Here’s a preview of what’s coming up on Ask a Tech Teacher in May:

1. Teacher Appreciation Gifts (for the geek)
2. 12 Tech Tasks to End the School Year
3. 13 Bits of Wisdom I learned from my Computer (humor)
4. Find Public Domain Images
5. College or Career? Check out These Articles
6. Memorial Day Websites

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Here are the most-read posts for the month of April:

1. Why College Matters for a Successful Career in Tech
2. 15 Websites to Teach Financial Literacy
3. #CoronaVirus–This Week’s Inbox
4. Stem Education in 2020
5. How to Assess Digital Literacy
6. Teaching During #CoronaVirus–An Old Strategy That’s Perfect
7. Teaching During COVID-19
8. Why Earth Day May be the Most Important Event at School
9. 10 Tips for Teaching Remotely
10. 3 Apps That Energize Learning
11. End of Year Activities
12. The Challenge of Connecting in the Age of COVID

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Teacher Appreciation Week: The First Full Week of May

There’s always been something mystically cerebral about people in technical professions like engineering, science, and mathematics. They talk animatedly about plate tectonics, debate the structure of atoms, even smile at the mention of calculus. The teaching profession has our own version of these nerdy individuals, called technology teachers. In your district, you may refer to them as IT specialists, Coordinators for Instructional Technology, Technology Facilitators, Curriculum Specialists, or something else that infers big brains, quick minds, and the ability to talk to digital devices. School lore probably says they can drop a pin through a straw without touching the sides.

When I started teaching K-8 technology, people like me were stuffed in a corner of the building where all other teachers could avoid us unless they had a computer emergency, pretending that what we did was for “some other educator in an alternate dimension”. Simply talking to us often made a colleague feel like a rock, only dumber. When my fellow teachers did seek me out — always to ask for help and rarely to request training — they’d come to my room, laptop in hand, and follow the noise of my fingers flying across the keyboard. It always amazed them I could make eye contact and say “Hi!” without stopping or slowing my typing.

That reticence to ask for help or request training changed about a decade ago when technology swept across the academic landscape like a firestorm:

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One of the most important yet underwhelming international events is coming up the first Thursday in May (in Canada, it’s March 15th). What is it? It’s World Password Day,

Yawn…

I know — words can’t express how tedious most people find passwords, how annoying they are to use, and how likely it is 99% of the world will not celebrate this event. Let me see if I can convince you otherwise. On January 1, 1983, when the Internet was invented, mankind agreed to a binary choice: Invent passwords or forever regret their absence. Without them, there would be no protection for your privacy, your online information, or even your personal identity. Passwords are now required to access websites, banking, email, social media, favorite shopping sites, chat venues like iMessenger, and even certain documents. These annoying, forgettable, intrusive entities are the first line of defense against hackers and for many, their entire defense.  Because so many treat passwords casually, despite all they know about their importance, password theft is one of the fastest growing and most effective crimes. 

While every expert recommends changing your password two-three times a year, no one does that. Do you? I don’t. I’m challenged to remember my password much less remember to change it regularly. As a result, World Password Day came into being:

Annually, on World Password Day, change all of your passwords

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Every month, subscribers to our newsletter get a free/discounted resource to help their tech teaching.

May

Discounts on Select Print Books

Any of these books: $25.99

Kindergarten Technology Curriculum

1st Grade Technology Curriculum

3rd Grade Technology Curriculum

High School Technology Curriculum–Book 1

Ultimate Guide to Keyboarding: Middle School

All of these book are ordered and delivered through Amazon.

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-12 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, CSTA presentation reviewer, freelance journalist on tech ed topics, contributor to NEA Today, and author of the tech thrillers, To Hunt a Sub and Twenty-four Days. You can find her resources at Structured Learning.

In these 169 tech-centric situations, you get an overview of pedagogy—the tech topics most important to your teaching—as well as practical strategies to address most classroom tech situations, how to scaffold these to learning, and where they provide the subtext to daily tech-infused education.

Today’s tip: Parts of a Website

Category: Internet

Share with students the four most important parts of a website (see inset):

Sign up for a new tip each week or buy the entire 169 Real-world Ways to Put Tech into Your Classroom.

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I met Kiana Berkman in this traumatic time of moving teaching home through an invigorating discussion on education and how it’s changing. Kiana and her tutoring agency (Berktree Learning Center) were already ahead of the curve on that. I asked her to share insights on how COVID-19 is affecting her students and their passion for learning. I think you’ll like what she and her husband, Daniel (partner in the tutoring business) have to say:

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There is a popular saying that applies to learning: “you can lead a horse to water, but can’t make him drink.” Any educator knows that you can’t force a student to learn, though that does not stop them from trying anything possible. A teacher could create the most gorgeous lesson plans, and employ all the best known tactics, and there may still be students that don’t want to learn. Yet students are not horses, nor are teachers horse-trainers. They’re both human beings with a latent desire to find and share knowledge. Some students have not accessed this desire yet, and their teachers are trying earnestly to connect with these students on an intellectual level, to release that latent desire. For a teacher, there is no experience more gratifying than helping a student search deep for understanding and watch as they finally discover it!

The Distance Before Distance-Learning

Connecting intellectually with students has always been the challenge addressed to teachers, even before social-distancing. Students face innumerable difficulties in their life that conflicts with regular attendance and consistent attention in the classroom. Many of these conflicts come from a barrage of social challenges, ranging from complex family tensions, lack of accessibility to adequate resources due to financial constraint, or just plain old emotional growing pains. Going to school each day is the most consistent life experience for many students, and teachers try their hardest to make the classroom experience as reliably consistent as possible.

Teachers who have the opportunity to work individually with students get a rare opportunity. Classroom sizes have limited the teacher’s reach to individual students, and standardization has normalized an almost industrial perspective of student pass-rates, as if failing students are merely the result of quality control. The more that students and teachers become statistics, the less that their human qualities are recognized and accessed. Needless to say, society has been widening the distance between students and teachers long before the Corona virus made it mandatory.

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From our files, here are great articles about activities popular at the end of the school year:

5 Favorite Activities to End the School Year

The end of the school year is a time when both students and teachers alike are distracted by thoughts of vacation, sleeping in, and no deadlines. For many, this means, during the last few weeks of school, learning limps to a grinding halt but increasingly, teachers use this time productively to introduce curricular- and standards-aligned activities that “color outside the lines” — step away from the textbook to blend learning with dynamic activities that remind students why they want to be life-long learners. Many of these, educators would love to teach but “just don’t have time for“, even though they align well with broad goals of preparing students for college and career.

If you’re looking for meaningful lessons to wrap up your school year, here are my top picks:

• • • Digital Passport
    • Cool book reports
    • Practice keyboarding
    • Dig into cyberbullying
    • Applied Digital Skills

10 Ways to Wrap Up the School Year

It’s the end of school. Everyone’s tired, including you. What you want for these last few weeks are activities that keep the learning going but in a different way. You want to shake things up so students are excited and motivated and feel interested again.

Change your approach. Provide some games, simulations, student presentations–whatever you don’t normally do in your classroom. If you’re doing PowerPoints, use the last few weeks for presentations.  Make them special–invite teachers. Invite parents. If you never serve food in your lab, do it for these presentations.

Here are my favorite year-end Change-up activities:

• • • 6 Webtools in 6 weeks
    • Class Debate
    • Digital Citizenship review
    • Games and Simulations
    • Genius Hour
    • Group Discussion
    • Khan Academy
    • Presentation Boards
    • Service Learning
    • Write an Ebook

How to Use Tech to Help Graduating Students Find Jobs

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Let’s face it. Teachers juggle an exhausting schedule of parent conferences, administrative tasks, and specialized student needs. They take work home evenings and weekends and often are forced to choose between family and job when it comes to allocating a finite quantity of time over what surely seems to be infinite needs.

The teachers I know want to be more organized, work more efficiently, use available tools to complete tasks faster, and prioritize needs. Knowing this, I look for tools to energize my teaching, do stuff like:

• save time
• accomplish common tasks more quickly 
• make access from digital devices easy and intuitive
• are simple to use so even when my mind is somewhere else (like on the child across the room or the admin peeking in my door), the tool performs flawlessly

Here are three apps I love that meet these qualifications:

Flip

Flip is a freemium discussion app where teachers (or even students) pose a discussion topic (via video) and students respond with a short video. The post may include a recording, an attachment, decorations, or any number of other tools to share their knowledge. Responses show up in a grid format that’s easy to view and fun to read for students and teachers.

Educational applications

This app is a wonderful method of differentiating for varied student needs. Here are just a few ways to use it in your class:

• ask questions about reading material or the lesson plan as a formative assessment to measure student understanding of the topic.
• let students pose questions about material that classmates can answer–a backchannel approach to learning
• have students share a quick video about themselves at the start of a new school year
• extend a classroom discussion so all students can offer their ideas, even the shy members
• brainstorm on a topic to collect lots of ideas before drawing a conclusion

IFTTT  

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In these 169 tech-centric situations, you get an overview of pedagogy—the tech topics most important to your teaching—as well as practical strategies to address most classroom tech situations, how to scaffold these to learning, and where they provide the subtext to daily tech-infused education.

Today’s tip: 7 Netiquette Tips

Category: Internet

Sub-category: MS Office, Keyboarding

Q: What are the most important netiquette tips for students when using the Internet?

A: Here’s a poster:

Sign up for a new tip each week or buy the entire 169 Real-world Ways to Put Tech into Your Classroom.

#digcit

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