Category: Reviews
Weekend Website 40: NORAD Santa
Common Core: A Lesson Plan for STEM (on Bridges)
Here’s a free lesson plan from the newest Ask a Tech Teacher book, How to Achieve Common Core with Tech–the Math Strand. This covers K-8, 114 Standards, and has 20 projects.
BTW, the lines at the front of each step are to check off the skill–track progress in case you don’t complete it in one class period. Feel free to print out for your classroom use:
Essential Question
How can I use practical and theoretical knowledge to solve a problem?
Summary
Students virtually construct a viable, affordable bridge and submit it (if age limits met) to a national competition. They use theoretical knowledge in a practical application. When done, they reflect on importance of both theoretical and practical in problem solving.
This lesson contributes to the rigor of your school’s math program, defined by Common Core: … Use of technology differentiates for student learning styles by providing an alternative method of achieving conceptual understanding, procedural skill and fluency, and applying to authentic circumstances.
By the end of this unit, middle school students will review all eight Standards for Mathematical Procedures, 3 W and 3 RST standards, as well as embrace an authentic experience in problem solving and the practical applications of math knowledge.
Big Idea
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Weekend Website #135: Samorost
Drop by every Friday to discover what wonderful website my classes and parents loved this week. I think you’ll find they’ll be a favorite of yours as they are of mine.
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Book Review: Common Core Lesson Plans
THE KEY TO ALIGNING YOUR K-5 CLASS WITH COMMON CORE STATE STANDARDS
30 Projects that integrate technology into core lesson plans
The Key to Aligning Your K-5 Class with Common Core State Standards is for classroom teachers, technology integration specialists and lab professionals, as a resource for aligning your technology program with the Common Core State Standards now implemented in forty-six states. You will find it a foundational tool for scaffolding technology into the areas of math, language, reading, writing, speaking and listening as is required in CCSS. Overall, they are authentic approaches to student-centered learning, asking the student to be a risk-taker in his/her educational goals and the teacher to act as guide. The essential questions are open-ended and conversations organic and inquiry-driven, ultimately asking students to take responsibility for the process of their own learning.
It can be used as a resource book, to provide exciting new lessons that seamlessly blend technology with lesson plans and involve students in the many new tools available to enrich their educational experiences, or a road map, plotting the vertical planning and differentiated instruction fundamental to CCSS goals.
There are thirty lessons, five per grade level. Each includes:
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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:
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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
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Weekend Website 123: Google Gravity
Inquiring minds don’t always need a purpose. Fun is often inspiration enough. Check out this clever rendition of Google Search:
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Weekend Website #116: Google Street View Locations
Every Friday, I share a website (or app) that I’ve heard about, checked into, been excited to use. This one covers anything on your mind and uses the quintessentially-popular Google Earth. I know you’re going to enjoy this review.
[caption id="attachment_9802" align="aligncenter" width="614"] Google Street View goes inside locations[/caption]Age:
3rd-8th
Topic:
Academic
Address:
Review:
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Be Featured on Ask a Tech Teacher
I get thousands of visitors a day–three-quarters of a million since I started. The most common reason why you-all drop by is for resources. I have lots of them–leson plans, tips and tricks–but one area I have little of is tech ed book reviews. I thought we could build a community library, right here on Ask a Tech Teacher!
I’m looking for:
- reviews of technology-in-education books or ebooks
- essays on tech ed topics
- White papers on tech ed topics
- Education pedagogy
Here are a few examples:
- Disrupting Class
- Endangered Minds: Why Children Don’t Think And What We Can Do About It
- My Evernote
- Savvy Cyberkids at Home
- Second Grade Technology–32 Lessons –by Structured Learning
- Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
These will be collected and offered as a resource to readers on my blog under Great Books.
If you’ve written a review and posted it on your blog, please send the link to me. I will provide a link back to your blog and we’ll develop a Book Group right here on Ask a Tech Teacher.
I look forward to hearing from you!
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Weekend Website #115: Minecraft
Every week, I share a website that inspired my students. This one is a blockbuster as far as student interest, risk-taking, enthusiasm.
[caption id="attachment_10086" align="aligncenter" width="614"] Click to visit website and play movie about Minecraft[/caption]Age:
Grades 3-8 (or younger, or not)
Topic:
Problem-solving, critical thinking, building