Category: Classroom management

Summer is for change. Out with routine, in with spontaneity. When you were in high school, that meant relaxing, seeing friends, going to parties. In college, it likely meant a summer job to make the money that paid for college. Now, as an adult, living your future, summer is a time to rejuvenate, to enrich, to build your core–those things that make you who you are.

As a technology teacher or IT coordinator or computer specialist (or all of the above), you need as much time as you can get and more than you have during the school year to stay afloat of what’s happening in the tech ed field. The list of changes is daunting–iPads, 1:1 initiatives, technology integration, podcasts, sharing and publishing student work, embeddable widgets, Common Core State Standards, digital citizenship, keyboarding. If you’re like me, you try to do what you can during the school year, but it’s summer, with its endless days and no schedule that gives you the freedom to let your brain lose.

Here’s my bucket list for this summer:

(more…)

A Parent’s Perspective on education…

Parents do not always see things as we–the teacher–do. It is refreshing to have them voice their thoughts on prickly issues that are part and parcel to educating children.

Here’s Sara Stringer’s opinion. She is a former medical and surgical assistant who now does freelance business consulting. She enjoys blogging and helping others.  In her spare time (translation: the time spent doing what’s most important), she enjoys soaking up the sunshine with her husband and two kids.

Instilling the Importance in Education

As adults we understand what is so important about going to school and doing the best we can. But sometimes kids just don’t see the point. Some of us are natural scholars and others have to be trained to be so. I have heard time and again that grades don’t count until high school anyway. This just isn’t true.

Sure colleges aren’t looking at what your child does in the 2nd grade, but it’s at a young age they will build the habits that they will carry with them the rest of their lives. Slacking in school is just not an option. 

I am not saying that your child has to be the smartest or that learning disabilities aren’t real. The truth is we all have strengths and luckily we are more aware of this than we once were. But a child who has an extremely creative mind still has to learn math. As awful as it may sound, use the subjects they love as collateral for them to do the things that are harder for them.

But possibly what is most important is keeping it honest with your kids. If  s/he loves the nurse at the doctors office because she helps and is really nice and your child wants to be like her when s/he grows up, explain the opportunities in healthcare. Let her know academically what that career requires and without doing well in school, s/he may not get to live that dream.

(more…)

If you’ve been swearing all year to get students online using some of those amazing digital tools. I have some ideas for you. These seven projects will be so much fun, they will eagerly welcome the new school year, hoping you have more toys for them to learn.

The trick with so many of these online sites is: Let students explore. Don’t rush them. Don’t teach them every twist and turn. Don’t expect perfection. Expect inquiry and enthusiasm and self-paced discovery. Let them solve problems as they create.

Here are seven ideas for amazing end-of-year projects that leave students thinking the school year is ending too soon:

End-of-year Multimedia Summative

Students take pictures of each other holding up favorite projects or working on tech skills–humorously, of course. Use these pictures in an Animoto movie to share light-hearted details of their Year in Tech. Open it with a magazine cover of student (created in Big Huge Labs). Accessorize with music, transitions, and text bubbles. Save to class network and load onto the school set of iPads. Students can play these movies on the last day of class as they celebrate the end of school. If you don’t have iPads, gather students in comfortable seating, play a student video as they reflect on another successful year of Tech.

(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 Joe :

I am a tech teacher at my school, and I just got word that the admin want to discuss eliminating “teaching kids to type”. She feels it is not an important skill to teach our “tech savvy” kids. This stems from the idea that many devices have virtual keyboards instead of physical keyboards. While I have my check-list of the reasons why typing is important for kids to learn, I also want to collect ideas and reasons from other experts in the field. Any research based data would be great too.Thanks for your help,

Before I answer Joe, I need to send a shout-out to my son, Sean, in Kuwait, as he defends America’s liberties–HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!

Back to my regularly scheduled post…

Hi Joe

If you teach technology, it’s likely you were thrown into it by your Admin. You used to be a first grade teacher or the science expert or maybe even the librarian and suddenly, you walked into school one day and found out you’d become that tech person down the hall you were always in awe of, the one responsible for classroom computers, programs, curriculum, and everything in between. Now that’s you–the go-to person for tech problems, computer quirks, crashes and freezes, and tech tie-ins for classroom inquiry.

You have no idea where to begin.

Here’s a peek into your future: On that first propitious day, everything will change. Your colleagues will assume you received a data upload of the answers to every techie question. It doesn’t matter that yesterday, you were one of them. Now, you will be on a pedestal, colleague’s necks craned upward as they ask , How do I get the Smartscreen to work? or We need microphones for a lesson I’m starting in three minutes. Can you please-please-please fix them? You will nod your head, smile woodenly, and race to your classroom for the digital manuals (if you’re lucky) or Google for online help.

Let me start by saying: Don’t worry. Really. You’ll learn by doing, just as we teach students. Take a deep breath, engage your brain, and let your brilliance shine.

(more…)

You became a teacher not to pontificate to trusting minds, but to teach children how to succeed as adults. That idealism infused every class in your credential program and only took a slight bump during your student teacher days. That educator, you figured, was a dinosaur. You’d never teach to the test or lecture for forty minutes of a forty-five minute class.

Then you got a job and reality struck. You had lesson plans to get through, standards to assess, and state-wide tests that students must do well on or you’d get the blame. A glance in the mirror said you were becoming that teacher you hated in school. You considered leaving the profession.

Until the inquiry-based classroom arrived where teaching’s goal was not the solution to a problem, but the path followed. It’s what you’d hoped to do long ago when you started–but how do you turn a traditional entrenched classroom into one that’s inquiry-based?

(more…)

It’s hard to run an inquiry-based classroom. Don’t go into this teaching style thinking all you do is ask questions and observe answers. You have to listen with all of your senses, pause and respond to what you heard (not what you wanted to hear), keep your eye on the Big Ideas as you facilitate learning, value everyone’s contribution, be aware of the energy of the class and step in when needed, step aside when required. You aren’t a Teacher, rather a guide. You and the class find your way from question to knowledge together.

Because everyone learns differently.

You don’t use a textbook. Sure, it’s a map, showing you how to get from here to there, but that’s the problem. It dictates how to get ‘there’. For an inquiry-based classroom, you may know where you’re going, but not quite how you’ll get there and that’s a good thing. You are no longer your mother’s teacher who stood in front of rows of students and pointed to the blackboard. You operate well outside your teaching comfort zone as you try out the flipped classroom and the gamification of education and are thrilled with the results.

And then there’s the issue of assessment. What your students have accomplished can’t neatly be summed up by a multiple choice test. When you review what you thought would assess learning (back when you designed the unit), none measure the organic conversations the class had about deep subjects, the risk-taking they engaged in to arrive at answers, the authentic knowledge transfer that popped up independently of your class time. You realize you must open your mind to learning that occurred that you never taught–never saw coming in the weeks you stood amongst your students guiding their education.

Let me digress. I visited the Soviet Union (back when it was one nation) and dropped in on a classroom where students were inculcated with how things must be done. It was a polite, respectful, ordered experience, but without cerebral energy, replete of enthusiasm for the joy of learning, and lacking the wow factor of students independently figuring out how to do something. Seeing the end of that powerful nation, I arrived at different conclusions than the politicians and the economists. I saw a nation starved to death for creativity. Without that ethereal trait, learning didn’t transfer. Without transfer, life required increasingly more scaffolding and prompting until it collapsed in on itself like a hollowed out orange.

(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 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

(more…)

Here are 15 websites I’ve found that do an excellent job of using games to promote critical thinking, problem solving skills, and learning:

• Bridge Builder—learn how to design and test bridges
• Coffee Shop—run a coffee shop business
• iCivics—experience what it means to be part of a democracy
• Lemonade Stand—run a lemonade stand business
• Making History: The Great War—WWI strategy game
• Minecraft (links to MinecraftEdu—fee required)
• Mission US––students role play the American Revolution or the Civil War
• Past/Present—life as an American immigrant in the early 1900’s
• Science simulations—lots of choices at 7^th grade level
• Second Life—simulates just about anything if you can find it
• SimTower—learn how to run a skyscraper as a business

Suggestions for using Bridge Builder:

(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 Roxi in South Africa:

Please could you share with us your opinion on school i-pads for ALL work the learners do. We have many requests from parents wanting to know when we will be switching to i-pads only. There seem to be many schools over the world that actually only use android devices for all their work and have great success in doing so. I have just started to research recently but up to now it seems to me that one cannot do all the academic stuff you need to do on an i-pad as comfortably and as inexpensively as you can do on a computer. Also the paradigm shift and hours of work to apply the curriculum to using androids might prove to be quite a daunting tasks for teachers who not confident with technology.

We have 3 labs at our school – I find that our learners are very much challenged and learn something new every day using laptops and computers. Please could you let me know what your findings are.

This is a question so many schools are struggling with. IPads are the exciting new toy (like laptops were just a few years ago) so schools are taking the issue of whether or not to buy seriously. Consider these Pros and Cons:

IPads have a great purpose in education:

• kids love them, are excited to learn anything that is taught via an iPad. What’s not to like about that as a teacher? Students will practice math facts, read books, happily gamify learning.
• iPads are light-weight, easy to care for, boot up quickly, and are fairly sturdy
• compared to a laptop, iPads are affordable. That leaves lots of money for other uses
• they are easier to care for, have less IT issues, and are not as likely to be ‘messed with’ by students. Plus, a certain amount of the upkeep can be performed easily by teachers
• iPads are great for collaboration–maybe better than laptops (unless you’re a Google Apps school. That could drop this off the list)
• for those parts of education that are media-centric–such as viewing videos, reading books, drawing–it’s hard to beat the iPad.
• iPad battery life is long compared to a laptop. Students don’t have to remember to recharge as often
• iPads have a much higher ease of use and accessibility than laptops. Between instant on, touch screen, not as many choices, they are much simpler to get up to speed on.
• I have to admit, iPads make recording, taking videos and pictures much simpler than if I used the laptop. Find out how important this is to teachers as you make your decision.

But there are downsides:

(more…)