Category: Lesson plans

#6: Photoshop for Fifth Graders–Auto-fixes

Before starting on Photoshop lessons for fifth grade and up, teach preparatory basics covered in this lesson plan here (reprinted in part below). If you have a newer version of Photoshop, adapt these instructions to yours:

Open Photoshop. Notice the tool bars at the top. These will change depending upon the tool you choose from the left side. These are the crux of Photoshop. We cover about ten of them in fifth grade. The right-hand tools are used independent of the left-hand tools. They are more project oriented.

    • Click the File Browser tool (top right-ish). It shows you the folders on your computer. From here, you can select the picture you’d like to edit (or use File-open)
    • Select a picture and notice how it displays all data—file name, size, date created, author, copyright and more
    • Click on several tools on the left side and see how the top menu bar changes, offering different choices. Go to Help. Have students view several of the ‘How To’ wizards available. Make sure they try ‘How to paint and draw’, ‘How to print photos’, ‘How to save for other applications’. Then have them select the ‘Help’ files. This takes them to the Adobe CS website and exposes a vast database of questions and answers. Encourage them to explore, engage their critical thinking and active learning skills. Remind them this is where they can find answers independent of teacher assistance.
    • Open a picture of the student’s choice. Show class how to zoom in and out (right-side toolbar). Explain pixels.
      Show students how they can take the paint brush and color just one pixel if they are close enough. This is
      how experts remove ‘red eye’ in photos.
    • Introduce the History toolbar (right side) as an undo feature (like Ctrl+Z in Word). Have students open a new blank canvas and draw on it. Now use the history tool to toggle between the canvas before and after drawing on it by clicking between the original picture and the last action taken (at the bottom of the History list).
    • Have students click through several tools on the left tool bar and show them how the top toolbar changes,
      depending upon the tool selected.
    • Watch the layers tools. You can only paint on the highlighted layer. Notice that the top layer covers all others
    • Show students how to save. The default is as a Photoshop file with a .psd extension. This won’t open in other programs, so show students how to change the file type format to a .jpg, .bmp, .tif or other for use in Word, Publisher, emails or a website.

Once students are comfortable with the Photoshop format, try these easy-to-do auto-fixes.

Auto-fixes is one of the easiest Photoshop skills. Depending upon your version of Photoshop, this may be found in different spots on the menu lists. If you’re familiar with your program, you’ll find it right away:

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Tech Ed Resources–Lesson Plans

I get a lot of questions from readers about what tech ed resources I use in my classroom so I’m taking a few days this summer to review them with you. Some are from members of the Ask a Tech Teacher crew. Others, from tech teachers who work with the same publisher I do. All of them, I’ve found well-suited to the task of scaling and differentiating tech skills for age groups, scaffolding learning year-to-year, taking into account the perspectives and norms of all stakeholders, with appropriate metrics to know learning is organic and granular.

Today: Lesson Plans

There are lots of bundles of lesson plans available–by theme, by software, by topic, by standard. Let me review a few:

Who needs this

These are for the teacher who knows what they want to teach, but needs ideas on how to integrate tech. They are well-suited to classroom teachers as well as tech specialists.

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21st Century Lesson Plan Updated

When I first wrote this article seven years ago, remote teaching was something done on snow days, teaching from home short-changed student learning, and parents were too busy to get involved in their child’s education. So much has changed. Here’s an update on this popular post to reflect what my grad students tell me they now face.

Education today is characterized by rapid technological advancements, globalization, and changing workforce demands. As a result, traditional teaching methods may not prepare students for the challenges and opportunities of the post-High School world.

Key characteristics of teaching today include:

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#75: Tessellations in Excel

Tessellations are repetitive patterns of shapes that cover a surface without overlapping. With Excel (or another spreadsheet program), you can create tessellations by arranging shapes in a grid and using formulas and formatting options to make the patterns visually appealing. Here’s a step-by-step lesson plan to use Excel or another spreadsheet program to teach tessellations:
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3 Fun Tech Classroom Projects for Summer

Here are great ideas from the Ask a Tech Teacher crew on how to keep tech fresh this summer.

3 Fun Ways to Use Tech in the Classroom in the Run-Up to Summer

Summer is right around the corner and as a teacher, you might be in search of creative ways to leverage technology to ensure your classroom remains an entertaining, engaging and educational space.

Fear not, we’ve got you covered! Buckle up and join us on this delightful journey through tech-savvy classrooms – from elementary school to high school – we’ll unlock a treasury of innovative ideas guaranteed to amuse the young minds while also preparing them for their future. Let’s dive in!

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How to Teach Digital Citizenship in Kindergarten and 1st Grade

Understanding how to use the internet has become a cornerstone issue for students. No longer do they complete their research on projects solely in the library. Now, there is a varied landscape of resources available on the internet.

But with wealth of options comes responsibility to use resources properly. As soon as children begin to visit the online world, they need the knowledge to do that safely, securely, responsibly. There are several great programs available to guide students through this process (Common Sense’s Digital Passport, Carnegie CyberAcademyK-8 Digital Citizenship). I’ve collected a long list of resources here:

K-HS Digital Citizenship Resources

Today, we focus on Kindergarten–1st Grade.

Overview/Big Ideas

Students learn how to live in the digital world of internet websites, copy-righted images, and virtual friends who may be something different.

Essential Questions

  • What is a ‘digital citizen’?
  • How is being a citizen of the internet the same/different than my home town?
  • What are the implications of digital citizenship in today’s world?

Objectives and Steps

The objectives of this lesson are (use the lines in front of each item to check them off as completed):

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#32: How to Use Art to Teach Grammar

Here’s a great lesson that uses every child’s innate love of color to learn grammar. All you need is MS Word or Google Docs), a quick introduction to the toolbars and tools, and about 25 minutes to complete. If you’re the tech lab teacher, this gives you a chance to reinforce the grammar lesson the classroom is teaching and teach tech skills students need (click to enlarge):

[caption id="attachment_1026" align="aligncenter" width="450"]COLOR1 From Structured Learning’s Tech Lab Toolkit Volume I[/caption]

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