Category: Classroom management

Today I have a guest post from Sam Melton. Sam is in his final year at Winthrop University studying Middle Level Education and will graduate with his teaching credential in May, 2014. Please feel free to connect with Sam at sammeltontalks at yahoo.com.

I asked Sam to share with us what he sees as the future tech tools for tomorrow’s classroom. Here are his thoughts:

I’m wrapping up my time in school and soon, I’ll be a certified teacher in my own classroom. Throughout my education, there’s been one integral aspect of my success: technology. I’m always online researching, using apps to stay organized, keeping my thoughts in check with a blog and using a tablet to get online from anywhere.

Those apps, devices and technical knowledge are something I’ll transition to use from being a student in a classroom to being a teacher in one.

Technology has been creeping into classrooms for years, and is now something teachers should be prepared to use – and be prepared for their students to use, too. There are certain technology apps and tools that future teachers like myself should become familiar with before they are in the classroom.

(more…)

It’s easy to confuse ‘using technology’ with digital tools. Your school bought iPads and passed them out to all classes. Some of your colleagues think having students read in this tablet format means they’re integrating technology into their curriculum. Kudos for a good start, but next, they need to use the tablets to differentiate for student learning styles, enrich learning materials, and turn students into life-long learners.

That’s harder than it sounds. Technology hasn’t been around long enough to beget standards that work for everyone (not withstanding ISTE’s herculean efforts), the set-in-stone of settled science. Truth, that will never happen. Technology tools populate like an out-of-control rabbit. Or bacteria in a culture. Every time you turn around, there’s another favorite tools some teacher swears has turned her students into geniuses and her class into a model of efficiency. After fifteen years of teaching technology, chatting with colleagues, and experimenting, I can assure you there is no magic wand like that. What there is is a teacher not afraid to try new ways, test them out in a classroom environment, toss what doesn’t work and share the rest. Her/his success doesn’t come without lots of failure and mistakes, widgets that sounded good but were too complicated or non-intuitive for a 21st century classroom.

Which of these nine mistakes do you make? Then, see how to fix them:

(more…)

Dear Otto is an occasional column where I answer questions I get from readers about teaching tech. I am always educated by the questions readers have. I find them fascinating, and wanted to share the most popular ones with you from 2013:

1. Dear Otto: What are Common Core keyboarding standards?
2. Dear Otto: How do I teach keyboarding in a 25-minute class?
3. Dear Otto: What do I do with students who ‘get’ tech really fast?
4. Dear Otto: Use Tech to Differentiate Lessons?

(more…)

I include lots of links for my readers to places that will help them integrate technology into education. They cover websites on lesson plans, math, keyboarding, classroom management, cloud computer, digital books, teacher resources, free tech resources, and more. On any given day, I generate on average 830 of these ‘click throughs’. Which links my readers select tells me a lot about the type of information they’re looking for.

Here’s a list of the top ten sites visitors selected from my blog:

1. itunes.apple.com–last year the top click-through was a website. This year, teachers are looking for apps for iPads.
2. libraryspot.com–there’s a big uptick in using the internet for research this year over last year
3. Structuredlearning.net–lots of teachers are finding books/ebooks here for integrating tech into the classroom
4. abcya.com–a popular site with classroom edutainment
5. factmonster.com–more research for class projects
6. kids.nationalgeographic.com–still more research. I’m seeing a trend
7. bigbrownbear.co.uk/keyboard/–One of my favorite sites to teach K/1 how to type
8. brainpop.com–great collection of videos and games on almost every topic
9. teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Kali-Delamagente-The-Tech-Teacher–my Teacher Pay Teachers store. Come Visit!
10. eepurl.com/gakDr--this is the sign up link for one of my newsletters.

(more…)

Kids love tablets (spelled I-P-A-D). It doesn’t matter that they won’t run most software, don’t have USB ports, have no flash, allow very little storage, and can’t print (with ease) because kids aren’t using them for that. In fact, according to a report from the UK’s MailOnline, most kids use tablets to play games, watch videos, and access the internet.

Which is different from how students (as a subset of ‘kids’) use tablets. When querying children about the education use of tablets, here’s what Nielsen found:

[from Nielsen’s quarterly “Connected Devices Report” and similar to the Ofcom Children and Parents: Media Usage and Attitudes Report though the MUAR finds 97% of children use tablets for school.]

As a tech teacher, I was surprised at the high email ranking. Conventional wisdom says kids don’t email, preferring texting, yet here, it’s the #2 most popular use. At the very least, I would have put it behind ‘reading books’, an activity probably at the cusp of why kids received the tablet: Parents want to encourage reading.

(more…)

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 Linda:

We all have that student who just doesn’t get what we’re saying. We want to blame him/her–may even start that direction–but then, many of us, we pause to listen. What’s s/he saying–something about not understanding the problem? What’s s/he mean? What if we [fill in the blank with something outside the box]?

Here’s a 12-year old who happily and successfully sees the world as no one else does. And the world is a better place because he does. His message:

Stop learning and start thinking.

Solve problems your own way.

(more…)

Common Core notes:

New technologies have broadened and expanded the role that speaking and listening play in acquiring and sharing knowledge and have tightened their link to other forms of communication. Digital texts confront students with the potential for continually updated content and dynamically changing combinations of words, graphics, images, hyperlinks, and embedded video and audio.

The underlying theme can’t be ignored by teachers any longer: A 21^st Century learner requires technologic proficiency. Proof enough is that Common Core summative assessments will be completed online—only possible if students use technology as comfortably as paper and pencil to demonstrate knowledge.

But how do you do that if you aren’t a ‘techie’, a ‘geek’, if you barely use a Smartphone much less the myriad of online tools. I have ten strategies that will make your teaching life easier, bump up your effectiveness with students, and save time complying with Common Core standards. Try these ten tech uses. Watch what a difference they make:

(more…)

It used to be simple to post grades. Add up test scores and see what the student earned. Very defensible. Everyone understood.

It’s not that way anymore. Here are the factors I consider when I’m posting grades:

• Does s/he remember skills from prior lessons as they complete current lessons?
• Does s/he show evidence of learning by using tech class knowledge in classroom or home?
• Does s/he participate in class discussions?
• Does s/he complete daily goals (a project, visit a website, watch a tutorial, etc.)?
• Does s/he save to their network folder?

(more…)

When I was editing the 8th grade tech curriculum, I got wowed by ‘infographics’–a visual approach to communicating information. Yes, I have known for a long time about ‘infographics’, but haven’t really paused to considered their strength. This dove-tailed nicely when I started getting questions from readers like, “What is a ‘flipped classroom’?”

Here–take a look at this one from Cool Infographics (and click the link–they have some great visual stuff over there):

(more…)