What are You Doing for Valentine’s Day?
Thursday’s are my busiest days at school. I barely get a lunch break–the 5 free minutes between classes I must use for the restroom. Eat or pee? Hmmm…. Not really a choice.
So by the time I get home this Thursday, I’ll be exhausted, not interested in fighting the holiday lovers for a place at the Restaurant Table. My husband of 29 years and I will eat in, chat, catch up, and likely go to bed early (although maybe Elementary is new on the Telly).
But, I realize most of you would like a bit more so I have a few ideas for you.
First, go to my post last Friday and you’ll find 20 Great Valentine Websites for your students. If you already finished these, read on:
- Here’s Valentine history, according to Wikipedia. Who knew it all started with Geoffrey Chaucer?
- Three great Valentine love poems from new efriend, Chris Wood. You can also drop by St. Valentine’s Day website for an entire list of heart-jerkers
- Are you looking for pithy, concise Valentine sayings? Try Creating Really Awesome Free Things. Be forewarned: They belong on candy hearts. These are a bit longer, but still saccharin.
- You not a serious, mushy sort of lover? Click here for quotes with a sense of humor.
Free Lesson Plans–Visit My TeachersPayTeachers Store
Looking for something to spice up your classroom? Here are a variety of projects you can download for free. Just visit my TeacherPayTeachers store, click download, and they’re yours. If you enjoy them, please add a few stars to the recommendation list:
A Colonization Brochure in Publisher
A Publisher trifold on American colonies (or any
other topic you’re covering in your classroom). Includes step-by-step directions, standards addressed, time required, prior knowledge expected, vocabulary used, higher-order thinking skills addressed, samples, reproducibles, grading rubrics, and more.
Students interpret the words of Dr Martin Luther King in their own words in a visual organizer. Great project that gets students thinking about impact of words on history. Common Core aligned
Tech Tip #40: Where Did Windows Explorer Go?
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!
Q: I have Windows 7 and I can’t find Explorer anymore. Where did it go?
A: Right click on the start button and select ‘Explore’.
DOS is a lot harder to find. Type ‘command prompt’ into the search field and it’ll pop up.
I still miss DOS…
New Literacies Enable Smarter Researching
In my last post, we talked about “digital citizens”, the modern student who lives in two worlds. One he can touch with his hands, the other only with his mind. It’s this latter one 
that has revolutionized education, provided opportunities for students to talk to experts on astronomy, walk through the ancient ruins of Stonehenge, and dissect a frog without touching a scalpel. This world is scintillating, but challenging, demanding students be risk-takers and inquirers.
Inquiry and education
That last—inquiry—has changed the K-12 classroom from what many experienced just a decade ago, for students cannot be inquirers without being risk-takers. They take responsibility for their own learning by following practical strategies for uncovering information despite the billions (literally) of places to look. Consider this: If you Google ‘space’, you get over 4 billion hits. That much information is worthless. Digital citizens develop practical strategies for refining this list to a specific need.
Digital citizens also differentiate instruction so it works for themselves, not change their learning style to fit what the teacher delivers. They hear the big ideas, grasp the essential questions, and then develop a plan that delivers it in their own unique and personal way.
Valentine Sites For Your Students
Here are some fun Valentine sites to fill those few minutes betwixt and between lessons, projects, bathroom breaks, lunch, and everything else:
- Apps
- Drag-and-drop
- Dress up the heart
- Google Drawings Magnetic Poetry from Ctrl Alt Achieve
- Games and puzzles
- Games and stories
- ‘I love you’ in languages Afrikaans to Zulu
- Line up the hearts
- Match
- Mouse skills
- Poem generator
- Puppy jigsaw
- Rebus game
- Sudoku
- Tic-tac-toe
- Typing
- Unscramble
- Write in a heart
Do you have any I missed?
How the Internet Neighborhood is Like Any Other Community
Education has changed. Teachers no longer lecture from a dais with student learning contained within the schoolhouse walls. Thanks to the pervasiveness of easy-to-use and free 
web-based tools, 93 percent of teachers have one or more computers in the classroom with internet access (National Center for Education Statistics–2009). Global home Internet users with fixed Internet access is expected to grow from 1.7 billion in 2011 to 2.3 billion by 2016 (VNI-SA Research)—that’s almost one-third of the world’s population.
Because of these changes, educators have come to expect students to participate actively in the learning process and transfer their knowledge from the classroom to life. For example, when preparing a class project, a fifth grader will do the research using the internet, collaborate with classmates on Google Apps, write the report with a web-based tool (i.e., Google Drive), share it with the world using digital tools (i.e., Animoto or Glogster), and then use those learned skills in other classes.
Students have become digital citizens. The question is: How do we as educators teach them to thrive in the digital world?
Tech Tip #39: My Computer Won’t Turn Off
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!
Q: I’m pushing the power button on my laptop (or desktop, but more commonly this happens with laptops), but it won’t turn off. What do I do?
A: Push the power button and hold it in for a count of ten. That’ll work. If not (there’s always that one that breaks all the rules), hold it for a count of twenty.
To get the complete list of 169 Tech Tips, click here.
Subscribers: Your Special is Available
Every month, subscribers to Ask a Tech Teacher get a discounted resource to help their tech teaching.
This month:
THE KEY TO ALIGNING YOUR K-5 CLASS WITH COMMON CORE STATE STANDARDS:
30 Projects that integrate technology into core lesson plans
Why do I need this book?
The Key to Aligning Your K-5 Class with Common Core State Standards is for classroom teachers, technology integration specialists and lab professionals, as a resource for aligning your technology program with the Common Core State Standards now implemented in forty-six states. You will find it a foundational tool for scaffolding technology into the areas of math, language, reading, writing, speaking and listening as is required in CCSS. Overall, they are authentic approaches to student-centered learning, asking the student to be a risk-taker in his/her educational goals and the teacher to act as guide. The essential questions are open-ended and conversations organic and inquiry-driven, ultimately asking students to take responsibility for the process of their own learning.
Tech Tip #38: My Desktop Icons Are All Different
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!
Q: My desktop icons (those little pictures that allow you to open a program) are all different. What happened?
A: I get this question a lot. Push the start button and check who the log in is. That’s the name at the top of the right-hand side of the start menu. It should have your log-in name. Any other, log out and log in as yourself and the world will tilt back to normal.
This happens a lot in my lab because I have separate log-ins for different grades. Students being students often forget to log out. I teach even the youngers how to check for this problem and solve it.
Truth be known, lots of adults have this problem, also. They’re used to sitting down at a computer they share only with themselves. When tech comes and does something on it–say, fixes a problem–and they don’t log out, my teachers are also lost
Now Available: K-8 Digital Citizenship Curriculum
Digital Citizenship Curriculum for K-8 (print or digital)
Why do teachers need to teach Digital Citizenship?
Education has changed. No longer is it contained within four classroom walls or the physical site of a school building. Students aren’t confined by the eight hours between the school bell’s chimes or the struggling budget of an underfunded program.
Now, education can be found anywhere, by collaborating with students in Kenya or Skyping with an author in Sweden or chatting with an astrophysicist on the International Space Station. Students can use Google Earth to take a virtual tour of a zoo or a blog to collaborate on a class project. Learning has no temporal or geographic borders, available 24/7 from wherever students and teachers find an internet connection.
This vast landscape of resources is available digitally, freely, and equitably, but before children begin the cerebral trek through the online world, they must learn to do it safely, securely, and responsibly. This conversation used to focus on limiting access to the internet, blocking websites, and layering rules upon rules hoping (vainly) that students would be discouraged from using this infinite and fascinating resource.
It didn’t work.
Best practices now suggest that instead of protecting students, we teach them to be good digital citizens, confident and competent in the use of the internet.
What’s included in K-8 Digital Citizenship Curriculum?
This 70-page text is your guide to what our children must know at what age to thrive in the community called the internet. It’s a roadmap for blending all the pieces into a cohesive, effective student-directed cyber-learning experience that accomplishes ISTE’s general goals to:
