Category: Websites

Here are five great holiday websites that will put the seasonal spirit into your teaching. They are education-infused, lively, and appeal to varied learning styles. If you’re a tech teacher, you’ll want to use all of them. If you’re a classroom teacher, click through and find the ones right for your age group:

• 12 Days of Christmas
• Gift Hunt
• NORAD Santa
• Penguin Show
• Reindeer Orchestra

12 Days of Christmas
Middle School and High School

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Need a few websites to fill in sponge time? Here are Holiday websites that will keep students busy while teaching them:

1. 12 Days of Christmas
2. Christmas—history—fun video
3. Gift Hunt–updated version of 12 Days of Christmas–just as much fun
4. Holiday collection
5. Holiday Crossword
6. Holiday Elf Games
7. Holiday hangman
8. Holiday Hangman II
9. Holiday music
10. Holiday music II–sing along with the music–the site provides the words
11. Holiday—Design Gingerbread House
12. Holiday—find the word
13. Holiday—match game
14. Holiday—Math Facts
15. Holiday—North Pole Academy
16. Holidays–various
17. NORAD Santa
18. Penguin Show
19. Reindeer Orchestra
20. Santa Tracker

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Every week, I share a website that inspired my students. This one is perfect for Hour of Code. Make yourself a hero for an hour:

Age:

Grades 3-8 (or younger, or older)

Topic:

Problem-solving, critical thinking, building

Address:

Minecraft

Review:

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Need a few websites and apps to fill in sponge time? Here are Thanksgiving sites that will keep students busy and still teach them:

1. Canadian Thanksgiving
2. Online/Offline Thanksgiving activities
3. Plimoth Plantation–a field trip of a Pilgrim’s life. Included on this real-life site is a video of the Pilgrim’s crossing to the New World.
4. Primary Games Thanksgiving Apps
5. Starfall–Silly Turkey
6. Thanksgiving Coloring Book App
7. Thanksgiving edu-websites–CybraryMan
8. Thanksgiving Games
9. Thanksgiving games–Quia
10. Thanksgiving information–history, more
11. Thanksgiving Jigsaw
12. Thanksgiving Jigsaw II
13. Thanksgiving Lesson Plans
14. Thanksgiving puzzle–by Digipuzzle
15. Thanksgiving Tic-tac-toe
16. Thanksgiving video–Brainpop
17. Thanksgiving Wordsearch
18. The First Thanksgiving

If you’re looking for projects, you’ll find two on Ask a Tech Teacher:

• A Holiday Card
• A Holiday Flier

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Here’s a short list of fun Halloween websites for your students. Enjoy!

Websites:

1. Ben & Jerry
2. Billy Bear’s
3. Carving Pumpkins
4. Enchanted Learning
5. Halloween games, puzzles–clean, easy to understand website and few ads!
6. Halloween ghost stories
7. Meddybemps Spooky
8. Pumpkin Toss
9. Signing Halloween–a video
10. Skelton Park
11. The Kidz Page

Apps:

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Here’s a long list of websites to address Digital Citizenship topics you teach in your classroom:

Avatars

to promote digital privacy

1. Avatar 1–a monster
2. Avatar 2–Lego you
3. Avatar 3–animal
4. Tellagami–a video avatar
5. Vokis
6. With comics, via Pixton — fee-based

Copyrights and Digital Law

1. Copyrights–BrainPop video
2. Copyright and Fair Use–Common Sense Media video
3. Copyright Law Explained (fun video, informative, thorough)
4. Copyright law curriculum
5. Creative Commons
6. Take the mystery out of copyrights–by the Library of Congress
7. Videos on licensing, copyrights, more (from Creative Commons)

Curriculum

1. Common Sense media
2. Ask a Tech Teacher

Cyberbullying

1. Bullying—Watch this (videos)
2. Cyberbullying video
3. Cyber-bullying–5th grade
4. Cyber-bullying—BrainPop
5. Cyberbullying—what is it
6. Think Time: How Does Cyberbullying Affect You

DigCit (General)

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Here’s along list of websites that focus on math automaticity for the K-5 classroom. I’ve broken it down by grade level, but you can decide if your second graders are precocious enough to try the websites for grades 3-5:

K

• K Math Skills
• Math Videos (not practice, but fun to watch)
• Money flashcards
• Numbers

1^st

• First Grade math skills
• Money flashcards
• Numbers

2^nd

• Math Flashcards
• Math Practice Test
• Mental Math
• More Quick Math
• Multiplication Tables
• Quick Math
• Quick Math II
• Quick Math—by level (more…)

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: Some websites/blogs are confusing. I click through way too many options to get anything done. What’s with that?

A: I hadn’t put a lot of thought to this until I read a discussion on one of my teacher forums about the oft-debunked-and-oft-followed 3-click rule made popular by Web designer Jeffrey Zeldman in his book, “Taking Your Talent to the Web.”. This claims ‘that no product or piece of content should ever be more than three clicks away from your Web site’s main page’.

This is true with not just programming a website, but teaching tech to students. During my fifteen years of teaching tech, I’ve discovered if I keep the geeky stuff to a max of 2-3 steps, students remember it, embrace it, and use it. More than three steps, I hear the sound of eyes glazing over.

Whether you agree with the ‘rule’ or not, it remains a good idea to make information easy and quick to find. Readers have a short attention span. Same is true of students.

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Here’s a great lesson plan with three activities well-suited to the discussion of architecture and design in 1st grade:

Review

Students complete three projects in two weeks to aid understanding of architecture, design, and three-dimensional thinking. They’ll experiment with spatially laying out a three-dimensional structure on a two-dimensional paper. When completed, they’ll discuss with neighbors while practicing good listening skills learned in class.

Start with a discussion of design. This includes size, shape, texture, proportion, scale, mass and color. We will apply these to rooms, buildings, and neighborhoods. Encourage students to think and analyze critically as they engage in learning.

In figures below, ask students which are two- or three-dimensions? How do they know?

[gallery ids="50170,50171,50172,50173,50164"]

Design the Classroom

Visit Classroom Architect and demo how to design the classroom with drag-and-drop pieces (see figures below). Take suggestions from class on layout. Students must think about where tables and storage are relative to other items. This is an active learning lesson that encourages visual thinking. Develop a sample based on class input and show how to make corrections if necessary.

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Labor Day is annually held on the first Monday of September (this year, September 2nd). It was originally organized to celebrate various labor associations’ strengths of and contributions to the United States economy. It is largely a day of rest in modern times. Many people mark Labor Day as the end of the summer season and a last chance to make trips or hold outdoor events.

Labor Day is a US holiday dedicated to workers across the country. The public holiday always falls on the first Monday in September. The first federal observation of the holiday occurred in 1894 however the first Labor Day observed in a state was in Oregon in 1887.

Today, I honor the warrior, his job to fight for America’s way of life, invisibly and heroically, across the globe.

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Jacqui Murray has been teaching K-8 technology for 15 years. She is the editor of a K-8 technology curriculum, K-8 keyboard curriculum, K-8 Digital Citizenship curriculum, and creator of dozens of technology training books that integrate technology into education. She is webmaster for six blogs, CSG Master Teacher, an Amazon Vine Voice book reviewer, Editorial Review Board member for Journal for Computing Teachers, CAEP reviewer, CSTA presentation reviewer, freelance journalist on tech ed topics, a tech ed columnist for Examiner.com, and a weekly contributor to TeachHUB.