Every Friday, I share a website (or app) that I’ve heard about, checked into, and become excited to use. This one is tools available for teachers to help their students maneuver the often-tricky machinations of the internet.

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What is an iPad?

It’s a brand name—not a product—for a tablet computer designed, developed and marketed by Apple and used primarily for audio-visual media such as books, games, periodicals, movies, music, and web content. It has a keyboard, but most people maneuver with finger taps and swipes.

It does less than laptops and computers, but what it does is spectacular. Such as it’s instantly on—no booting up. If you use your computer’s boot-up time to take a break, that’s over. And unlike smartphones, it’s big enough to check email, watch videos, read a book. It isn’t a phone, but can make addicting video phone calls through Skype. It isn’t a camera, but takes quick and easy great pictures.

What it doesn’t do well is run software—MS Office, Apple software (though it can with the right apps).

Software isn’t the purpose of an iPad. Don’t mistake this new device for a laptop-light. If you’re planning to introduce iPads to your Lower School/Elementary-age students, here’s a lesson plan for you:

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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!

Q: I have a video on my classroom computer I want to use on my iPad. How do I do that?

A: There are ways to do that–email it to your iPad, open through DropBox–but those have issues:

• emailing requires extra steps and time you may not have
• many email accounts limit you to <10MB. What if a video file is larger?
• DropBox has limited space
• like email, you must put materials in DropBox to access them from there (In know–Duh, but that requires planning. What if your inquiry-driven class popped onto this topic on the fly?)

If you’re like me, anything to make your worker faster, easier, less steps is a good thing.

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There are 25 problems that stump students most often when they use the computer. They’re questions like, ‘My audio doesn’t work’ and ‘My screen is frozen’. How about ‘I deleted *** and didn’t mean to’? Does that sound familiar? These 25 problems account for 70% of the issues that make students unable to use the computer for whatever they’re trying to accomplish. If they can solve these, they are much more independent and the tech experience much more authentic.

I’ve updated this from my last year’s list. Did I miss any?

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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 Ganasini:

I want to create a literary e-zine for my small, rural elementary school. What is the best program or venue–blog, wiki, or something else? I am looking more for a way to display work. In the past, I’ve done hard copy photocopied “newspapers” for students to publish their stories, reports, art work, book and movie reviews etc. I would like to try to publish something similar on the computer. One idea is that each student contributor could have a bi-line with their photo and then links to their various entries, or else I could organize it with links to student fiction, for instance. I think it would only go out to our small school community. Thanks so much for your input and direction! It is much appreciated.

This is especially important because of the requirements for publishing in the CCSS K-5 education standards and ISTE technology standards. There are a lot of solutions, I think, that could work for you:

• Adobe Professional–collect pdfs into a bundle and publish online with a cover, table of contents, or whatever else you’d like to include. I did this one year for a 4th grade poetry book. Students designed the cover. I added a TofC with each student poem, and then each poem. It can be displayed as a book or a rotating selection or a variety of different ways. And, it didn’t take long to create
• Issuu–collect all student work into a traditional magazine. Just upload and Issuu does most of the heavy lifting.
• Glogster–create a poster which includes each student name and is linked to their work..
• Check this link at Cool Tools for School. Scroll down to ‘publish’ (it’s under ‘presentation tools’) and see nine more options like Youblisher and Scribd.

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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 Laurie:

There are a lot of teachers trying to keep up with tech ed changes despite older labs and computer set-ups. Some are lucky with 1:1 set-ups and classroom iPads, but lots of teachers make do with what they have.

Like you, I don’t have a smartscreen. Our IT guys attached my computer to a screen (probably like your Epson) so I can display samples and rubrics, and I have Splashtop on my iPad so I can get back to my screen from anywhere in the classroom (albeit, it’s a bit clunky) so that-all helps. I have students come up to the screen and point or share–a way to involve them more in the lessons. At times, I let them use my computer–when I flip the class and have them teaching a skill. This is quite popular.

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19 posters to Decorate Your Technology Lab is for new and experienced tech teachers to remind students of the basics of computer use. It includes keyboard tips, website usage, mouse control, how to solve common problems, parts of the computer, email netiquette, how to search, volunteer guidelines and more. As a Bonus: There’s a sample structure for a 45-minute tech class.

This is a must-have for new teachers, a time-saver for everyone.

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There’s one good outcome from the Yahoo breach (a hacker defeated Yahoo’s firewalls, stole 450,000 accounts, and proceeded to post the user names and passwords onlines). You know all that dire advice about using numbers and letters and symbols in passwords? Turns out the Yahoo users didn’t. A peek at their twenty favorite passwords makes it clear once more that the biggest impediment to computer security remains human users:

1. 123456′ used by 1666 (0.38%)
2. ‘password’ used by 780 (0.18%)
3. welcome’ used by 436 (0.1%)
4. ‘ninja’ used by 333 (0.08%)
5. ‘abc123’ used by 250 (0.06%)
6. ‘123456789’ used by 222 (0.05%)
7. ‘12345678’ used by 208 (0.05%)
8. ‘sunshine’ used by 205 (0.05%)
9. ‘princess’ used by 202 (0.05%)
10. ‘qwerty’ used by 172 (0.04%)

If you’re thinking this looks familiar, you’re right. Here are the top 25 from 2011:

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I know summer just started. You’re relaxing, reading the stack of books that collected on your nightstand, planting the flowers you were supposed to take care of in April, but, well, teaching came first.

Bookmark this page and when you’re ready to look at some teacherly resources, come back. I’ve collected 89 great resources to make your job easier–everything from grading rubrics, online quizzes, audio books, utilities, to puzzle creators and more.

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As a working technology teacher, I get hundreds of questions from parents about their home computers and from students about 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 don’t know why, but I never remember the date. Unfortunately, I have to type it often at school/work/home. Is there a shortcut for people like me?

A: Who does remember the date? No problem. Just push Shift+Alt+D. That puts the current date into any Word document (use Ctrl+; in Excel).

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