As a working technology teacher, I get hundreds of questions from parents about their home computers, how to do stuff, how to solve problems. Each week, I’ll share one of those with you. They’re always brief and always focused. Enjoy!

Q: My school updated to Office 2010 and many parents are still on 2003. What can I do so they can read my stuff?

A: When you save the doc, go to File-save as, and select file type 97-2003

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Woah–I’ve been nominated for a Bammy Award in the category of School Technologist by the Academy of Education Arts and Sciences. Here’s the reasoning submitted by the Nominations Committee for the nomination:

Jacqui Murray has taught K-8 technology for 15 years. Based on her experience, she wrote a tech curriculum for kindergarten-fifth grade, which is now used in hundreds of schools all over the country. She is webmaster for five blogs (most notably the award-winning Ask a Tech Teacher), an Amazon Vine Voice book reviewer, a technology columnist for Examiner.com, Editorial Review Board member for ISTE’s Journal for Computing Teachers, IMS tech expert, and a weekly contributor to Technology in Education. She has also written several ebooks on integrating tech into core classroom units.

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This post is from 2014 so has lost a few of the links. You’ll find good replacements on this list of of money and economic websites for K-8 here. It is always updated.

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Teaching about money is a balancing act–doing so responsibly. I’m always on the lookout for new sites that accomplish that difficult goal. I must confess, they’re hard to come by.

Until Isreal Defeo, new Ask a Tech Teacher contributor, came up with these six. I hadn’t heard of any of them except Planet Orange (which might be going away. I left it in hopes it would survive). Check these out. I think you’ll like them:

It’s never too early to teach your kids about the value of saving money. Some child experts say that as soon as your child can do basic math, that’s a good time to start. You’ll want to begin as early as you can to make those money-saving skills stick: The ideal situation is that it’ll become as ingrained and second nature as brushing your teeth or changing your underwear.

Here are some websites that can help make learning about money fun.

Planet Orange’s

(Literally) out-of-this-world game takes kids by the hand to guide them through basic financial concepts. After signing up, kids pick out an astronaut name and password, and start their interplanetary travels. Tasks must be completed at every planet to earn money (or “Obux”) for gas.

Besides teaching kids that money is necessary for certain activities (like decorating their spaceships), it also demonstrates the concept of bartering, or exchanging goods for other goods.

ING Direct assures parents that the site is purely educational and free to join.

Gone… how sad…

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There are so many apps out there, I can’t keep up–and I’m supposed to. I’m the tech teacher. I used to download every app that looked fun, exciting, useful, try it out, be amazed by it, and then like a squirrel, dart to the next shiny object. I rarely got back to that one that so magnificently filled my attention for all of ten minutes. People in my PLN–teachers I respect and admire–have favorites that they swear by, which means I must try them. And I do, often love them and am sure I’ll use them the next time I have need of… a virtual Swiss Army Knife or an e-dressing room to try on clothes. But I don’t. Usually, it’s because there are ten that are Just Perfect for whatever I want to do, or I can’t find  the one I loved just a week ago. If I could remember the name, I could search for it, but at times my brain is as useful as a chocolate teapot.

Truth, there are so many apps on my IPad, I’m throwing out those I haven’t used in a year, have forgotten about, and/or can’t figure out. What’s left, I’ll use before I download more, no matter how exciting the new widget sounds.

And I found some amazing apps–about twenty that have me gobsmacked. I’ll start with three I can’t believe I never used:

Notability

This is my current favorite note-taking app. Consider this scenario. You’re at a meeting, taking notes. Typing away. The speaker draws something on the whiteboard–you fumble to record it on your IPad. Or s/he’s referring to a picture that’s in your camera roll, but how do you bring it up and add his thoughts? You know there’s a way, but what app was it and how do you integrate it with the note-taking app? Then–horror–he’s talking too fast to keep up. If only you could just tape him and listen without struggling to write every word.

You need Notability. See the image to the right? That’s how you use this powerful, inexpensive app:

• take notes by tapping the screen. Wherever you tap is where you type. No waiting for a cursor or working from top down. In this case, I type right next to the image.
• quickly change from typing to drawing by accessing the short, ever-present toolbar at the top of the screen (hard to see in the drawing, but it starts with a ‘t’). Drawing defaults to what would normally be a pencil, just like you’d want if you were handwriting notes and needed to copy a picture from a screen. Width and color is easily changed with another tap.
  
• open an image or PDF from your Google Drive, DropBox or another location and write directly on it–or just take a picture of the speaker’s work and insert it into your notes.
• give up note-taking and tape the presentation with the microphone tool at the top of the screen. One click and you’re recording. Another click and you’re back to typing.

From its dashboard, you can easily find and access notes, edit, revise and share with anyone. I have used Evernote faithfully and will still use it for collecting websites, data, images, and more. But for quick notes–what you might take on a yellow lined tablet (that has access to image downloads and audio taping)–I now use Notability and then share with Evernote.

(BTW: If you’re looking for a simple image annotation tool, Notability is great. Open the picture and write all over it, wherever you want.)

Thinglink

The idea of being able to annotate pictures is powerful. Many images speak for themselves, but others require enhancement–something to make the idea clearer or communicate a unique perspective. If you couldn’t see the puppy’s thought bubble in the picture to the right, you’d never know how happy he was (though the flopping chaotic ears give it away).

Thinglink is quickly taking over the market for annotating images. Besides thought bubbles, you can add hotlinks that when hovered over, become words, emoticons, weblinks, document links, tags, and more. You can even include music, videos, and other pictures. This is perfect in the classroom. One seminal picture can be linked to relevant information that covers an entire topic with just a few clicks.

Once a Thinglink is completed, it can be shared, commented on, even embedded into personal blogs and websites.

And education accounts are free.

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Computer technology isn’t as hard as it sounds, but it does require consistent use. You can’t learn a skill and stick it on a shelf for three months without it molding. Here’s how you do that: Read this blog. I cover the stuff you will use daily. It won’t get stale. Take my test. Try these eighteen:

Basics

• 7 Education Trends You Don’t Want to Miss
• 8 Education Tools That Are Going Away
• 11 Ways to be an Inquiry-based Teacher
• 12 Tips on Handling Hard-to-teach Classes
• How to be a Tech Teacher
• Mouse Skills
• My Classroom
• New Students? 7 Tips to Differentiate with Tech

Common Core Basics

• 11 Things I Love About Common Core
• Common Core Writing–Digital Quick Writes
• How to Prepare Students for PARCC Tests
• What are Common Core keyboarding standards?

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The more I use Google Apps–Sheets, Slides, Docs, , the more of a fan I become. The facility for collaboration, sharing with others, publishing to multiple media is unmatched. No surprise that Google Apps–and that cousin, Google Apps for Education–is a transformative tool that will change the way both teachers and students deliver education and learning.

When you use Google Apps, you quickly realize it’s not business as usual. That alone makes it intimidating and exciting at the same time. As a teacher, I have to tilt everything slightly out of focus, look at it from a different angle from my traditional. No ‘that’s the way we’ve always done it’ when dealing with Google Apps. It’s about shaking the educational world up, turning it on its nose, and seeing what happens.

I’ve been using Google Apps for about a year now and have a list of my nine favorite tricks. I know these will change in the next year, but for now, these are the tools that make me yell ‘huzzah’ in class. See if you agree:

Revision History

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Try these with your students during April–Poetry month (for the most UTD list, click here)!

1. Favorite Poem Project
2. Fill-in-the-blank poetry—easy and hard
3. Giggle Poetry
4. Glossary of Poetry Terms
5. Magnetic Haiku poetry
6. Magnetic poetry—big collection
7. Musical poem—write poem, add music
8. Poem generator
9. Poetry Engine
10. Poetry Engine—writes poem for you
11. Poetry with a Porpoise
12. Shaped Poems–fun
13. Write Poetry and Decorate it

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Here’s a free lesson plan from the newest Ask a Tech Teacher book, How to Achieve Common Core with Tech–the Writing Strand. This covers K-8, 208 Standards, and has 28 projects.

BTW, the lines at the front of each step are to track progress in case you don’t complete it in one class period. Feel free to print out for classroom use:

Essential Question

How does writing often and briefly improve skills?

Summary

Students use digital Quick Writes to integrate writing and critical thinking practice into any discipline.  They use a variety of age-appropriate digital tools to prepare their work. Through these short, fun writings, students develop fluency, build the habit of reflection, and informally assess thinking.

Big Ideas

Writing routinely for short periods of time, for a range of tasks, purposes, and audiences, makes students better writers.

Materials

Internet, drawing program, quick write links

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Google Apps Meets Common Core

by Michael J. Graham

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

View all my reviews

Michael Graham’s Google Apps Meets Common Core (Corwin 2013) is exactly what I hoped it would be. As a teacher, there couldn’t be two bigger topics than ‘Google Apps for Education’ and ‘Common Core’. Juxtaposing the two instantly caught my attention. My only question was whether Graham would be up to the task.

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As a working technology teacher, I get hundreds of questions from parents about their home computers, how to do stuff, how to solve problems. Each week, I’ll share one of those with you. They’re always brief and always focused. Enjoy!

Q:My internet stopped for no reason. I’m in the middle of something important. What can I do?

A: Do what the pros do–unplug it, wait ten seconds and plug it in again. Half the time, this is all it takes.

The same applies to a printer that stops for no known reason–turn it off, wait ten seconds and turn it back on.

It’s something about tasks being shuffled out of the way and needing to re-establish their order. All I know is it works often enough, it’s my first line of defense to problem-solving this particular problem. (more…)