Here are a few of the popular resources teachers are using to

• BTS resources from Microsoft
• BTS resources from Teachers Pay Teachers
• Back to School Survival Kits
• BTS Toolkit from Education.com
• Make a class photo in Pixton EDU

We write about back to school often on Ask a Tech Teacher. Here are some of the past articles I think you’ll like:

1. 3 Apps to Help Brainstorm Next Year’s Lessons
2. 5 FREE Web Tools for a New School Year
3. 5 Tech Ed Tools to Use this Fall
4. 5 Top Ways to Integrate Technology into the New School Year
5. 5 Ways Teachers Can Stay on Top of Technology
6. 5 Ways to Involve Parents in Your Class
7. 6 Tech Best Practices for New Teachers
8. 8 Tech Tools to Get to Know Your Students for Back to School
9. 11 Back-to-school Activities for the First Month of School
10. Back to School–Tech Makes it Easy to Stay On Top of Everything
11. Dear Otto: I need year-long assessments
12. Great Activities for the First Week of School
13. Great Back to School Classroom Activities
14. How to Build Your PLN
15. New School Year? New Tech? I Got You Covered
16. Plan a Memorable Back to School Night
17. Ready To Go Back To School? 7 Fun Lesson Ideas To Start The New Year

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Here are popular online audio resources (click for update to lists):

1. Audacity–free download for Windows, Macs, Linux
2. Audionote – Syncs audio with typed notes so you can hear what was said at any time (app)
3. AudioPal–records a message that is then embeddable into your website or blog
4. Audio Memos Free – The Voice Recorder (free with ads or $0.99 without ads) (app)
5. Beautiful Audio Recorder— record directly from your browser; pretty easy to use with some editing functions
6. DropVox (fee) (app)
7. HablaCloud–record directly from the browser using your Chromebook (must download the the ChromeMP3 Recorder); really simple
8. iTalk Recorder
9. MicNote–audio recorder and notepad; great for Chromebooks (app)
10. Online Voice Recorder–runs on Chromebooks, Macs, PC from your browser; few editing features
11. QuickVoice Recorder (free) (app)
12. SoundCloud–record and publish with Chromebooks using free accounts (app)
13. Soundtrap – the multi-platform, cloud based audio editor has a very decent iOS app.
14. SpeakPipe Voice Recorder–record directly from browser to your local machine, or on iPhone, iPad
15. TwistedWave–a browser-based audio file editor
16. Vocaroo–record yourself, intuitive even for youngers, embeddable; no log-in required
17. Voice Thread–Talk, type, and draw right on the screen (app)

Chromebooks–try these

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Here’s a long list of Language Arts and Word Study websites (check here for updates).

1. Contraction Games
2. Contraction Practice
3. Feast of Homonyms
4. Glossary of Poetry Terms
5. Grammar Gorillas
6. Grammaropolis
7. Punctuation Games
8. Suffix Match

Word Study

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Here are popular online resources to teach about History (click here for updates to the list):

1. Critical Past–original videos from mid-1800’s and forward of amazing events in world history.
2. DocsTeach
3. Hello History–chat with historic figures from the past
4. History Central
5. History for Kids--written by a ‘kid’ in well-chosen words his peers will understand
6. HistoryPin–connect your community with local history
7. Media History Project
8. Pass the Past–educational game to help students prepare for Virginia’s Standard’s of Learning (SOL) exams with a focus on World, United States and Virginia history, civics, and geography. (app)
9. Timelapse–watch the world change over time

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How Digital Study Techniques Improve Exam Preparation

Studying for exams can often feel like this huge, monumental task that causes not only stress but existential anxiety. But it doesn’t have to be this way – yes, the pressure is real, and yes, you may have an immensely demanding study schedule, but with the right tools and strategies, you can turn this daunting challenge into a manageable experience. Maybe even a rewarding one (yes, you read that right).

Here are some of the best digital study techniques that can make your study sessions more effective and help you ace all your exams.

Use Time-Management Tools

Let’s start with the basics: time management. To make sure your every study session is as productive as it can be, you need to learn to manage your time effectively. Meaning, when it’s time to study, you need to make every minute count.

Digital tools like calendar apps like Google Calendar or even Outlook, as well as task managers like Trello or Todoist, can help you organize your study schedule. Likewise, apps like Pomodoro can help you get more focused when studying by splitting your study sessions into 25-minute stretches of work and 5-minute breaks.

Invest in Quality Online Study Resources

There’s no reason to study like a monk – the internet is full of diverse study materials that cater to different learning styles, including yours. Websites like Khan Academy or Quizlet provide access to lectures, practice tests, and flashcards among other things.

For example, with Quizlet, you can create digital flashcards and practice tests tailored to your syllabus. If you’re preparing for a really demanding exam, like the bar exam, online resources like Quimbee offer everything you need to pass it. 

Say you want to prepare effectively for the North Carolina bar test – they have multiple full-length practice MBEs and thousands of MBE practice questions, plus offer personalized feedback from an attorney for practice essays to help you succeed. Of course, all of the course material can be studied from your computer. (more…)

June is National Internet Safety Month, thanks to a resolution passed in 2005 by the U.S. Senate. The goal is to raise awareness about online safety for all, with a special focus on kids ranging from tots to teens.

Here’s a short list of internet cautions I got from an online efriend a few years ago. I reprint it every year because it covers all the basics, avoids boring details, and gives kids (and adults) rules to live by:

Not everything you read online is true

It used to be anything we read in print was true. We could trust newspapers, magazines and books as reliable sources of information. It’s not the same with the web. Since anyone can become published, some of the stuff you’re reading online isn’t true. Even worse, some people are just rewriting stuff they read from other people online, so you might be reading the same false information over and over again. Even Wikipedia isn’t necessarily a reliable source. If you’re researching something online, consider the source. Some poorly written, random web page, isn’t necessarily a good source. However, if you find a .gov or .org site, the information has a better chance of being true. Always look at who owns the website and whether or not they have an agenda before considering whether or not certain information is true.

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A few spring websites, lesson plans, printables, activities:

1. 7 Science Experiments that Teach About Spring
2. Books from Scholastic about Spring
3. Life cycle of a snake
4. Life Cycle Lesson Plans
5. Life Cycle resources
6. Life Cycles
7. Life Cycle Symbaloo
8. Plant life cycle
9. Spring Puzzle
10. Spring Games
11. Spring Vocabulary (video)
12. Spring Word Scramble
13. Spring Word Search
14. What Happens in Spring (video)
15. What Happens in Spring–PS (video)

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Many people in the United States, particularly students, parents and teachers, join forces on Read Across America Day, annually held on March 2nd to coincide with the birthday of Dr. Seuss. Let’s celebrate with this take-off of his writing style, but about technology, reprinted with permission of Gene Zigler at Cornell University:

If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port,
and the bus is interrupted as a very last resort,
and the address of the memory makes your floppy disk abort,
then the socket packet pocket has an error to report.

If your cursor finds a menu item followed by a dash,
and the double-clicking icon puts your window in the trash,
and your data is corrupted 'cause the index doesn't hash,
then your situation's hopeless and your system's gonna crash!

If the label on the cable on the table at your house,
says the network is connected to the button on your mouse,
but your packets want to tunnel on another protocol,
that's repeatedly rejected by the printer down the hall,
and you screen is all distorted by the side effects of gauss,
so your icons in the window are as wavy as a souse,
then you may as well reboot and go out with a bang,
'cause as sure as I'm a poet, the sucker's gonna hang!

When the copy of your floppy's getting sloppy on the disk,
and the microcode instructions cause unnecessary risk,
then you have to flash your memory, and you'll want to RAM your ROM.
Quickly turn off the computer and be sure to tell your mom.

Copyright © Gene Ziegler

Email: [email protected]

--reprinted with permission © 6-28-09

Here are thirteen great reading websites for students K-5: (more…)

If your third grader has to write a report about landforms, try these websites:

1. Continents explained (with humor)
2. Explore the Colorado
3. Geography Games
4. Geography Quiz Game
5. Geologic movies–great and fun
6. Landforms—matching games, etc.
7. Mapping Game
8. Rainforest life—people, etc.
9. Rainforest tree house—virtual game
10. Rainforest—Enchanted Learning
11. Rainforests
12. The Colorado River
13. Virtual tour–undersea  

If any of these website links don’t work, please click here for an update. (more…)

Three holidays are fast-approaching–Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. If you’re a teacher, that means lots of tie-ins to make school festive and relevant to students.

Here are ideas for Halloween projects, lesson plans, websites, and apps (check here for updated links):

Websites and Apps

1. 30-day Halloween fitness challenge
2. Build a Jack-o-lantern (in Google Slides)
3. Carve-a-Pumpkin from Parents magazine – Resolute Digital, LLC (app)
4. Enchanted Learning
5. Halloween games, puzzles–clean, easy to understand website and few ads!
6. Halloween Kahoot Games (video for teachers)
7. Halloween Science
8. Halloween Voice Transformer (app)
9. Make A Zombie – Skunk Brothers GmbH (app)
10. Meddybemps Spooky
11. Pumpkin Patch Games
12. The Kidz Page
13. WordSearch Halloween – AFKSoft (app)

Projects

1. ASCII Art–Computer Art for Everyone (a pumpkin–see inset)
2. Lesson Plan: Halloween letter for grades 2-5
3. Make a Holiday Card
4. A Holiday Card
5. A Holiday flier

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