I’ve been teaching technology for over fifteen years. While student familiarity with this tool has improved, one thing that never varies is the myths surrounding teaching with it. It’s a constant struggle with parents and colleagues who have far more enthusiasm regarding this subject than expertise. Just when I think I’ve got everyone coloring between the lines, things change and I have to get a different paintbrush.

Here are ten of the most common face-palming, head-slapping myths that I have to correct:

Kids are digital natives. They get it.

Let’s look at that term, “digital native”. Techopedia defines it as:

a person born or brought up during the age of digital technology and therefore familiar with computers and the Internet from an early age.

I agree about the familiarity. When these “digital natives” show up in my classroom, they have played with iPads and their parents’ smartphones enough to know how to swipe, tap, squeeze, and shake, but they know none of the nuances required to morph the device from a toy to a productivity tool. This is contrary to popular belief — that being raised with iPads means they understand all about them.

To be fair, kids who use technology regularly at home do have both a baseline set of skills and a fearless enthusiasm for anything with a screen and a power button. We adults envy that confidence, so unlike our abject fear that simply touching the device wrong will break it.

But what kids possess is bravado, not knowledge. Knowledge must be taught.

It’s important to remember that lots of kids aren’t raised with technology. The New York Post reported in 2018 that as many as 5 million schoolage children have no Internet access. The reasons vary, everything from their parents don’t believe in it, can’t afford it, don’t trust it, or have no way to connect to the Internet, but the result is the same: No technology for kids considered to be the “digital native” generation.

(more…)

Hello! Ask a Tech Teacher is a group of tech ed professionals who work together to offer you tech tips, advice, pedagogic discussion, lesson plans, and anything else we can think of to help you integrate tech into your classroom. Our primary focus is to provide technology-in-education-related information for educators–teachers, administrators, homeschoolers, and parents.

Here’s how to get started on our blog:

Read our varied columns

They are numerous and varied, including

• Tech tips
• How-to’s–how to use web tools, software, hardware, more
• Dear Otto–questions from educators on tech questions
• Pedagogy that impacts tech in ed
• Reviews of books, apps, web tools, websites, tech ed products used in your classroom
• Subscriber Specials–monthly discounts (or FREE) on tech ed products
• Humorous life of a tech teacher

Read Hall of Fame articles

(more…)

As a teacher, I’m always looking for children’s books for my students. I’m excited to say I’ve found two I think you’ll like:

• Amazing Matilda — A coming of age of a monarch butterfly; delightful
• Sir Chocolate and the Fondant Five story and cookbook

Amazing Matilda

by Bette Stevens

5/5

Bette Stevens Amazing Matilda: The Tale of a Monarch Butterfly (CreateSpace 2012) is the story of tiny Matilda, a round white creature born from an egg in Nature’s garden with a burning desire to fly.  Without wings, though, she knows that can’t happen. Matilda has no idea that in her life, she will morph from the crawly leaf-bound creature to a gorgeous monarch butterfly. She tells her animal friends about her passion to fly and they offer their stories of growing up as well as sage advice any parent would be envious of. For example, her friend Sparrow suggests:

Another friend suggests:

She is frustrated by this good-natured advice because she has no idea how to do what they suggest:

“Sparrow said that I must have patience and that I must follow my instincts. Now, you say I must have wings. Where can I find all of those things?”

As Matilda grows, she changes from a larva to pupa to a gorgeous winged adult. Each stage in Matilda’s amazing journey is accompanied with wonderful drawings that show her progress, who she meets, and how she changes.

As a result, readers are not just entertained by the story but happily learn about the development of a butterfly. There are lots of cute lines, such as:

“Matilda crunched and munched and lunched, leaf after leaf, day after day.”

If you loved P.D. Eastman’s incomparable book, Are You My Mother, about a baby bird’s search for its mother, you must read this book. If Charlotte’s Web is one of your childhood favorites, I say, Move over Charlotte. Matilda is now here!

This is a short book. In fact. This review is almost longer than the story!

Sir Chocolate and the Fondant Five story and cookbook

by Robbie Cheadle

5/5

Robbie Cheadle’s Sir Chocolate and the Fondant Five story and cookbook (2019) is the next in the author’s delightful series of books that blend children’s stories with themed original recipes. This one is a clever story poem about the disappearance of zoo animals and how Sir Chocolate must figure out what happened.

“One day Sir Chocolate arrived, and not a sound could hear, he called long and loud, but no animals did appear. The animals had vanished, the zoo was empty and still,”

“The monkey is naughty, he likes to have fun, he plays tricks on the others, then away he does run.”

The story is written in the format of a poem and includes great photographs that help readers visualize the action. At the completion of the story, there is a cute poem to introduce an original collection of animal-themed recipes children can complete with their parents. Some of the recipes are:

• Sir Chocolate peppermint caramel pudding
• Cheetah Cheese scones
• Rino Soetkoekies

I have bought several of these books because I love the idea of blending a story with cooking and inspiring kids and parents to spend time together. I also love that Robbie writes these books with her son, Michael, each doing their part in writing, cooking, and photographing. Overall, this is another excellent book in a clever collection that not only entertains but brings parents and kids together.

(more…)

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–Transparent Backgrounds

Category: Images

Sub-category: Keyboarding

Q: When I insert a picture, the background isn’t transparent, so it covers everything behind it. How do I make it see-through?

A: Two ways to fix that problem:

• Select the picture; use the picture toolbar pen.
• If that doesn’t work, select the picture and then press Ctrl +T.

These don’t work in all cases. It depends upon the image file you’re using. I hope it covers your case.

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

(more…)

April 5th-15th:

Buy a K-8 School License

get 5 free print books of the grade level you purchased

(domestic purchase or freight-forwarders only)

Usually, you get one desk copy for each grade level included in your school license. Between April 5th and 15th, get five per grade level. That’s enough for a team to each have one.

To take advantage of this special, purchase from Structured Learning with PayPal or with a PO. Email us (admin at structuredlearning dot net) with your proof of purchase. We’ll send the extra books.

What is a school license?

(more…)

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

Digital Passport

Common Sense Media’s award-winning Digital Passport is the gold-standard in teaching digital citizenship to grades 3-5 (or Middle School). This free-to-schools online program mixes videos, games, quizzes, and the challenge of earning badges to teach students the  concepts behind digital citizenship:

• Communication
• Privacy
• Cyber-bullying
• How to search
• Plagiarism

It includes certificates of achievement, badges at the completion of units, and a classroom tracking poster to show how students are progressing.

(more…)

Music is arguably one of the most important subjects taught in school, yet is often the first to be cut away when budgets fail. Thank you, Jane Sandwood, Ask a Tech Teacher contributor, for discussing some of the online options to make teaching music easier, more effective.

In a recent survey, 93% of Americans said that learning music is an important part of getting a well-rounded education. It is a subject that can also benefit many other areas of learning, including math and languages, by engaging many different hemispheres of the brain. Using technology to improve and expand teaching methods can help students learn about music quicker and give them a variety of different learning techniques.

Innovative Piano Apps

When you are teaching music, having a basic understanding of the layout of a piano keyboard can be extremely useful, especially when it comes to learning music theory. The piano is visually simple, making tones and semitones easily identifiable in a way that is difficult with other instruments, such as the trumpet and saxophone. By understanding the keyboard, you can also teach the concept of sharps and flats in a logical way. There are a number of innovative piano apps on the market that make this possible – you don’t have to have access to an actual piano. In a small classroom this is ideal and students can also learn at home on their tablets and smartphones. Simply Piano and Joy Tunes are two excellent piano apps that provide informative lessons and musical knowledge in a logical, step-by-step way.

Streaming live music

It is impossible to learn about music without listening to it. Using live streaming services in the classroom is an excellent way to expose students to a wide variety of styles and genres from baroque and classical, through to hip-hop, K-pop and dance. Live video streaming has meant that you can bring the largest concerts in the world straight into the classroom. Or you could watch an intimate performance of a jazz trio. One of the biggest benefits of this is to see professional musicians at their best and study the techniques that they are using. You can also use this as a basis for discussion about composition and how music has evolved over the centuries. What would Mozart think of the evolution of live streaming? It certainly would have brought the classical music of the time to the masses, rather than being something that was generally only heard by the aristocracy.

(more…)

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

1. 33 Resources for Read Across America Day
2. Teaching Basic Cybersecurity Measures To Everyday People (For Parents of Digital Natives)
3. How Readilearn grew from one woman’s dream to an exciting education resource
4. How Smart Tech and IoT are Making Educational Spaces More Accessible
5. Humorous Look at What I Learned from my Computer
6. Peer Feedback That Works
7. The Importance of SEL to Education Success
8. April is Financial Literacy Month
9. Why Mastery Based Learning is a Good Option
10. Fake News or Fact? How do you tell?
11.  Ways to Teach Tolerance
12. Solve 50% of Tech Problems with 16 Simple Solutions

(more…)

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

• Cutting Edge Tech to Improve Music Teaching
• 5 Favorite Activities to End the School Year
• 9 Ways to Teach Tolerance
• Fake News or Fact? How do you tell?
• 10 Myths about teaching with tech
• Solve half of tech problems with 16 simple solutions
• Have Google Takeout at your end-of-year party
• What to do when you lose a digital document
• 11 projects to teach digital citizenship
• How to wrap up tech for the school year
• 5 favorite apps for summer learning

(more…)

The Number One reason–according to students–why their computer doesn’t work is… It’s broken. As a teacher, I hear this daily, often followed by the solution, I need a different computer. My students innately think computer problems are something they can’t solve. I asked them what happened in class when I wasn’t there to fix the problem, or at home. I usually got a shrug and one of these responses:

• My classroom teacher can’t fix them.
• My mom/dad can’t fix them.
• The school tech people couldn’t get there fast enough.

Which got me thinking about how these problems that bring learning to a screeching halt really aren’t that complicated They don’t require a Ph.D in engineering or years of experience in IT. So why not teach kids how to troubleshoot their own problems?

I started with a list. Every time a student had a tech problem, I wrote it down and then ticked it off each time it happened. It didn’t take long to determine that there are about sixteen problems that happen often and repetitively. Once students learned how to solve these, they’d be able to fix half of the problems that bring their education to a screeching halt. I spent the school year teaching the solutions authentically as they arose starting in Kindergarten. By the end of 2nd grade, students felt empowered, By the end of 5th grade, they rarely asked for help.

Here’s my list but yours may be different. Include those that arise granularly in your school’s educational endeavor. For example, if you use Macs, right-click issues won’t be as big a deal.

(more…)