Category: 4th Grade

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 need a faster way to access menus. Is there one?

A: Yes, and you’ll love it. All PC’s have this unique mouse with both a left and a right button. The left one is for all the normal stuff, but the right one is for the most common activities performed from wherever you are–on the desktop, in a program, whatever.

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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! (more…)

Every Friday, I’ll send you a wonderful website (or more) that my classes and my

parents love. I think you’ll find they’ll be a favorite of your students as they are of mine.

My fourth graders just went through a unit of inquiry on natural disasters and we came up with a pretty good list of resources. I want to share them with you. Please add your own to the comment section:

1. Avalanches
2. Earthquake simulations
3. Earthquakes
4. Earthquakes for Kids
5. Earthquakes–USGS
6. Hurricanes
7. Natural disaster videos
8. Natural disasters—National Geographic
9. Natural disasters–resources
10. Savage Earth
11. Storm Chasing
12. Tornadoes
13. Tornadoes II
14. Tsunamis
15. Volcano Underwater
16. Volcano videos
17. Volcanoes

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This year more than any before, classroom budgets have been cut making it more difficult than ever to equip the education of our children with quality teaching materials. I understand that. I teach K-8. Because of that, I’ve decided to give the lesson plans my publisher sells in the Technology Toolkit (110 Lesson Plans that I use in my classroom to integrate technology into core units of inquiry while insuring a fun, age-appropriate, developmentally-appropriate experience for students) for FREE. To be sure you don’t miss any of these:

I love giving my material away for free. Thankfully, I have a publisher who supports that. If everyone did, we would reach true equity in international education.

Learn Google Earth with the Google Earth Board

Students select from a list of Wonders of the World (or locations put together in conjunction with the classroom teacher). They do brief research on it, locate it using Google Earth and make a short presentation to the class about it.

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This year more than any before, classroom budgets have been cut making it more difficult than ever to equip the education of our children with quality teaching materials. I understand that. I teach K-8. Because of that, I’ve decided to give the lesson plans my publisher sells in the Technology Toolkit (110 Lesson Plans that I use in my classroom to integrate technology into core units of inquiry while insuring a fun, age-appropriate, developmentally-appropriate experience for students) for FREE. To be sure you don’t miss any of these:

• Subscribe to Ask a Tech Teacher by Email
• Sign up to the RSS feed

…and start the week off with a fully-adaptable K-8 lesson that includes step-by-step directions as well as relevant ISTE national standards, tie-ins, extensions, troubleshooting and more. Eventually, you’ll get the entire Technology Toolkit book.

I love giving my material away for free. Thankfully, I have a publisher who supports that. If everyone did, we would reach true equity in international education.

Explore the Wonders of Google Earth

Students create their own tour on Google Earth using locations selected by the classroom teacher. They add the locations to Google Earth, add a fact about it and turn it into a tour.

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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!

When I try to insert a text box or object into Word 2003, a drawing canvas appears around it. It gets in the way–everything has to wrap around it and it leaves too much white space, even when I resize it.

My solution: Get rid of it. It’s huge and designed to allow you to place multiple shapes that are moved and resized as one. Most of us are only interested in inserting one text box, so it is cumbersome, annoying and useless. To turn the drawing canvas off:

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This year more than any before, classroom budgets have been cut making it more difficult than ever to equip the education of our children with quality teaching materials. I understand that. I teach K-8. Because of that, I’ve decided to give the lesson plans my publisher sells in the Technology Toolkit (110 Lesson Plans that I use in my classroom to integrate technology into core units of inquiry while insuring a fun, age-appropriate, developmentally-appropriate experience for students) for FREE. To be sure you don’t miss any of these:

• Subscribe to Ask a Tech Teacher by Email
• Sign up to the RSS feed

…and start each week off with a fully-adaptable K-8 lesson that includes step-by-step directions as well as relevant ISTE national standards, tie-ins, extensions, troubleshooting and more. Eventually, you’ll get the entire Technology Toolkit book. If you can’t wait, you can purchase the curriculum here.

I love giving my material away for free. Thankfully, I have a publisher who supports that. If everyone did, we would reach true equity in international education.

Intro to Google Earth

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This year more than any before, classroom budgets have been cut making it more difficult than ever to equip the education of our children with quality teaching materials. I understand that. I teach K-8. Because of that, I’ve decided to give the lesson plans my publisher sells in the Technology Toolkit (110 Lesson Plans that I use in my classroom to integrate technology into core units of inquiry while ensuring a fun, age-appropriate, developmentally-appropriate experience for students) for FREE. To be sure you don’t miss any of these:

• Subscribe to Ask a Tech Teacher by Email
• Sign up to the RSS feed

…and start each week off with a fully-adaptable K-8 lesson that includes step-by-step directions as well as relevant ISTE national standards, tie-ins, extensions, troubleshooting and more. Eventually, you’ll get the entire Technology Toolkit book. If you can’t wait, you can purchase the curriculum here.

I love giving my material away for free. Thankfully, I have a publisher who supports that. If everyone did, we would reach true equity in international education.

Sponge Activities for Vocabulary Building

There are lots of great online vocabulary websites to help kids learn high-frequency and Dolch words. I’ll share five of them. Maybe you have some to share with the group. (more…)

Online resources for great worldwide museums. Take one lesson to introduce students to these six art sites (five to ten minutes on each) and then allow them to revisit when they have a few minutes at the end of a class projects, unit, before lunch, etc.
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There’s a secret to teaching kids how to use the computer. It’s called ‘delegate’. I don’t mean sluff off the teaching to aides or parents. Here, I’m referring toempowering students to be their own problem-solvers, then expect it of them. Here’s how you do it:

• Let them know that computers aren’t difficult. Aw, come on. I see your scrunched faces. Here’s the ugly little truth: Computers are only hard to learn if kids are told they’re hard to learn. Don’t mention it. Compare keyboarding to piano–a skill lots of kids feel good about–or another one that relates to your particular group. Remove the fear. They might not believe you, but you’re the teacher so they’ll give you a chance
• Teach them how to do the twenty most common problems they’ll face on a computer (more on that later). Expect them to know these–do pop quizzes if that’s your teaching style). Post them on the walls. Do a Problem-solving Board (click the link for details on that–it works well in my classes). Remind them if they know these, they’ll have 70% less problems (that’s true, too) than the kids who don’t know how to solve these. If they raise their hand and ask for help, play Socrates and force them to think through the answer. Sometimes I point to the wall. Sometimes I ask the class for help (without saying who needs assistance. Embarrassing students is counter-productive). Pick the way that works for you. The only solution you can’t employ is to do it for them
• Teach students keyboard shortcuts. Does that sound like an odd suggestion? It isn’t. Students learn in different ways. Some are best with menus, ribbons and mouse clicks. Some like the easy and speed of the keyboard. Give them that choice. If they know both ways, they’ll pick the one that works best for them. Once they know these, they’ll be twice as likely to remember one of the two methods of doing the skill like exit a program (Alt+F4) or print (Ctrl+P).

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