Category: 4th Grade
Weekend Website #133: Embeddable Puzzles
It’s the time of year when children are looking for entertainment and parents want something fun to keep their cerebral fires burning. Entertainment-cerebra–that’s not an oxymoron. Check this website on States, and then check out the other topics available on Quiz Factor.
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:
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- Advocate and practice safe, legal, and responsible use of information and technology
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- 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
#47: Tour the World—with a PowerPoint Slideshow
Use the research done for #40. Use a guidesheet to lay out what is on each slides, i.e., a cover, table of contents, what makes a geographic locations amazing (discuss this as a group), a map, and three locations from #40. Teach PowerPoint skills such as adding slides and text and pictures, animation, transitions, auto-forward, personalized backgrounds, adding music to multiple slides. Third graders may not be able to complete all skills.
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Dear Otto: How do I prevent printer pandemonium?
Do you have a tech question?[/caption]
Dear Otto is an occasional column where I answer questions I get from readers about teaching tech. If you have a question, please complete the form below and I’ll answer it here. For your privacy, I use only first names.
Here’s a great question I got from Cheryl in Indiana:
It seems that my well-structured primary tech classrooms fall apart when it is time to print. Some students just keep pushing Print & end up printing multiple copies, 25 students scramble to the printer to collect their printouts. Total chaos! Any ideas?
I have a two-step solution to that:
- Teach students how to print. I take lesson time to show them the print box, the varied spots where things can be changed, and how to do it right. After that, I know it’s not lack of knowledge causing problems
- I don’t let them go to the printer. First, it gets to be the lab water cooler–everyone hanging out back there, chatting, while they wait for the stuff to print. That’s no good. Second, I’ can’t monitor that everything printed is appropriate if they’re taking papers from the printer. Third, if they print more than one, I want to chat with them about it.
- Consistent offenders aren’t allowed to print. I’ll email it to parents/teacher, but they lose the privilege
Dear Otto: Any Ideas for Tech Ed Benchmark Assessments?
Dear Otto is an occasional column where I answer questions I get from readers about teaching tech. If you have a question, please complete the form below and I’ll answer it here. For your privacy, I use only first names.
Here’s a great question I got from Lisa and Tamma:
My district is asking us to create assessments. I was wondering what you have included in them and how/when you administer them. Thanks!
Hi Lisa and Tamma
Dear Otto: How Can Students Keep Track of Passwords?
Do you have a tech question?[/caption]
Dear Otto is an occasional column where I answer questions I get from readers about teaching tech. If you have a question, please complete the form below and I’ll answer it here. For your privacy, I use only first names.
Here’s a great question I got from Kaylene in Ohio:
How do you teach students to keep track of the many usernames and passwords they will need when using all of the great web 2.0 tools? I personally use an encrypted Excel file, but what do you suggest for students in K-8?
Hi Kaylene
Great question. Here’s what I do for K-5: I have a binder by each station in the computer lab with a template for recording UN and PW for all accounts. This isn’t private (anyone could look in the binders), but most accounts don’t require any degree of security. The process is to get students used to tracking log-ins, that they have a source to check when they need a log-in. I do ask that each UN and PW be different so they acclimate to that and figure out a logic to accomplishing that which works for them. For example, they might come up with a sentence where they use the first letter of each word as the PW with some combination of number/symbol appended to the front or back.
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!
5 Favorite Websites for K-5
One of the biggest problems I face as a technology teacher is the wealth of information out there for teachers, parents, students. I try to stay on top of it (as you who subscribe to my 
Weekend Websites know), but there is so much more than I can cover with one-a-week.
So, this week, I’m giving you 5. You will love these. I find myself sharing them with colleagues in answer to their tech ed needs so decided it was time to share them with you also:
BrainPop offers a great group of games for science, math, social studies, and health–all easy to maneuver, age-appropriate and fun learning. The gamification of education is alive and well at BrainPop
This is a gorgeous eight-minute tour across America via biplane. It took my classes by storm.
Filled with Free video tutorials and interactive materials for your students. This is a website and an app with tutorials, over 10,000 lessons, ‘knowledge maps’ for chemistry and biology, even a how-to for creating video lessons.
