Here are the most-read posts for the month of February:

1. #WorldReadAloudDay February 1st
2. Groundhog Day and the 100th Day of School
3. 14 Tech Assessment Strategies
4. 72: Check Your Math in Excel
5. Is ChatGPT Writing Your Students’ Homework? New Tech Will Detect It
6. Tech Tip #45 My Screen is Sideways!!
7. 57+ Kindergarten Websites That Tie into Classroom Lessons
8. You Know You’re a Techy Teacher When…
9. 3 Projects to Teach 1st Grade Architecture
10. Teach Vocabulary with the Frayer Model

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In these 169 tech-centric situations, you get an overview of pedagogy—the tech topics most important to your teaching—as well as practical strategies to address most classroom tech situations, how to scaffold these to learning, and where they provide the subtext to daily tech-infused education.

Today’s tip: Software vs. Online Tools

Category: Pedagogy

Here are relevant criteria for evaluating software vs. online tools in your classroom:

For more detail on comparing software and online tools, visit “8 Reasons For and 8 Against Revisiting Software in Your Classroom” on Ask a Tech Teacher.

Sign up for a new tip each week or buy the entire 169 Real-world Ways to Put Tech into Your Classroom.

What’s your favorite tech tip in your classroom? Share it in the comments below.

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Here are popular puzzles resources teachers are using to teach mouse skills, critical thinking, and more. There are a few for the upcoming St. Patrick’s Day:

1. Digipuzzles–great puzzles for geography, nature, and holidays
2. I’m a Puzzle–create your own puzzles
3. Jigsaw Explorer–make your own
4. Jigsaw Planet–create your own picture jigsaw
5. Jigsaw puzzles
6. Jigzone–puzzles
7. Jigsaw Puzzles–JS
8. Kindergarten puzzles
9. Puzzle—St. Pat’s Puzzle
10. Puzzle—drag-and-drop puzzle
11. Puzzle—St. Pat’s slide puzzle

Copyright ©2023 usna.wordpress.com – All rights reserved.

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.

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

March 1-3, 2023

65 Tech Ed Posters

$2.99

This set of sixty-five posters is a varied collection you can use to share critical issues dealing with technology and education. Print them out and hang them on your classroom walls or share them out digitally on a Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram feed.

Copyright ©2023 usna.wordpress.com – All rights reserved.

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.

In a perfect world, vocabulary is learned in context: The phrases and sentences around the unknown word define the meaning. If that isn’t sufficient, students use affixes — prefixes, suffixes, and roots — to decode meaning. But because the world isn’t always that pristine,  Dorothy Frayer and her colleagues at the University of West Virginia came up with a vocabulary teaching tool that has come to be known as “the Frayer Model”. Now used by thousands of educators, this approach to word study relies on analyzing words rather than memorizing definitions. Somewhat like Concept Circles, the Frayer Model uses a graphical organizer that asks students to describe words by much more than a memorized definition. They must:

• define the term
• describe essential characteristics
• provide examples
• provide non-examples

Because the Frayer Model digs deeply into understanding the word, it promotes critical thinking and a granular familiarity with unfamiliar vocabulary. It draws on a student’s prior knowledge to build connections among new concepts and creates a visual reference by which students learn to compare attributes and examples.

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Many Fridays, I report on a wonderful website or project my classes and parents love. This one is teaching architecture to youngers:

Lesson Plan:

Three projects over six weeks and your students will learn about blueprints, room layout, dimensions, and more. Plus, they’ll understand how to think about a three-dimensional object and then spatially lay it out on paper. This is challenging, but fun for first graders.

Spend two weeks on each projects. Incorporate a discussion of spaces, neighborhoods, communities one week. Practice the drawing, then do the final project which students can save and print. Kids will love this unit.

• First, draw a picture in your drawing program of the child’s home. If you don’t already have a class favorite, check this list. Many have architecture tools so show students how to find them. Have kids think about their house, walk through it. They’ll have to think in three dimensions and will soon realize they can’t draw a two-story house. In that case, allow them to pick which rooms they wish to include and concentrate on what’s in the room.

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I have to reblog this wonderful post by my efriend, Lisa. How many of these fit you? Can you add to this 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. Your students call you the “cool” teacher.
12. The other teachers are jealous of your Instagram.
13. YouTube is blocked in your school, and you know how to get around it.
14. The Tech Department is sick of your constant requests to unblock Twitter.
15. You’ve Googled your principal.
16. You know that TweetDeck is not a patio with a lot of birds.
17. You correct your friends’ grammar when they text you.
18. “Casual Fridays” means logging into the EdTech UNconference in your bunny slippers.
19. You wear your “I Heart EdTech” button everywhere you go.
20. You read this blog post then tweet it, like it, and pass it on to a friend (more…)

One of our Ask a Tech Teacher contributors use this to help her student improve their handwriting. This is a great way to incorporate journaling with handwriting skills for learning students. See if you agree:

Create a Handwriting Workbook to Improve Penmanship

It is no news that practice makes perfect, and this saying certainly applies if you want to improve your handwriting. Learning to modify your handwriting can be a challenge as a person’s writing style is mostly just muscle memory. 

The reason you write a certain way is simple; you have always written like that. To improve penmanship, you must dedicate yourself to a process that takes both time and commitment. 

On that note, here’s how to create a handwriting workbook to help improve penmanship.

Determine Your Goals

The first step to make before you start a handwriting workbook is to map out your goals.

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In these 169 tech-centric situations, you get an overview of pedagogy—the tech topics most important to your teaching—as well as practical strategies to address most classroom tech situations, how to scaffold these to learning, and where they provide the subtext to daily tech-infused education.

Today’s tip: Find a file

Category: Problem-solving

Q:  I saved my document, but I can’t find it. What do I do?

A:  There are five ways to search for a document you saved, but don’t remember where (see poster below):

If none of these work, try these two:

• One: Open the program you created it in, say MS Word.
• Select File>Open. MS Office programs–Word, Publisher, Excel, PowerPoint–and some other software show recently created documents in the task panel. Check to see if your document shows up there. If so, open it and re-save it in a spot you’ll remember.
• Two: Not there? Click the Start Button. Type the file name in Search. This will Search only locations attached to your computer. For example, it won’t find files on your flash drive if it isn’t plugged in or an external folder.

Sign up for a new tip each week or buy the entire 169 Real-world Ways to Put Tech into Your Classroom.

What’s your favorite tech tip in your classroom? Share it in the comments below.

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AI-generated writing, currently centered around ChatGPT, already is a disruptive force in education. Check out these articles:

• How ChatGPT Can Improve Education, Not Threaten it–from Scientific American
• ChatGPT threatens education at all levels – here’s how it can be stopped–from Tech Radar
• ChatGPT: The Next Firestorm in Education–from AACSB

ChatGPT has this to say about itself being a threat to student writing skills:

Detecting AI writing can be a difficult task, as modern AI systems are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their ability to produce human-like text. However, there are a few indicators that can help you identify whether a piece of writing has been generated by an AI system.

1. 1. Consistency: One of the most noticeable features of AI writing is its consistency. Unlike human writers, AI systems tend to produce text that is consistent in tone, style, and grammar throughout the entire piece.
   2. Repetition: AI systems often rely on pre-programmed templates and patterns to generate text, which can result in repetitive phrasing and wording.
   3. Unusual errors: While AI systems are generally quite accurate in their use of grammar and spelling, they can sometimes make unusual errors or produce awkward phrasing that is not typical of human writing.
   4. Lack of context: AI systems can struggle to understand the broader context of a piece of writing, which can lead to text that is disconnected or irrelevant to the topic at hand.

Pretty good? Or not? The problem is, because it’s not obviously incoherent, how do you tell it was written by an AI? Here’s what Jodi Williams, one of Ask a Tech Teacher’s tech experts suggests to help you decide:

4 Approaches to Detect AI Writing

Sometimes the use of technology can play a bad joke on us, especially when we turn to various AI-based tools that help to write things instead of ourselves. The practice shows that the AI Writing phenomenon contributes a lot to the cases of plagiarism and poses a severe problem for educators as they have to check assignments manually and spend more time evaluating the content. Still, it’s possible to detect the issue even when students use solutions like ChatGPT. The trick is to use analytical tools and evaluate the readability factor! 

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