Many (most?) states now administer yearly assessments online. If students haven’t used online testing tools before, this can be a daunting task. Having computer devices as optional education tools is a massive difference from requiring students to use them for graded assessments. This can be intimidating for both students and teachers.

The good news: It doesn’t take as much time and practice as you might think to prepare. What it does require is a techie mindset, the acceptance that technology is part of the daily landscape, that it be integrated into assignments, practice, modeling, homework, assessments, projects, portfolios, grading rubrics, expectations.

There are ways to get students in shape that won’t take much out of your already-packed day.

“The future of education will be shaped by technology and educators who use technology effectively will stand out from the crowd.” – Dr. Anil Singhal

Here are strategies that will make your teaching life easier, bump up your effectiveness with students, save time complying with state standards, and prepare students effectively. As you’re in grade-level teams, planning lessons for next year, include these. They will add spice to classes, build flexible learning paths, and contribute to sustainable, transformative learning. Once you start using tech in the classroom as a tool (not a separate activity), you will find students self-selecting it when given a choice, coming up with their own ways to make tech today’s adaptive answer:

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I get a lot of questions from readers about what tech ed resources I use in my classroom so I’m taking a few days this summer to review them with you. Some are from members of the Ask a Tech Teacher crew. Others, from tech teachers who work with the same publisher I do. All of them, I’ve found well-suited to the task of scaling and differentiating tech skills for age groups, scaffolding learning year-to-year, taking into account the perspectives and norms of all stakeholders, with appropriate metrics to know learning is organic and granular.

Today: Lesson Plans

There are lots of bundles of lesson plans available–by theme, by software, by topic, by standard. Let me review a few:

• STEM Lesson Plans
• Coding Lesson Plans
• By Grade Level
• 30 K-5 Common Core-aligned lessons
• 110 lesson plans–integrate tech into different grades, subjects, by difficulty level, and call out higher-order thinking skills.
• singles–for as low as $.99 each. Genius Hour, Google Apps, Khan Academy, Robotics, STEM, Coding, and more.
• Holiday projects–16 lesson plans themed to holidays and keep students in the spirit while learning new tools.

Who needs this

These are for the teacher who knows what they want to teach, but need ideas on how to integrate tech. They are well-suited to classroom teachers as well as tech specialists.

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

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The best rules for teaching aren’t found in a textbook, a teacher training class, or even the advice of older colleagues. It’s found inside of you, in your gut, your instinct, your intuition. Here are ten rules no one will teach you, but will get you through the darkest times in your teaching career:

1. I HODL which is nothing like Yodel. It’s an acronym for Hold On for Dear Life. If I hang a sign around my neck saying, I’m HODLing. Leave me alone, everyone knows to avoid me.
2. When coloring between the lines doesn’t work, I try a bigger paintbrush. What I mean is, when those multitudinous rules about genre writing bog my story down, it’s time to try breaking the rules.
3. If something that used to work no longer does, change it. My husband used to kill flies by snapping them with his fingers. Then he got old(er), tired of his miss rate, and switched to a dishrag.
4. Every once in a while, I sit in a hard chair and reflect. I don’t do this one often.
5. I pick carefully who I trust about my teaching. That’s also my attitude toward boneless fish.
6. For difficult days, I don my I Am a Teacher t-shirt, take half a baby aspirin, and howl at the detractors.
7. Don’t get tricked into measuring what you can’t define. Know the problem. Investigate solutions. Ask for help if necessary.
8. Take advantage of the most important of human freedoms: You have the ability to choose your attitude in a given set of circumstances. If others are frustrated, you can be positive, others angry, you can smile.
9. Figure out your North star and stick with it. It doesn’t move. Don’t pretend it does.
10. Help students see around corners.

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Here are the most-read posts last month

1. Need a New Job? Here’s What You Do
2. Photoshop Skills–Custom Shapes
3. Tech Tip #88: Use Shortkeys with Students
4. Tech Ed Resources–K-8 Keyboard Curriculum
5. Is Online Schooling a Good Fit for Teens?
6. USA Moon Landing July 20 1969
7. Photoshop for Fifth Graders–Change Backgrounds

Here’s a preview of what’s coming up (more…)

Here are the basic skills fifth graders can learn in Photoshop if you’ve prepared them with basic computer skills. I’ve provided links but they aren’t live until publication:

• Photoshop artwork–live
• Photoshop actions–live
• Photoshop basics #5 (this lesson)
• Photoshop filter and rendering tools
• Photoshop starters–auto-correct with the auto-correction — quick fixes that make a photo look cleaner #6
• Photoshop crop tool–with the lasso and the magic wand #7
• Photoshop clone tool– within a picture and to another picture #8
• Photoshop–change the background–live
• Photoshop tools–add custom shapes–live
• Photoshop–start with Word –live (a little dated but still useful)

Get started

Open Photoshop. What you see will vary depending upon your Photoshop version. Adapt the lesson to what your school offers.

Notice the tool bars at the top. These will change depending upon the tool you choose from the left side. These are the crux of Photoshop. Cover about ten in fifth grade. The rest will have to wait. The right-hand tools are used independent of the left-hand tools. They are more project oriented.

• Click the File Browser tool. It shows you the folders on your computer. From here, you can select the picture you’d like to edit (or use File-open) (more…)

I posted this four years ago, but turned comments off. What I didn’t connect at that time was that a similar post on my old WordPress blog had dozens of comments on an ongoing basis. People like talking about their typing speed! So, I am reposting this with comments open. Be sure to visit the old post (almost 15 years old) for some amazing comments from keyboard enthusiasts

I get this question a lot from readers and purchasers of my technology curriculum: How fast should kids type? What about Kindergartners? When are their brains mature enough to understand speed and accuracy?

When I reviewed the literature on this subject, it is all over the place. Some say third grade, some leave it until sixth. I say–decide based on your own set of students. Me, I’ve come to conclusions that fit my particular K-8 students. Their demographics include:

• private school
• parents support emphasis on keyboarding
• most have computers at home; actually, most have their own computer at home
• students are willing to practice keyboarding in class and submit homework that is oriented to keyboarding

Based on this set of students, here’s what I require:

Kindergarten

An introduction. We use Type to Learn Jr. We also use Brown Bear Typing as a challenge for students, an activity that moves them into another of their choice. I focus on:

• • posture
  • hand position (hands on the keyboard)

They tolerate TTL Jr. and love Brown Bear. Often, even when they’ve achieved a score that allows them to move on, they continue. When it’s free choice time, they often select this program.

I also use a variety of games to support learning the most common keys on the keyboard–enter, spacebar, backspace, delete, etc.

First Grade

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Here are the basic skills fifth graders can learn in Photoshop if you’ve prepared them with basic computer skills. I’ve provided links but they aren’t live until publication:

1. Photoshop artwork–already live
2. Photoshop actions–already live
3. Photoshop basics #5
4. Photoshop filter and rendering tools
5. Photoshop starters–auto-correct with the auto-correction — quick fixes that make a photo look cleaner #6
6. Photoshop crop tool–with the lasso and the magic wand #7
7. Photoshop clone tool– within a picture and to another picture #8
8. Photoshop–change the background (put yourself at the Eiffel Tower or on Hoover Dam)–published here
9. Photoshop tools–add custom shapes–already live
10. Photoshop–start with Word (a little dated but still useful)

Get Started

This one you already know how to do if you’ve been following along through the book. Because it is a must-have in a school environment, I’m going to step it out for you.

• Have your child or students open a photo of themselves in Photoshop
• Use the cropping tools learned here to crop themselves out of the background
• Go to select-inverse to select the individual rather than the background
• Edit-copy (this will copy the student’s cropped picture)
• Open a picture of the background they’ve chosen
• Edit and then paste the picture they cropped into the background

Imagine, putting your students in the historic events you study together, in the landforms they learn about in science, or the natural math that appears in nature. Now, with this Photoshop lesson, that’s all possible.

PS–If you don’t have Photoshop, try the free download called GIMP.

–from 55 Technology Projects for the Digital Classroom. 

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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, freelance journalist on tech ed topics, and author of the tech thrillers, To Hunt a Sub and Twenty-four Days. You can find her resources at Structured Learning.

On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong was the first man to place foot on the moon. Commemorate that this year with an exciting collection of websites and apps that take your students to the Moon (click for updates to the list):

1. Apollo 11: Countdown to Launch via Google Earth
2. Apollo 11 VR
3. Google Moon–see the Moon in 3D with your Google Earth app
4. How we are going to the Moon–video
5. If the Moon Were Only One Pixel…
6. JFK Challenge — takes kids to the Apollo 11
7. NASA’s Musical Playlist–88 million viewers of 188 songs
8. Moon Phase Simulation Viewed from Earth and Space (interactive, elementary and middle school)—and associated Lesson Plan
9. Observing the Moon in the Sky (interactive, elementary)
10. Moonrise to Moonset (media gallery, elementary)

A wonderful tribute to this day–a poem by Denise Finn (reprinted with permission)–if you enjoy this, check out Denise’s blog: (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. I share those with you. They’re always brief and always focused. Enjoy!

Q: My taskbar disappeared. What do I do?

A: Push the flying windows key (it’s located between Ctrl and Alt on the bottom left of your keyboard). That brings up the start button

Need more?

Windows 11

• Step 1: Check Taskbar Settings to see if the taskbar is set to auto-hide.

Open Settings by pressing “Windows + I” on your keyboard. Navigate to “Personalization” and then click on “Taskbar.” Ensure the “Automatically hide the taskbar” option is turned off. 

• Step 2: Restart Windows

Press “Ctrl + Shift + Esc” to open Task Manager. Look for “Windows Explorer” in the list, click on it, and then click “Restart” at the bottom right. This action will refresh the taskbar, bringing it back if it was unresponsive.

Windows 10

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