Here are ten of the top image tips according to Ask a Tech Teacher readers:

• Photos For Class–Robust, Student-safe with built in citations
• Quick Search for Plagiarized Images
• What Online Images are Free?
• Where Can I Find Kid-safe Images?
• 5 Image Apps for your Classroom
• My Picture’s a TIFF and the Program Needs a JPG
• Wrap Text Around an Image
• How to Move Pics Around in Documents
• Easy Photo Editing in MS Word
• Images (curated list by category)

Click for a lesson plan on Image Copyright Do’s and Don’ts.

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When I teach professional development classes, by far the topic that surprises teachers the most is the legal use of online images. And they’re not alone. On my blog, in educator forums, and in the virtual meetings I moderate, there’s lots of confusion about what can be grabbed for free from online sites and what must be cited with a linkback, credit, author’s name, public domain reference, or even as little as an email from the creator giving you permission. When I receive guest posts that include pictures, many contributors tell me the photo can be used because they include the linkback.

Not always true. In fact, the answer to the question…

“What online images can I use?”

typically starts with…

It depends…

Luckily, teaching it to K-8 students is simpler because most of them haven’t yet established the bad habits or misinformation we as adults operate under. But, to try to teach this topic in a thirty-minute set-aside dug out of the daily class inquiry is a prescription for failure. The only way to communicate the proper use of online images is exactly the way you teach kids not to take items from a store shelves just because they think they can get away with it: Say it often, in different ways, with the buy-in of stakeholders, and with logical consequence. Discuss online images with students every time it comes up in their online activities.

There are five topics to be reviewed when exploring the use of online images:

• digital privacy
• copyrights
• digital law and plagiarism
• hoaxes
• writing with graphics

Here are suggestions on how to teach these to your students.

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Just an update for you on Haiku Deck Deck Classroom. The special introductory price (with access for a teacher and up to 150 students) will soon end. This is different from the traditional Haiku Deck slideshow tool which has become a staple in many lesson plans. Haiku Deck Classroom includes:

• All the features of Haiku Deck Pro for a teacher and his/her students: Unlimited presentation creation, advanced privacy settings, offline viewing and printing, YouTube video embedding, and more.
• Classroom Management Dashboard: Easily add/remove courses and students to your account.
• New Course Galleries: Students can submit Haiku Decks for teacher review
• Optional Google Classroom Integration & Google Sign in: For schools using Google Classroom, import courses and student lists from Google Classroom

Also offered is special bulk pricing for departments, schools, or districts. Question? Email [email protected].

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I love hearing from colleagues about tools they discover that make a difference in their classroom. Last week, I got an email from new efriend, Dr. Robert Cleary, an adjunct instructor for various business courses at several universities. In addition, Dr. Cleary is a key member of the campus learning center at Keiser University, an active member of the Miami-Dade school system STEM advisory board, as well as a member of the Doral Chamber of Commerce. Here’s his feedback on a new presentation creator he found  for the 2016-17 school year:

I think I may have stumbled upon one of the web’s best kept secrets for teachers and educators – it’s called mysimpleshow. This online video making tool is a great solution for incorporating mixed media into lessons as well as supporting the flipped classrooms ideology. mysimpleshow’s possibilities are endless, allowing teachers to enhance their presentations with relevant video content, explain common classroom procedures at the click of a button, assign more enjoyable homework and in-class activities, or communicate messages to parents and other staff. Below is an example video:

https://youtu.be/r2vHYJsQP_A

What really attracts me to mysimpleshow instead of other video creation tools is how quick and easy it is to use. Knowing the life of a teacher, extra preparation time is a luxury most of us don’t normally have. The tool provides clear guidelines in each of their many storyline templates, and the Explainer Engine technology automatically suggests images for the most important text, which are called keywords. Storyline templates for educators range in subject areas, so all teachers can utilize the tool. Below are just a few storyline templates:

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I recently got a question from a reader asking how the lessons in my K-8 curriculum supported Dr. Norman Webb’s Depth of Knowledge philosophy — an integral concept to her school’s mission. It got me thinking about lesson plans in general — how far we’ve come from lecture-test-move on. Now, exemplary teachers focus on blending learning into the student’s life knowledge base with the goal of building happy, productive adults. There are several concepts that address this reform in teaching (such as Art Costa’s Habits of Mind, Bloom’s Taxonomy, the Hess Cognitive Rigor Matrix, or the tech-oriented SAMR Model). Depth of Knowledge (DoK) is arguably the most thorough with its four concise levels, each supported by a collection of words that contribute to delivering content at that level. Like the SAMR Model, involvement grows with each level from a basic recall of knowledge to the ability to use that information in new circumstances.

Here are general details about Webb’s DoK:

• With Webb’s DoK chart, not only can you figure out how to teach a subject more deeply and expect students to demonstrate complex understanding, but teachers can evaluate where students are in the four-step process starting at the rote application of knowledge to its synthesization from various sources that is then transferred to other uses.
• Level One: Identify details in the text, specific facts that result in a ‘right’ answer. Tasks that require Level One thinking include words like memorize, state, and recognize.
• Level Two: Show a relationship between an idea in the text and other events. ‘How’ and ‘why’ are good questions to bump an activity into Level Two. Tasks that require Level Two thinking include words like compare, infer, and interpret.
• Level Three: Analyze and draw conclusions about the text. Support conclusions with details. Use a voice that is appropriate to the purpose, task, and audience. Tasks that require Level Three thinking include words like hypothesize, differentiate, and investigate.
• Level Four: Extend conclusions and analysis (which might be the result of Level three) to new situations. Use other sources to analyze and draw conclusions. Tasks that require Level Four thinking include words like connect, analyze, and prove.
• As Dr. Karin Hess says, DoK is not about difficulty, it’s about complexity. Level  One may be difficult for some students, but it isn’t complex. They may memorize a calculus formula (which I’ll stipulate is beyond difficult), but it doesn’t represent rigorous thinking. That happens in Level Four’s application to the real world.
• For DoK’s Level One and Two, there are usually right answers. That’s not true in Levels Three and Four.There, it’s about higher-order thinking.
• DoK is not a taxonomy (like Bloom’s). Rather, it itemizes ways students interact with knowledge.
• To work at a Level Three or Four requires foundation. Show students how to accomplish Level One and Two goals first.

With that in mind, here are seven steps to transform your current lesson plan into one aligned with DoK guidelines:

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I read recently that 70% of millennials get their news from Facebook. Really? Isn’t Facebook a place to share personal information, stay in touch with friends and families, post pictures of weddings and birthdays? So why do students turn to it for news? And then, not two days later, I heard Twitter has reclassified their app as a news  purveyor rather than a social media device. Once again: Who gets news from Twitter? Apparently a lot of adults. No surprise news shows are littered with references to listener’s tweets and presidential candidates break stories via their Twitter stream.

One more stat — which may explain the whole social-media-as-news-trend — and then I’ll connect these dots: 60% of people don’t trust traditional news sources. That’s newspapers, evening news, and anything considered ‘mainstream media’. They prefer blogs, Twitter, and Facebook.

So when it comes to research, are you still directing kids toward your grandmother’s resources — encyclopedias, reference books, and museums? No doubt, these are excellent sources, but if students aren’t motivated by them, they won’t get a lot out of them. I have a list of eight research sites that walk the line between stodgy (textbooks) and out-there (Twitter and Facebook), designed by their developers with an eye toward enticing students in and then keeping their interest. It’s notable that most are free, but include advertising. The exception is BrainPOP — there are no ads, but it requires a hefty annual fee:

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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”

..

Ask a Tech Teacher contributor, Nick Garvin, founder of StackUp, has these thoughts on why both learning and playing matter for teachers:

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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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Here are thirteen of the top tips for teachers new to technology, according to Ask a Tech Teacher readers:

• Top 10 Reasons to Sign Up for Summer Learning with Ask a Tech Teacher
• 169 Real-World Ways to Put Tech into Your Class–NOW
• 6 Tech Best Practices for New Teachers
• New to technology? Follow my classes
• How Teachers Learn About New Edtech Products (Round-up)
• New Tech Teacher? I Understand You
• 5 Must-have Skills for New Tech Teachers Plus One Extra
• 5 Ways Teachers Can Stay on Top of Technology
• 10 Tips for Teachers who Struggle with Technology
• Best-Kept Secrets for Teaching Tech to Kids
• A Day in the Life of a Tech Teacher
• How to Talk to a Tech Teacher
• 18 Things Teachers Do Before 8am

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I repost this article every September because I get so many requests for mouse resources for those youngest keyboarders. Enjoy!

One of the most important pre-keyboarding skills is how to use the mouse. The mouse hold is not intuitive and if learned wrong, becomes a habit that’s difficult to break. Here are some images to assist you in setting up your newest computer aficionados:

Here are 16 websites students will enjoy, including 3 for adults new to computers:

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