Keyboarding is a topic that most parents want their children to learn and many schools don’t have time to teach. Of all topics on Ask a Tech Teacher, keyboarding is the most visited. If you’re looking for a curriculum for your K-8 classes, here are two popular ones we offer:

The Essential Guide–-a thorough K-8 curricula intended for schools that allot about 45 minutes a week to tech classes

The Ultimate Guide–a K-5 or MS comprehensive deep dive into keyboarding (optional student workbooks available)

We are taking the next two weeks–two articles–to answer the questions that should help you as a teacher or administrator decide what type of keyboarding program is best for your school.

Week 1 (this article)

• Why learn keyboarding?
• What is the best age to start teaching keyboarding?
• How important is teacher knowledge of teaching keyboarding?

Week 2 (click when available)

• What is the best way to teach keyboarding?
• What is the correct body position?
• What about keyboarding homework?
• Questions you may have

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9-11 Day has become Patriot Day here in America, but it doesn’t change its purpose: to show how much we love our country.

What day in recent history do you remember most from your country?

There’s a reason why the brain uses 25% of the calories you eat: Thinking is hard work. Subjects like math and science — the ones only “smart” kids do well in — demand that you find patterns, unravel clues, connect one dot to another, and scaffold knowledge learned in prior lessons. Worse, you’re either right or wrong with no gray areas.

Wait. Where have we heard those characteristics before? In games! Do these descriptions sound familiar (ask your game-playing students)?

Take the helm of your own country and work together with others to solve international problems!

Manage your city so it’s energy efficient and sustainable. 

Solve a mysterious outbreak in a distant tropical jungle and save the scientists. 

All torn straight from the taglines of popular games. Kids love playing games, leveling up, and finding the keys required to win. They choose the deep concentration and trial-and-error of gameplay over many other activities because figuring out how to win is exciting. So why the disconnect among teachers and parents when applying gameplay to learning?

Surprisingly, all you need is one simple mindshift to do this: Create a classroom environment where thinking isn’t considered work. Don’t say science and math are hard. Don’t jump in to solve problems. Let students thrill with the excitement of finding their own solutions. The great thinkers of our time understand that everyone is capable of finding solutions:

“Failure isn’t falling down; it’s not getting up.” — Mary Pickford 

“No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking.” — Voltaire

“Life is a crisis. So what?” — Malcom Bradbury

I’ve discussed problem-solving before (see How to Teach Students to Solve Problems). Today, I want to share five favorite websites that turn the deep-thinking required for solving problems into fun:

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Here are a few of the popular resources teachers are using to

1. BTS resources
2. BTS resources from Microsoft
3. Make a class photo in Pixton EDU

We write about back to school often on Ask a Tech Teacher. Here are some of the past articles I think you’ll like:

1. 8 Tech Tools to Get to Know Your Students for Back to School
2. 3 Apps to Help Brainstorm Next Year’s Lessons
3. 11 Back-to-school Activities for the First Month of School
4. Great Back to School Classroom Activities
5. Plan a Memorable Back to School Night
6. New School Year? New Tech? I Got You Covered
7. 5 Top Ways to Integrate Technology into the New School Year
8. 5 Ways to Involve Parents in Your Class
9. 6 Tech Best Practices for New Teachers
10. 5 Tech Ed Tools to Use this Fall
11. How to Build Your PLN
12. 5 Ways Teachers Can Stay on Top of Technology
13. 5 FREE Web Tools for a New School Year
14. Dear Otto: I need year-long assessments
15. Great Activities for the First Week of School

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Tech Tips for Teacher Writers is an occasional post on overcoming Tech Dread. I’ll cover issues that friends, both real-time and virtual, have shared. Feel free to post a comment about a question you have. I’ll cover it in a future tip.

This tip is to help you find books on Amazon country platforms not your home location. Say, a website guided you to a link in the US Amazon platform (amazon.com), but you want to buy the book in the UK. There’s a two-second way to get you across the world to whatever country you want.

Here’s the link for my latest prehistoric fiction in Amazon’s US platform:

The quickest way to move from the US to Britain’s Amazon platform is replace ‘com’ with ‘co.uk’ like this:

All I do is:

• double click ‘com’
• replace the highlighted letters with ‘co.uk’

It works the same way with any other country. You have to know the country’s international ID, but once you do, it’s simple to replace one with the other.  I say it takes two seconds, but it could be faster.

Here’s my product page in the US Amazon

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Labor Day is annually held on the first Monday of September (this year, September 5th). 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.

Here are websites to help students understand what Labor Day means to them:

1. Child Labor
2. Cybraryman’s Labor Day page--comprehensive as is his way
3. History of Labor Day–Movie
4. Labor Day activities, games, drawings for kids
5. Labor Day infographic
6. Labor Day’s Violent Beginnings
7. PBS Kids: Labor Day
8. Ten Labor Day Facts (from Forbes)
9. Today in History (Labor Day)–from Library of Congress
10. Why Americans and Canadians Celebrate Labor Day–YT video

Teacher-Authors: Here’s a post from last year for you.

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

1. Tech Ed Resources–Coaching
2. How to Thank a Teacher
3. Benefits of a Short Course
4. Notetaking and Study Apps
5. Free Keyboarding Posters
6. Essential Tech Tools for History Class
7. Habits of Mind
8. Which Digital Device Should I Use
9. Lessons Learned my First 5 Years of Teaching
10. Incorporate Podcasting Into Your Curriculum

Here’s a preview of what’s coming up in September:

• More Free Posters
• 8 Tips to Become Tomorrow’s Teacher
• Apps for Curious Students
• Fall Websites
• How to Evaluate Apps

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

September 2nd-3rd:

Subscribe to the Ask a Tech Teacher newsletter through Rafflecopter. Each new subscriber is entered in a contest to win a $10 Amazon card

a Rafflecopter giveaway

http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/display/ca9c2f912/?

Jacqui Murray is the author of the popular prehistoric fiction saga, Man vs. Nature which explores seminal events in man’s evolution one trilogy at a time. She is also the author of the Rowe-Delamagente thrillers and Building a Midshipman, the story of her daughter’s journey from high school to United States Naval Academy. Her non-fiction includes over a hundred books on integrating tech into education, reviews as an Amazon Vine Voice,  a columnist for NEA Today, and a freelance journalist on tech ed topics. Look for her next prehistoric fiction, Natural Selection Fall 2022.

A lot of teachers who read Ask a Tech Teacher are also authors so once a month, I share the most popular post from the past month on my writer blog, WordDreams. Here’s one that’s humorous while hitting close to the heart: 

***

At times, I wonder if I’m missing some critical piece required to be a Real Writer. I do a lot of the right things–

• I read, a lot.
• I’m observant.
• I’m a loner (or, the flip side–I don’t mind being alone).
• I bloom where I’m planted.

But is that enough? I went in search of other traits successful friends have that might inform my endless quest to succeed in a craft that few can. Here’s what I found:

1. Writers have a selective memory–they forget the bad stuff people say and remember the good. Otherwise, we get depressed.
2. Writers are conversant with their muse–anywhere, any time, any subject. It doesn’t matter. When s/he starts talking, writers listen.
3. Writers are tethered to their voicemail in case that Big Call from an agent comes through. If there is no call, they check to be sure their voicemail is working properly.
4. Writers understand the importance of taking a break to do something fun, like read a book. If they are one of those unlucky folk who get writer’s block, this will suffice.
5. Writers never show fear in front of their computer. It’s like a dog–it smells our distress. It’ll then do nasty things like crash in the middle of a scene or corrupt your file.
6. You can tell a lot about a writer by the way he/she handles three things: rejection, fame, and a change in their schedule.
7. In golf, one of 14 clubs has to be the right decision. In writing, all 14 are wrong because readers want unique.
8. Writers don’t want to be judged by what s/he does between the lines.
9. Writers believe in the impossible, in miracles, and in Santa Claus. They will spend hours on a paragraph, or sentence, and consider it time well spent.
10. To rephrase Voltaire: “No problem can stand the assault of sustained thinking from a writer.”
11. Where the engineer thinks of his equations as an approximation to reality, and the physicist thinks reality is an approximation to his equations, the writer thinks it doesn’t matter if the prose are elegant.

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If you’re a teacher-author–like me!–I’d love your help launching this HS-level historical fiction book with your community. In return, I’d be more than happy to share yours with mine!

The world has changed. Can Lucy, too, if it will save her tribe?

In this conclusion to Lucy’s journey, she and her tribe leave their good home to rescue former tribemembers captured by the enemy. Lucy’s tribe includes a mix of species–a Canis, a Homotherium, and different iterations of early man. More join and some die, but that is the nature of prehistoric life, where survival depends on a combination of developing intellect and man’s inexhaustible will to live. Based on true events.

If you’d like to know a little more about Natural Selection, here’s the trailer.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZhlvou9hvg]

An Indie author’s most powerful marketing tool is word of mouth. We don’t have a big publisher behind us or an agent that pushes us out to the world. What we have is each other, telling our friends about the latest great book we’ve read.

I need your help

If you’re willing to help me promote my latest book, I’ll help you! Here’s how it works:

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