Category: Websites

macros

Playful Learning–What a Great Idea

playPlayful Learning (Parents’ Choice Gold Medal website) is a well-done, professional-looking website that  offers advice, projects, and visual images touting the benefits of education through play. The reader is drawn into the child-centered imagery and strong basic colors, wanting everything on offer so their child’s play areas can look and work as described.

Let’s back up a moment. Play as the vehicle of education is not a revolutionary idea. Pedagogy has long recommended ‘play’ as a superior teacher for youngers–

Play is the great synthesizing, integrating, and developing force in childhood and adolescence. –PsycINFO Database Record 2012 APA,

The play of children is not recreation; it means earnest work. Play is the purest intellectual production of the human being, in this stage … for the whole man is visible in them, in his finest capacities, in his innermost being.~ Friedrich Froebel

In general, research shows strong links between creative play and language, physical, cognitive, and social development. Play is a healthy, essential part of childhood. —Department of Education, Newfoundland Labrador

Young children learn the most important things not by being told but by constructing knowledge for themselves in interaction with the physical world and with other children – and the way they do this is by playing.” –Jones, E., & Reynolds, G.  “The play’s the thing: Teachers’ roles in children’s play”

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2015

10 Top Click-throughs from 2014

top tenI include lots of links for my readers to sites that will help them integrate technology into education. They cover websites on lesson plans, math, keyboarding, classroom management, cloud computer, digital books, teacher resources, free tech resources, and more. On any given day, a third of visitors to Ask a Tech Teacher click through to one of these resources. Which links my readers select tells me a lot about the type of information they’re looking for.

Here’s a list of the top ten sites visitors selected from my blog:

  1. Structuredlearning.net–lots of teachers are finding books/ebooks here for integrating tech into the classroom. This is where I make mine available.
  2. abcya.com–a popular site with classroom edutainment
  3. itunes.apple.com–last year the top click-through was a website. This year, teachers are looking for apps for iPads.
  4. libraryspot.com–there’s a big uptick in using the internet for research this year over last year
  5. kids.nationalgeographic.com–still more research. I’m seeing a trend
  6. bigbrownbear.co.uk/keyboard/–One of my favorite sites to teach K/1 how to type
  7. DanceMat Typing
  8. Fact Monster–for research
  9. Typing Web
  10. World Almanac for Kids

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16 Thanksgiving Sites For Your Students

tagul thanksgiving2Need a few websites 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. Starfall–Silly Turkey
  5. Thanksgiving edu-websites–CybraryMan
  6. Thanksgiving Games
  7. Thanksgiving games–Quia
  8. Thanksgiving information–history, moretagul thanksgiving
  9. Thanksgiving Jigsaw
  10. Thanksgiving Jigsaw II
  11. Thanksgiving Lesson Plans
  12. Thanksgiving puzzle–by Digipuzzle
  13. Thanksgiving Tic-tac-toe
  14. Thanksgiving video–Brainpop
  15. Thanksgiving Wordsearch

Jacqui Murray has been teaching K-18 technology for 30 years. She is the editor/author of over a hundred tech ed resources including a K-8 technology curriculum, K-8 keyboard curriculum, K-8 Digital Citizenship curriculum. She is an adjunct professor in tech ed, Master Teacher, webmaster for four blogs, an Amazon Vine Voice reviewer, CAEP reviewer, CSTA presentation reviewer, freelance journalist on tech ed topics, contributor to NEA Today and TeachHUB, and author of the tech thrillers, To Hunt a Sub and Twenty-four Days. You can find her resources at Structured Learning.

updated 12-23-18

5 Tools To Shake up the New Year

One thing we can all agree on is that there are tons of free tech tools available that enrich learning.  I can’t keep up with them. I belong to several Tech Teacher forums, FB groups, G+ Communities, and every day I find more great tools I can’t wait to use in my classroom.  Like many of you, this summer I attended several professional development conferences (ISTE, Teachers Pay Teachers, WordPress, Summer PD)–that bumped my total up to about a gazillion.

With school just around the corner, I needed to figure out which tools should be immediately integrated into my teaching. This was difficult, but I sorted, shook, noodled, experimented, sifted, and whittled my list down based on tools that differentiate for student needs, simplify the teacher’s job, and entice students to use technology in learning. Here are my top five:

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