I found this on my G+ stream from my new efriend, Lisa. It’s from Jeff Foxworth (I had to google him to be sure it wasn’t a typo for Jeff Foxworthy). Tell me these don’t apply to you…

1. You get a secret thrill out of laminating things.
2. You can hear 25 voices behind you and know exactly which one belongs to the child out of line.
3. You walk into a store and hear the words, “It’s Ms./Mr. ____________ and know you have been spotted.
4. You have 25 people who accidentally call you Mom/Dad at one time or another.
5. You can eat a multi-course meal in under 25 minutes.
6. You’ve trained yourself to go to the bathroom at two distinct times of the day, lunch and planning period.
7. You start saving other people’s trash, because most likely, you can use that toilet paper tube or plastic butter tub for something in the classroom.
8. You believe the Teacher’s Lounge should be equipped with a margarita machine.
9. You want to slap the next person who says, “Must be nice to work 7 to 3 and have summers off”.
10. You believe chocolate is a food group.
11. You can tell if it’s a full moon without ever looking outside.
12. You believe that unspeakable evils will befall you if anyone says, “Boy, the kids are sure mellow today.”
13. You feel the urge to talk to strange children and correct their behavior when you are out in public.
14. You believe in aerial spraying of Ritalin.
15. You think caffeine should be available in intravenous form.
16. You spend more money on school stuff than you do on your own children.
17. You can’t pass the school supply aisle without getting at least 5 items!
18. You ask your friends to use their words and explain if the left hand turn he made was a “good choice” or “bad choice.”
19. You find true beauty in a can full of perfectly sharpened pencils.
20. You are secretly addicted to hand sanitizer.
21. You understand, instantaneously, why a child behaves in a certain way after meeting his/her parents.

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Dear Otto is an occasional column where I answer questions I get from readers about teaching tech. If you have a question, please complete the form below and I’ll answer it here. For your privacy, I use only first names.

Here’s a great question I got from Sandy:

Q: I am a Computer Teacher for Early Education (3 & 4 year old) and also Elementary students.  My question to you is if a child is left handed, should you teach them to use their mouse with their left hand?

A: That’s a great question. I’ve seen lots of different answers, but there’s only one that makes sense to me: Allow students to use the hand they’re most comfortable with. If they want to use the left, I set the mouse up so it works for them. Often, it’s a shared station, so I help the student get used to reversing the mouse buttons themselves. If that’s enough to convince them to use the right hand, so be it, but many times, they are eager to take the few extra seconds to visit the control panel and set the mouse up to suit their needs.

By allowing students to choose, I first don’t let my prejudices influence how they learn. I don’t want them to go one way because I told them to. I want them to make up their minds and act  in their own best interests. This also prevents me from interfering with the parenting they receive at home. Moms and dads may have strong opinions on this subject and nudge their children accordingly. I don’t want to interfere with that when experience tells me it doesn’t make any difference.

What do you do with your lefties?

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Dear Otto is an occasional column where I answer questions I get from readers about teaching tech. If you have a question, please complete the form below and I’ll answer it here. For your privacy, I use only first names.

Here’s a great question I got from Sandy:

Q: I am a Computer Teacher for Early Education (3 & 4 year old) and also Elementary students. My question to you is if a child is left handed, should you teach them to use their mouse with their left hand?

A: That’s a great question. I’ve seen lots of different answers, but there’s only one that makes sense to me: Allow students to use the hand they’re most comfortable with. If they want to use the left, I set the mouse up so it works for them. Often, it’s a shared station, so I help the student get used to reversing the mouse buttons themselves. If that’s enough to convince them to use the right hand, so be it, but many times, they are eager to take the few extra seconds to visit the control panel and set the mouse up to suit their needs.

By allowing students to choose, I first don’t let my prejudices influence how they learn. I don’t want them to go one way because I told them to. I want them to make up their minds and act in their own best interests. This also prevents me from interfering with the parenting they receive at home. Moms and dads may have strong opinions on this subject and nudge their children accordingly. I don’t want to interfere with that when experience tells me it doesn’t make any difference.

What do you do with your lefties?

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If you are inspired to nominate the Structured Learning K-6 curriculum for the 2012-2013

Ed-Tech Readers’ Choice Awards, please let me know. SL is offering a wonderful prize over on their website for those so motivated (a free tech book of your choice)!

Here’s the contest blurb:

Have you had success with a particular ed-tech product or service? Want to recognize that product and share your success with your colleagues? Then nominate your favorite product(s) for our 2012-2013 Ed-Tech Reader’s Choice Awards from eSchool Media.

Nominations can include hardware, software, or online services in any area of educational technology. Please include the name of the product or service, the company that provides it, and a brief but detailed description (no more than 200 words) telling us how you use the product or service and how it has benefitted your college, university, school, school district, classroom, teachers, students, or its community. (The more specifics you can provide, the better—for example, “We’ve used X in our fourth-grade classes for the past two years, and scores on our state reading exam have improved by 30 percent…”)

IMPORTANT:  Each nomination must be accompanied by a valid school eMail address.

How It Helps

1. Support your colleagues by pointing out ed-tech products and services that are relevant, beneficial, efficient, and cost-effective.  

2. Give top-flight products and services the national recognition they deserve.

3. Encourage ed-tech vendors to produce more high-quality products and service for education. 

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.

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 Tuesday, I’ll share one of those with you. They’re always brief and always focused. Enjoy!

When I try to insert a text box or object into Word 2003, a drawing canvas appears around it. It gets in the way–everything has to wrap around it and it leaves too much white space, even when I resize it.

My solution: Get rid of it. It’s huge and designed to allow you to place multiple shapes that are moved and resized as one. Most of us are only interested in inserting one text box, so it is cumbersome, annoying and useless. To turn the drawing canvas off:

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This year more than any before, classroom budgets have been cut making it more difficult than ever to equip the education of our children with quality teaching materials. I understand that. I teach K-8. Because of that, I’ve decided to give the lesson plans my publisher sells in the Technology Toolkit (110 Lesson Plans that I use in my classroom to integrate technology into core units of inquiry while insuring a fun, age-appropriate, developmentally-appropriate experience for students) for FREE. To be sure you don’t miss any of these:

• Subscribe to Ask a Tech Teacher by Email
• Sign up to the RSS feed

…and start each week off with a fully-adaptable K-8 lesson that includes step-by-step directions as well as relevant ISTE national standards, tie-ins, extensions, troubleshooting and more. Eventually, you’ll get the entire Technology Toolkit book. If you can’t wait, you can purchase the curriculum here.

I love giving my material away for free. Thankfully, I have a publisher who supports that. If everyone did, we would reach true equity in international education.

Intro to Google Earth

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I have to reblog this wonder post by my efriend, Lisa. How many of these fit you? Can you add to this fun list?

You Know You’re a Techy Teacher When…

1. You can’t remember the last time you printed a classroom document.
2. Plurking, tweeting, and playing with your wiki in public are acceptable behaviors.
3. Your Notebook isn’t spiral bound – it plugs into the wall.
4. Forget the garden…you spend more time on the weekend weeding out your Inbox.
5. You can recite your school’s Acceptable Use Policy by heart.
6. On parent/teacher night, instead of exchanging business cards, you Bump.
7. You express yourself with emoticons.
8. You no longer consider it graffiti to write on someone’s wall.
9. Your significant other gets jealous of your PLN.
10. It’s not creepy to have lots of followers.
11. You’re in a constant battle to be Mayor of your school.
12. Your students call you the “cool” teacher.
13. The other teachers are jealous of your Prezi.
14. YouTube is blocked in your school, and you know how to get around it and still use the content.
15. The Tech Department is sick of your constant requests to unblock Twitter.
16. You’ve Googled your principal.
17. You know that TweetDeck is not a patio with a lot of birds.
18. You correct your friends’ grammar when they text you.
19. Never mind the fruit, you want a real Apple for Christmas.
20. “Casual Fridays” means logging into the EdTech UNconference in your bunny slippers.
21. You wear your “I Heart EdTech” button everywhere you go.
22. You read this blog post then tweet it, like it, and pass it on to a friend (more…)

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

Q: My internet stopped working on my laptop. Everyone else’s in the house works, but mine won’t connect. What do I do?

A: First: Make sure the laptop button that allows connection to the internet is on. More often than not, that’s the problem for teachers at my school. If it’s not that, it gets much more complicated. I’ll cross my fingers.

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These are my 62 favorite first-grade websites. I sprinkle them in throughout the year, adding several each week to the class internet start page, deleting others. I make sure I have 3-4 each week that integrate with classroom lesson plans, 3-4 that deal with technology skills and a few that simply excite students about tech in education.

Here’s the list:

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I have a timely post from e-colleague, Jan Pierce, about how current teacher credential programs prepare students for the technology push they face in schools. Not only has Jan been a fourth grade teacher for over 20 years, she also owns the website Elementary Education Degree designed to assist students interested in earning a degree in elementary education. She makes some good points. Feel free to ask questions in the comment section:

Are Elementary Education Programs Preparing Teachers to use Today’s Technology?

From smart boards and PowerPoint presentations to iPads, educational technology is becoming more of a regular element of today’s classroom. But are students in education programs being adequately trained and prepared to integrate technology into their classrooms?

Bachelor’s Programs

When it comes to bachelor’s programs in education, the answers vary. Top education programs around the country ensure that technology training is an integral part of their curriculums, by introducing students to the various forms of technology common to the classroom and techniques for using them effectively. However, many programs still use a traditional approach with classes in school subjects, child development, teaching methods, and practicum experiences, but little or no technology components.

It is important to note that most of today’s college students are comfortable with using technology in their everyday lives, and so they may not require as much technology training as older teachers do. Nevertheless, while younger students have this advantage, education programs still need to do a better job at training students to integrate technology into their lessons.

Master’s Programs

There are many master’s programs that allow teachers to specialize in educational technology or a similar field. Classes range from using the Internet and computers effectively in the classroom to learning how to measure the effectiveness of technology use. These programs usually take one or two years to complete.

Online master’s degrees in educational technology are becoming more common, since they allow teachers to earn the degree while they continue working. In fact, many programs require applicants to be working teachers, as class components may involve implementing technology in their own classrooms and observing whether that technology is effective. For more information about these types of programs, you can visit the site Masters in Teaching.

Certificates

Another option for existing teachers who don’t want to earn a full master’s degree is a certificate in educational technology. These can be completed in less time than a master’s program, as they usually last a semester or a year. This is a great option for experienced teachers to gain the extra skills they need to start teaching with technology. These programs exist in both real and online options as well.

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.