I read an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal discussing the dramatic decline in men applying for and graduating from two and four-year colleges. Here’s the introductory piece of the discussion:

Men are abandoning higher education in such numbers that they now trail female college students by record levels.

At the close of the 2020-21 academic year, women made up 59.5% of college students, an all-time high, and men 40.5%, according to enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit research group. U.S. colleges and universities had 1.5 million fewer students compared with five years ago, and men accounted for 71% of the decline.

While the reasons for the decline are varied and complicated, the solutions mind-numbing, if your high school students are looking for alternatives to traditional four-year college and University environment, run through this simple matrix to see which you’re better suited for:

Then, check out these articles discussing how to prepare for the choice best for you:

College or Career? Check out These

MS Career Planning: Moving in the Right Direction

Clutch Prep: When You Need Help With a Class

What to do when Johnny wants career, not college?

Whether you pick college or career, students need to prepare a resume. Here are resources to create one that’s professional and thorough:

1. Google Docs–go to Docs.Google.com and select Resume template
2. PorfolioGen–A free site that lets you collect all the pieces of your experience into one nicely-formatted digital place. 
3. Resume Builder
4. Resume Generator
5. Student CV Builder
6. Wix–This is free with lots of templates so you can share exactly the right image. Here are examples.
7. WordPress–Use a free WordPress blog, but instead convert the pages to topics discussed below. Here’s an example.

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Getting ready for St. Patrick’s Day? Try these fun websites with activities for different grade levels, different classes:

1. Puzzle–St. Pat’s Puzzle
2. Puzzle–St. Pat’s drag-and-drop puzzle
3. Puzzle–St. Pat’s slide puzzle
4. Puzzles and games
5. Physical Education St. Patrick’s Day Activities from Elementary PE Teacher.com
6. Resources for St. Pat’s Day from Education.com by grade and subject
7. St. Patrick’s Day history–video
8. St. Pat’s Day songs–video
9. Tic tac toe
10. Wordsearch

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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: My Desktop Icons are Messed Up

Category: PC, Problem-solving

Q:  I have several students who share a computer. Kids being kids, they love moving icons around on the desktop. What’s the best way to handle this?

A:  I’ve tried everything. Refusing to allow them to play doesn’t work and asking them to undo their play at the end of their time doesn’t either. The best solution is to teach them to organize their desktop:

• right click on the desktop
• select Sort by>Item type

This can be part of their start-up maintenance when they arrive at class.

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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Virtual Reality is one of the hottest newish education strategies that keeps getting better. Here’s an excellent article from eSchool News about using VR to better understand topics traditionally considered complex:

VR helps students visualize complex information

Educators can use virtual reality to bring learning into the real world and improve outcomes for students, assert Shannon Cox, superintendent, and Candice Sears, director of instructional services, both of Montgomery County Educational Service Center. In this commentary, they describe how using VR technology can answer the question students often ask: “When will I ever use this?”

Read on…

More from Ask a Tech Teacher on Virtual Reality:

• How Does the Metaverse Fit into Education?
• Using VR in Schools
• VR Resources
• The Impact of VR on Student 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, and author of the tech thrillers, To Hunt a Sub and Twenty-four Days. You can find her resources at Structured Learning.

Two math celebrations are coming up on March 14th: Pi Day and World Maths Day

Pi Day

Pi Day is an annual celebration commemorating the mathematical constant π (pi). Pi Day is observed on March 14 since 3, 1, and 4 are the three most significant digits of π in the decimal form.

Daniel Tammet, a high-functioning autistic savant, holds the European record for reciting pi from memory to 22,514 digits in five hours and nine minutes.

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Invention Convention Worldwide is a global K-12 invention education curricular program mapped to national and state educational standards that teaches students problem-identification, problem-solving, entrepreneurship and creativity skills and builds confidence in invention, innovation and entrepreneurship for life.

Here are websites to help you and your students learn about the excitement of inventions:

1. A Guide to Inventions
2. Famous Inventors
3. How Inventions Change History (video)
4. How the popsicle was invented (a TEDEd video)
5. Invented by accident I
6. Invented by accident II
7. Inventions from the Military –crazy ones
8. Inventors and Inventions

Check back here for updates on this list.

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Teaching students about current events used to be as easy as picking a trusted newspaper and reading their headlines. Those days are gone with fake news, yellow journalism, and opinions dressed up as news stories. So how to you talk about what’s in the news? Marcee Harris over at Teaching Channel has a lesson plan to help you:

How to Talk About What’s in the News: A Lesson Plan

By Marcee Harris on March 31, 2021

When our students enter our classrooms, they come with bits and pieces of news from home, their social media feeds, and from conversations with friends. This news can create a sense of fear and worry for some, as well as generate lots of unanswered questions. Tackling these tough topics in the classroom can be a challenge, especially for educators who come from different backgrounds than their students. Despite the uncertainty of what to say, it’s imperative that we honor our kids’ news and engage in dialogue that explores their questions. This process will open students up to a range of perspectives and nurture critical thinking skills.

Read more…

More from Ask a Tech Teacher on news, sources, teaching with it:

• Fake News or Fact? How do you tell?
• News Sources for Kids
• Fake News Online Resources

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, and author of the tech thrillers, To Hunt a Sub and Twenty-four Days. You can find her resources at Structured Learning.

Here are great ideas for how to address the difficult topic of war in the Ukraine, from Ask a Tech Teacher collaborator, Christian Miraglia, recently retired from teaching after thirty-six years:

24/7

As events unfold in Ukraine, people want to know how the situation might play out. Glancing at the Apple Newsfeed or Twitter for minute-to-minute updates becomes an obsession. For many students, checking on Tik-Tok and Instagram is their source of information. In the classroom, questions on the location of Ukraine, the why of the Russian invasion, and what does the future hold are commonplace. So how does a teacher navigate these conversations?

Essential Skills

As a history teacher, I made it a priority to teach my students how to check the reliability of sources. This became increasingly important over the past decade as social media became the primary source for news. It was not uncommon for a class to start with a comment, “Did you see …?” My response to the student was, “What was the source of information, and how do you know if it is reliable?” A typical year in the class began with learning how to source information using the Reading Like a Historian lessons from the Stanford History Education Group. I also utilized the Civic Reasoning curriculum, which focused on developing critical thinking skills to navigate social media and news. With Ukraine dominating the news cycle, these skills are still essential. 

Guiding Principles

Here are some basic principles and resources that can be helpful when addressing the conflict in Ukraine. These tenents are applicable for any sensitive topic or event discussed in class. 

• As with any subject when using social media as a tool for study, teachers should review postings as some material may not be suitable for student consumption. 
• Use the Civil Discourse materials from Facing History and Ourselves at the beginning of the year so that both you, as a teacher and students, have a framework for approaching complex subjects. Some students may have family or friends serving in the military or have students who may have family from Ukraine.
• Ask the student about the source of information. Check social media feeds and news feeds so students can compare the credibility of sources. Providing students with sentence frames for responding to the question is necessary.
• Ask students why the event is important. Keep in mind that our students may be asking questions based on their fears. For example, students may ask if the events in Ukraine will lead to World War III.
• Make use of geography tools such as Google Maps or the history of Ukraine in maps found on the Washington Post site, as many students do not have a sense of the expansiveness of the world.
• Use proven resources such as Brown University’s Choices Program, which provides teachers with comprehensive lessons on the crisis. 

Embrace Conversations

The past five years have created challenges for teachers time and time again with global and national events. Our students are on a similar journey. The description on the Stanford History Education Group’s Civic Reasoning page reads, “Students are confused about how to evaluate online information. We all are.”  With each critical piece of news comes a chance to provide our students a platform to voice their concerns and synthesize the information they consume. One might call these “hard conversations,” but embracing these opportunities with the proper resources ultimately builds the foundations of becoming informed citizens. 

Bio:

Christian Miraglia is a recently retired 36-year educator and now Educational Technology Consultant at t4edtech where he also blogs at Edtech and Things Related. He can be found on Twitter @T4edtech, Linkedin, and on his YouTube Channel Transformative Edtech.

A few spring websites, lesson plans, printables, activities:

1. 7 Science Experiments that Teach About Spring
2. Books from Scholastic about Spring
3. Life cycle of a snake
4. Life Cycle Lesson Plans
5. Life Cycle resources
6. Life Cycles
7. Life Cycle Symbaloo
8. Plant life cycle
9. Spring Puzzle
10. Spring Garden–click to find flowers
11. Spring Games
12. Spring Vocabulary (video)
13. Spring Word Scramble
14. Spring Word Search
15. What Happens in Spring (video)
16. What Happens in Spring–PS (video)

Ideas from TeacherVision:

Printables

1. The Very Hungry Caterpillar Activities Booklet
2. Butterfly Life Cycle Worksheet
3. Baseball Fun
4. May Day
5. Butterfly Facts and Questions
6. Butterfly Life Cycle Quiz
7. The Very Hungry Caterpillar Poster & Activities
8. More Spring Printables

Lesson Plans

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Every month, we’ll share five themed posters that you can share on your website (with attribution), post on your walls, or simply be inspired.

This month: Learning

–for the entire collection of 65 posters, click here

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.