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November

Coming soon: Discounts on Google Play products. Stay tuned!

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.

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

1. Inspire Young Writer’s with Young Writers Program
2. October is Dyslexia Awareness Month
3. Digital Citizenship Week–Oct. 19-23–Here’s What You Need
4. 10 Best US Colleges for Computer Science
5. How do I become a Web Designer?
6. 7 Apps That Inspire Students
7. A Geek is asked, “Who are you?”
8. Halloween Projects, Websites, Apps, Books, and a Costume
9. Long-needed and Welcome Table Tool From JotForm
10. Why Game Based Learning Is the Right Choice for Remote Teaching

–Comments are closed but feel free to contact me via Twitter (@askatechteacher).

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Here’s a preview of what’s coming up on Ask a Tech Teacher in November. It’s a short month and we wish you the best during your holiday celebrations:

• How to Make Kindness Part of Your Classes
• National STEM/STEAM Day
• Tech Tips: 4 Stages of Keyboarding Growth
• 16 Sites, 3 Apps, 7 Projects for Thanksgiving

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I don’t know many kids who aren’t excited to play games. Savvy educators have built lesson plans based on this interest for years. Today, because of the changes in education, the use of games to reinforce learning, to teach, and to engage students in their own education has become one of the most effective tools to bridge the gap between school-based and remote learning. Here’s what a joint study from Legends of Learning and Vanderbilt University found:

“…students who played the games outperformed their peers on standardized tests. Additionally, teachers saw dramatic increases in engagement and performance. “

In fact, 92% of teachers indicated they would like to use curriculum-based games in the future.

What is GBL

What is this magic wand? It’s called Game Based Learning (GBL). It simply means teachers include games in their lesson plans to teach curricular concepts. By using the games kids already love–want to play–GBL has an opportunity to turn students into lifelong learners who enjoy learning.

Good example of GBL: SplashLearn 

A good example of game based learning is the free-to-teachers program called SplashLearn. SplashLearn is an easy-to-use COPA-compliant, Common Core-aligned math curriculum for grades Kindergarten-5th that uses game-based learning to teach mathematical concepts. Students learn specific skills assigned by the teacher (to a group or individual) by playing age-appropriate, intuitive games based on appealing characters and fun interactions. These are welcome alternatives to the rote drill that many of us grew up on.

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If you’re an online teacher who offers professional development classes to educators, this article from an Ask a Tech Teacher contributor will help you understand the basics of using SEO to reach those who need your expertise. It explains SEO, discusses the importance of keywords and backlinks, and more. 

SEO Tips for Online Education | Reach Students With SEO

Online education is getting popular day by day but reaching the applicants and students is crucial in the online education industry. There are so many online courses available on the internet these days and being among the top searches of any search engine has become a challenge. But it is also the only way to reach out to your potential students.

It is very simple, if your online course shows up on the first page, it will have a chance to reach students but if your page is ranked on the second or third page, students might never see it and they won’t signup for it.

The keyword “online education” has 14800 search hits per month. This is enough to understand that online education is trending and why your online courses should be on top of the search engines. But how to secure a top spot?

Well, the answer is SEO.

Here, we are going to discuss what is SEO, how it can be used in the online education industry, and how SEO campaign is done.

What is SEO?

SEO is a way to use relevant keywords for your business and secure a top spot on the search engine but there is more to it than just the keywords. It uses other strategies including content creation, strong link building, fast speed, and user-friendly layout among other things.

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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: Why Learn Keyboarding?

Category: Keyboarding

Here’s a poster with the top nine reasons why students want to learn keyboarding:

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

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Education has changed. No one knows yet if it’s for better or worse but we all understand that nothing’s as it once was. That means many traditional teaching tools are no longer the best choice for the new norms. Over the past few months (well, since March), I’ve spent a lot of time reinventing my teaching protocols, doing a rigorous evaluation of whether my standard practices are best suited for the new best practices for teaching at home and school (click here for lots of info on COVID-19 and education). Because often, I’m not physically with students to help with tech problems or down the hall from the school’s tech guru if I have problems, I now heavily select for digital tools that are quick to setup, intuitive to use, and straightforward to understand as well as engaging, flexible, and scalable with dynamic traits that can be re-engineered for a diversity of situations.

I’ve found one you’ll want to know about. It’s called JotForm Tables.

You may be familiar with JotForms. It is a popular forms builder that uses customizable templates and a drag-and-drop interface to collect and curate data. It works on all platforms and can be shared via a link or embed. For more, read my review here. Over the past several years, JotForms has released a variety of features that have helped educators be more effective. These include Smart PDF Forms, a PDF Editor, JotForm Cards, and JotForm Reports (click for my reviews).

The free JotForm Tables addresses the ongoing need teachers and schools have for easy-to-understand, easy-to-customize data to help with decision-making. In place of the conventional intimidating table you get from standard spreadsheet programs, JotForm Tables offers an attractive layout, loads of customization options, inclusion of all kinds of data (like files, calendars, check boxes, yes-no answers, and ratings)–all of it quickly modified to your needs and sharable via an Excel file, a CSV, a PDF, or a link.

Here’s what one of my class tables looks like:

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Three holidays are fast-approaching–Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. If you’re a teacher, that means lots of tie-ins to make school festive and relevant to students.

Here are ideas for Halloween projects, lesson plans, websites, and apps (check here for updated links):

Websites and Apps

1. 30-day Halloween fitness challenge
2. Build a Jack-o-lantern (in Google Slides)
3. Carving Pumpkins
4. Carve-a-Pumpkin from Parents magazine – Resolute Digital, LLC (app)
5. Enchanted Learning
6. Halloween games, puzzles–clean, easy to understand website and few ads!
7. Halloween ghost stories
8. Halloween counting & words games – IKIDSPAD LLC (app)
9. Halloween Kahoot Games (video for teachers)
10. Halloween Science
11. Halloween WordSearch – FinBlade (app)
12. Halloween Voice Transformer (app)
13. Landon’s Pumpkins – LAZ Reader [Level P–second grade] – Language Technologies, Inc. (app)
14. Make A Zombie – Skunk Brothers GmbH (app)
15. Math vs. Zombies (app)
16. Meddybemps Spooky
17. Readwords reading collection for Halloween
18. Readworks Halloween Reading Resources
19. Signing Halloween–a video
20. Skelton Park
21. The Kidz Page
22. WordSearch Halloween – AFKSoft (app)

Projects

1. ASCII Art–Computer Art for Everyone (a pumpkin–see inset)
2. Lesson Plan: Halloween letter for grades 2-5
3. Make a Holiday Card
4. A Holiday Card
5. A Holiday flier

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I don’t often get personal on this blog. It’s not about me–it’s about educators and their profession–but times are different this year. When you’re geeky, you don’t always think like the people around you or answer questions in the usual way. A writing class I took asked us newbies to tell the class a little bit about ourselves. Here’s how I answered that:

I am a multi-cellular, hairless, short-snouted, large-brained bipedal omnivore, evolved over millions of years within the classification of Primates, in response to dramatic environment changes on the planet Earth to become Homo sapiens sapiens.

I occupy the geologic address

34E43.29 N and 117E10.82 W

…the political address

xxxx xxxx Dr., Laguna Hills CA.

…the email address

[email protected]

…and the internet address (my IP location)

xx.x.xx.xx

I am one of over 8 billion big brained creatures living on Earth, each with unique talents and traits allowing us to best fit our local environment. I am a social animal, living in a large community–too large to know my neighbors by the methods other Primates use of ‘grooming’. Instead, we ‘gossip’ and ‘storytell’. I am surrounded by peers who feel superior to other mammals based on subjective factors such as physical characteristics or brain size. This primitive attitude has allowed my kind to take over the world but not run it well.  Without significant changes, we will not remain the dominant species for even as long as dinosaurs, sharks, jelly fish, alligators, Great Apes, or horsetail ferns.

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You probably found dozens of new apps over the holidays that you can’t wait to try out in your classes. They all sound educational, rigorous, and dynamic but the problem is there are far more than you can use. You may have decided to try one a week — or one a month — or some other method of doling them out in measurable quantities that won’t overwhelm you or students.

I have a better strategy: Limit new apps to five. All year. Introduce them; let students get comfortable using them in varied circumstances, in multiple subjects. Only then expect students to take ownership of the apps’ ability to share the student’s knowledge. Here’s why five is a good yearly number. When students see too many apps, they:

• decide technology is confusing
• decide your class is confusing
• think they don’t need to get comfortable with any app because you’ll introduce a different one any moment

A colleague considers technology “as approachable as a porcupine”. Don’t let students think of the apps you’re so excited about as porcupines!

So, how do you pick those five apps? Here are three general guidelines:

1. The app must improve outcomes. Award-winning educator, presenter, and teacher-author Alice Keeler says, “Paperless is not a pedagogy”. What she means is: Go paperless not to save trees but to improve the education experience. How does this apply to the selection of apps? Apps used in your lessons should improve learning rather than just being a cool app kids might like.
2. The tech must be there. You and your students must have the techiness to use the app. This is the most critical bottleneck for app selection. You may love what the app can do (like gamify math or quizzify science) but the technology required is more than you can handle, might require hours of time just to learn how to apply it. That’s not a good app for your circumstances. The app you choose should be within your skillset. Even better, that metric should apply to your students. If neither of you can self-train on an app, find a different one.
3. It must fill the M and R of SAMR. The SAMR Model (click link for more information) organizes technology as Substitution and Augmentation at a beginning level and Modification and Redefinition at the critical thinking and creativity level. For over a decade, teachers have considered it “good enough” to meet those first levels — like rote drills to replace worksheets. Not anymore. Now, apps you pick should require critical thinking — the M and R levels. These sorts of digital tools are not more complicated to use or more expensive. What they do is leverage learning more rigorously for both you and students.

* For ideas on how to select a specific app, read the introduction to 5 Favorite Classroom Apps.

Having said all of that, here are a selection of great apps to consider as you select your group of five:

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