for third grade with advanced tools that satisfy a fifth graders growing intellect.

Create a holiday card for Thanksgiving or Christmas in KidPix or another drawing program and reinforce early writing skills while teaching mouse skills, toolbars and tool use: (more…)

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 school bells or the struggling budget of an underfunded program. Now, education can be found anywhere — teaming up with students in Kenya, 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 class research. Learning has no temporal or geographic borders and is available wherever students and teachers find an Internet connection. This vast landscape of resources is offered digitally, often free, but to take that cerebral trek through the online world, children must know how to do it safely, securely, and responsibly. This used to mean limiting access to the Internet, blocking websites, and layering rules upon rules hoping (vainly) to discourage students from using an infinite and fascinating resource. It didn’t work. Best practices now suggest that instead of cocooning students, we teach them to be good digital citizens, confident and competent. Here are eleven projects to teach kids authentically, blended with your regular lessons, the often complicated topic of becoming good digital citizens, knowledgeable about their responsibilities in an Internet world. (more…)

Reinforce fiction writing–characters, plot, setting, climax–with a short story in MS Word or another word processing tool. Then use color, borders, and pictures to enhance the words. Click the images below for larger sizes. Designed for grades 2-7: (more…)

What’s the first thing you think of when I say, Excel? Numbers, right–turning data into information. That is Excel’s ‘killer app’, but the ingenious human brain has come up with another striking use for Excel: Drawing. I spent a long time trying to find a lesson that taught drawing in Excel, finally gave up and created my own” (more…)

Many people in the United States, particularly students, parents and teachers, join forces on Read Across America Day, annually held on March 2nd to coincide with the birthday of Dr. Seuss. Let’s celebrate with this take-off of his writing style, but about technology, reprinted with permission of Gene Zigler at Cornell University:

If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port,
and the bus is interrupted as a very last resort,
and the address of the memory makes your floppy disk abort,
then the socket packet pocket has an error to report.

If your cursor finds a menu item followed by a dash,
and the double-clicking icon puts your window in the trash,
and your data is corrupted 'cause the index doesn't hash,
then your situation's hopeless and your system's gonna crash!

If the label on the cable on the table at your house,
says the network is connected to the button on your mouse,
but your packets want to tunnel on another protocol,
that's repeatedly rejected by the printer down the hall,
and you screen is all distorted by the side effects of gauss,
so your icons in the window are as wavy as a souse,
then you may as well reboot and go out with a bang,
'cause as sure as I'm a poet, the sucker's gonna hang!

When the copy of your floppy's getting sloppy on the disk,
and the microcode instructions cause unnecessary risk,
then you have to flash your memory, and you'll want to RAM your ROM.
Quickly turn off the computer and be sure to tell your mom.

Copyright © Gene Ziegler

Email: [email protected]

--reprinted with permission © 6-28-09

Here are thirteen great reading websites for students K-5: (more…)

Before you start this project, you might want to visit How to KidPix I and How to KidPix II.

There are a lot of graphic art options for youngers. We choose KidPix because it is user friendly, easily understood, and doesn’t clutter up the screen with anything other than what new graphic artists need.

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

You sit down to type, start in on that long project with an imminent deadline, and nothing happens. The cursor blinks… and blinks… and blinks… but goes nowhere.

What do you do?

Before you buy a new keyboard, try a few things:

• Is the keyboard’s power light on? If it is, check your screen. Is there something that’s preventing you from typing? Maybe a dialogue box that wants an answer? If the light isn’t on, continue down this list
• Check the plugs. Maybe the cord that connects the keyboard to the computer is loose or fell out.
• Reboot. Sometimes the stuff in the computer’s boot-up sequence that makes the keyboard work gets lost. Restart your computer so it can re-establish itself.
• Do you eat at your keyboard? Does anyone? I say this next solution hesitantly: Bang on the key. Sometimes keys get food between them. If that doesn’t work, turn the keyboard over and see what falls out.

If none of those work, here are some pretty good suggestions from ChatGPT:

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Three holiday projects to prepare kids to celebrate:

A Holiday Calendar

Kids love making this calendar. They get to talk about their upcoming vacations and hear what their friends are doing. It’s simple enough for third grade with advanced tools that satisfy a fifth graders growing intellect.

Click to enlarge lesson plan (more…)

Over the next weeks, I’ll share ideas that will get you ready for Hour of Code. This includes (links are live on publication day):

1. An Overview of This Week — Dec. 5, 2023
2. Long list of websites by grade — Dec. 6, 2023
3. 9 Unusual Projects— Dec. 7, 2023
4. 5 Unplugged Hour of Code Activities — (this post) Dec. 8, 2023

***

These unplugged activities go back to the roots of coding. The idea started as a clever way to teach students to think critically and problem-solve, show them that deep thinking was fun and problem-solving exhilarating.

I happen to agree. Some of my most gratifying moments are when I accomplish the impossible, unravel a Mobius Strip-like problem, or force myself to do what I’ve never before done. Hour of Code does that every year for oh-so-many students. But here’s my issue: Too often, kids forget that the goal is to practice critical thinking and problem solving, not pursue a career in programming.

Let’s reinforce that goal by stepping away from the digital device, recognize that critical thinking and problem-solving apply to any part of life, even without a computer, iPad, or smartphone in hand. All kids need is their brain which happily, every child carries with them.

Here are some of my favorite unplugged activities:

Crazy Circuits With Squishy Circuits

Ages: MS

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