As a passionate Economics major in college (which grew into an MBA), I find Econ at the root of much of the world around us. It starts with counting coins in first and second grade and grows up to a peek into NASDAQ and other adult subjects in middle school.

In the US, tax day is April 15th. Here are some good websites to discuss what is probably a popular topic in families:

Taxes

1. BrainPOP | Taxes
2. A history of US taxes
3. Taxes–from Crash Course Economics
4. Where does your money go? — lesson plan from PBS
5. TurboTax Tax Calculator

After April 15th, there are great ways to teach about economics, financial literacy, and prepare students for managing their lives fiscally once they’re launched into the world:

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With technology, it is so much easier to offer students the assistive technology they need to pursue their education dreams. The Tech Edvocate has so great suggestions for apps and prograsms to help those with specialized needs:

What to Ask Colleges About Assistive Technology – The Tech Edvocate

10 More Educational Technology Concepts Every Teacher Should Know About

The selection process for colleges involves several factors for graduating high school students. Problems regarding tuition, academic programs, and location are often considered when students decide which college they will attend.

Read on

More about special needs from Ask a Tech Teacher

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SmartBrief has an excellent article worth your time to read:

Top 5 tech tools to maximize reading fluency

It is written from the perspective of a 2nd-grade teacher:

Teaching in a pandemic presented teachers with a whole new batch of problems to solve, whether through distance, hybrid or in-person learning models. Putting all technicalities and connectivity issues aside, teachers wanted to maximize engagement and student learning all the more. 

Read more

Ask a Tech Teacher has more excellent resources to promote reading in your classes:

• How Minecraft Teaches Reading, Writing and Problem Solving
• 12 Websites for Digital Books Summer Reading
• 33 Resources for Read Across America Day

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.

I know from personal experience that tech teachers are in short supply. It’s not unusual for a school to transfer the PE teacher or 2nd grade teacher into the Tech Teacher job because they can’t find anyone else for that position. ZDNet has a great article addressing the subject:

How to get into tech as a teacher

Tech careers are in high demand. The tech field attracts many career-changing professionals with strong salaries and diverse career paths. And teachers are uniquely positioned to move into tech.

If you’ve wondered how to get into tech as a teacher, you may think the field is intimidating. But while some tech careers require coding skills, many do not. By highlighting your transferable skills and educational strengths, you can move into careers like instructional designer, eLearning developer, training specialist, or technical writer. 

Read on…

More about teaching tech

• Teacher Appreciation Week–Gifts for the Tech Teacher (humorous)
• What’s a Tech Teacher Do With Their Summer Off?
• A Day in the Life of a Tech Teacher (humorous)

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This is such a great article on the benefits of bi-lingual education. Sure, we intuitively know what these are, but what are the real metrics? From an educator with a passion for her calling, see if you have any reasons you’d add:

4 Long-Term Benefits of Bilingual Education

Raising bilingual children is the norm in Singapore. From an early age, the children living in this multicultural city are exposed to a number of languages at home, in their preschools, and in their communities. At the same time, the government here has adopted a bilingual policy wherein students are required to gain proficiency in English and their respective ethnic mother tongue, which is Mandarin for the Chinese*, Malay for the Malay, and Tamil for the Indians. If you’re staying in the country with your family for work, it’ll be a breeze to find a bilingual program that will provide your children with the right environment for improving their language proficiency. These schools can focus on your mother tongue, English, as well as other languages that your child might be interested in acquiring. With the assistance of the right bilingual program and teachers, your child will have a better chance of acquiring, retaining, and deftly using multiple languages.

The beauty of bilingual education is that it presents students with immediate as well as long-term benefits, many of which the children can utilize even as they find their places as productive members of the workforce and society at large. Here are some of the advantages of having your child undergo a bilingual education program and how they can benefit from it in the coming years.

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Preparing students for college or career is arguably the biggest goal for High School. I like the focus of this particular principal, spotlighted in an article in The 74 Million:

Principal’s View: To Prepare Students to Enter a Tech-Focused Business World, Create Schools With the Workplace in Mind

Consider the world students face when they graduate. For many, their choices lead to college, vocational training or manufacturing careers that rely heavily on advanced technologies — from robotics and 3-D printing to equipment powered by artificial intelligence. Two decades from now, their jobs will be even more tech-focused, as workplaces adopt innovations we’ve yet to even imagine.

Read on…

Check out these Ask a Tech Teacher articles and resources on College and Career:

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Here are the most-read posts for the month of March

1. Social Media or COVID: Which is more dangerous to students?
2. 5 (free) Posters about Learning
3. Websites that add sparkle (and learning) to Spring
4. Guiding Students through the Crisis in Ukraine
5. A Lesson Plan for Addressing What’s in the News
6. Invention Convention is coming
7. Celebrate Pi Day and Maths Day
8. Using VR to Visualize Complex Information
9. 23 Websites on Biomes, Habitats, Landforms
10. 7+ Websites to Teach Financial Literacy

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

1. Preparing for College or Career
2. How to Become a Tech Teacher
3. Tech Tools for Reading Fluency
4. Resources to Teach Taxes
5. Easter Websites
6. Earth Day Activities
7. Digital Literacy
8. Create a Macro
9. Websites on Architecture/Engineering

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National Library Week is April 3-9, 2022. It allows us to promote our local libraries and their workers. Find more about here at the American Library Association.

Because I  know most of you online only, I thought I’d share my favorite online libraries with you:

For Children

1. Aesop for Children–collection of fables
2. Actively Learn–add PDFs of your choice to a library that can be annotated, read, and shared.
3. Audio Books–apps for books purchased through Audio Books (and free ones)
4. Bookopolis–focused on student reading
5. Books that Grow–read a story at many different reading levels
6. Class Literature
7. Epic–a reading library for kids, 15,000 books; most digital devices
8. RAZ Kids–wide variety of reading levels, age groups, with teacher dashboards
9. Reading Rainbow–library of books; free to try
10. Signed Stories–beautiful stories in sign language
11. Tumblebooks (fee)–focused on student reading

For All Ages

1. Free Books–download any of our 23,469 classic books, and read
2. Great Books Online by Bartleby
3. IBooks–amazing way to download and read books.
4. International Library
5. Internet Archive— Internet Archive offers over 12,000,000 freely downloadable books and texts. There is also a collection of 550,000 modern eBooks that may be borrowed by anyone with a free archive.org account.
6. Kindle–read ebooks, newspapers, magazines, textbooks and PDFs on an easy-to-use interface.
7. Librivox–free public domain audio books
8. Loyal Books
9. Many Books–Over 33,000 ebooks that can be browsed by language, author, title. 
10. Online Books Page
11. Open Library
12. OWL Eyes–for the classics
13. Unite for books (free) — gorgeous, easy-to-navigate site.

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

April 4th-6th:

20% discount on Early Bird sign-up for online professional development offered on your schedule:

20 Webtools in 20 Days

with coupon code KZJ8MBNV

What You Get With Enrollment

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March 31st is called World Backup Day. At least once a year, backup your data files to an external drive (like a flash drive). This is one that isn’t connected to your local computer so can’t be compromised if you get a virus. It’s good to always backup data to cloud drives or a different drive on your computer but once a year, do the entire collection of data files to what is called an ‘air gap’ drive–one that is separated from any internet connection.

How to do this 

There are various ways to back up your data. You can back up your data to an external device or a cloud-based backup service, or to both. You might even make more than one backup to external storage devices and keep the two copies in different places (providing protection and access to your data even if one of the backup devices is destroyed or inaccessible. Preserving your valuable documents and images for future access and use requires planning, as well as the use of automatic backup services.

To back up PC/Windows, use Windows Backup:

• • Click the start button.
  • Go to Control Panel
  • Select ‘Backup and Restore’
  • Select ‘Backup Now’

From there, select a drive with sufficient space and start. Be forewarned: If you have a lot of data, it takes a while. You can work on your computer while it’s backing up; it’ll just be slower.

Mac: Use the Time Machine tool.

Chromebook: No need. Everything is saved to the cloud. Now if you want to backup your cloud, use a service like Backupify.

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