Tag: lists

Every year, the world celebrates Earth Day on April 22nd, a day the United Nations recognizes as International Mother Earth Day. It is a day to remind ourselves of the importance of clean air, fresh water, and unlittered land. It’s when we can all participate in making that happen rather than accepting the trash-filled oceans, the smoggy skies, and the debris-laden land that is becoming the norm in our lives.

Despite the questionable health of our world, we have made progress. Back in 1970, when Earth Day was first celebrated, trucks spewed black smoke as they drove down the highways, toxic waste was dumped into oceans with no repercussions, and the general opinion was that the Earth took care of itself. That changed when U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson, Earth Day’s founder, witnessed the ravages of the 1969 massive oil spill in Santa Barbara California and decided it was time for someone to do something. When he looked around for that “someone”, it turned out to be himself. He started with a “national teach-in on the environment” with a simple goal: Encourage people to recognize the importance of protecting the Earth:

“It was on that day [Earth Day] that Americans made it clear they understood and were deeply concerned over the deterioration of our environment and the mindless dissipation of our resources.”

How effective is Earth Day

In the 49 years since the inception of Earth Day, there have been more than 48 major environmental “wins”. Here are some of those:

• The U.S. Clean Air Act was passed, a comprehensive federal law that regulates air emissions.
• The U.S. Clean Water Act was passed to regulate the discharge of pollutants into U.S. waters.
• The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was passed.
• The U.S. Endangered Species Act was passed to protect animal species that are disappearing.
• The Acid Rain (what happens when normal rain becomes loaded with offensive chemicals and scalds the skin) Program obtained emission reductions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides.
• The importance of the ozone layer to the health of the Earth is better understood.
• The consequences of too much plastic in the Earth’s oceans is coming home to roost.

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Many Christians celebrate Jesus Christ’s resurrection on Easter Sunday. To non-Christians (or non-traditional Christians), that event signifies a rebirth of spring that is filled with joy and gifts — and chocolate! Overall, it is America’s most-popular holiday with Christmas a close second. The date depends on the ecclesiastical approximation of the March equinox. This year, it’s April 12, 2020.

Here’s a good mixture of games, lesson plans, stories, and songs that can be blended into many academic subjects:

18+ Interactive Easter websites

Preschool-2

This website includes a colorful collection of Easter (and Spring) games and information that is visual and enticing to youngers. Games are Easter Math, Easter Egg Hunt, Easter Egg Dress-up, Easter Word hunt, complete-the-sentence, and more. Also, viewers will find websites about the history of Easter around the world.

ABCYa Easter Egg Hunt

Preschool-Kindergarten

Like all of ABCYa’s games and activities, Easter Egg Hunt is a colorful and intuitive educational game for young children.  It is easy-to-understand, playful, with favorite Easter symbols and energetic music that will engage children. The five Easter-themed games are easy-to-understand (no directions required) with a countdown clock to motivate activity. Nicely, it also aligns gameplay with the national standards met.

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April is National Poetry Month. For thirty days, we celebrate the value and joy that poetry brings to our world.  According to the Academy of American Poets, the goals are:

• Highlight the extraordinary legacy and ongoing achievement of American poets
• Introduce more Americans to the pleasures of reading poetry
• Bring poets and poetry to the public in immediate and innovative ways
• Make poetry a more important part of the school curriculum
• Increase the attention paid to poetry by national and local media
• Encourage increased publication, distribution, and sales of poetry books
• Increase public and private philanthropic support for poets and poetry

All across the nation, school, teachers, students, libraries, and families celebrate by reading, writing, and sharing poetry. Here are websites that do all that and more. Share them with students on a class page, Symbaloo, or another method you’ve chosen to share groups of websites with students.

When I was in high school, I was forced to learn poetry. I didn’t want to, saw no benefit to it, and unfortunately, the teacher didn’t change my mind. All that analyzing meaning and deconstructing stanzas went right over my head. Worse, selections such as Beowulf and anything by Elizabeth Barrett Browning seemed unrelated to my life and goals. Poems I loved like “The Charge of the Light Brigade”, “The Raven”, and “The Road Not Taken” were rare. It wasn’t until University, where I discovered that poetry speaks the language of dreams, that I fell in love with it.

Thankfully, today’s teachers communicate poetry’s essence much better than what I experienced.

What is poetry?

When many people think of poetry, they visualize flowing groupings of soulful words as pithy and dense as a fruitcake and for some, just as (un)appealing. I’ll get back to that in a minute, but first, here’s a definition (from Wikipedia):

an art form in which human language is used for its aesthetic qualities in addition to, or instead of, its notional and semantic content.

You are most likely to recognize a poem by its truncated lines that rarely end in a period (though this isn’t always true), the rhythm created when reading it, the liberal use of literary devices such as alliteration and similes, and its ability to tell an entire story in a very (very) few stanzas. A good poem not only communicates with words but with emotion, senses, and memories, it gives a reader permission to interpret the content in ways that speak to his/her dreams. It may ask a question or answer one but always, it encourages the reader to think.

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Getting ready for St. Patrick’s Day? Try these fun websites:

1. Color the shamrock
2. Color the Pot-o-gold
3. Color the leprechaun
4. Puzzle–St. Pat’s Puzzle
5. Puzzle–St. Pat’s puzzle II
6. Puzzle–St. Pat’s drag-and-drop puzzle
7. Puzzle–St. Pat’s slide puzzle
8. Puzzles and games
9. St. Patrick’s Day history–video
10. St. Pat’s Day songs–video
11. Tic tac toe
12. Webquest for St. Patrick’s Day I
13. Webquest II
14. Wordsearch

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The potential impact of Virtual Reality (VR) in the classroom can’t be overstated. It has become the most exciting education device in a decade, enticing students to become engaged in pretty much any topic that includes a VR overlay. As a learning tool, it’s affordable, inclusive, and worth the moderate learning curve required to get it up and running.

Let me step back a moment and explain what VR is. HowStuffWorks defines it this way:

using computer technology to create a simulated, three-dimensional world that a user can manipulate and explore while feeling as if he were in that world. 

Marxent explains it simply as:

the use of computer technology to create a simulated environment. Virtual Reality’s most immediately-recognizable component is the head-mounted display (HMD). 

If you (desperately) want to unpack this revolutionary tool in your classroom, there are lots of online resources — some free, some with a fee — available to address a wide variety of education needs. Here are my favorites:

900 VR Expeditions

If you use the Expeditions app (see below), here’s a curated spreadsheet of 900 free expeditions available to you and your classes.  It is crowd-sourced and sorted by tag, name, Panorama title, location, brief description, link, with a cell where teachers can note any additional required materials.

On a separate tab of the spreadsheet is a similar curated list of augmented reality expeditions, for those who have that technology available.

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Because AATT is a resource blog, we share lots of tips our group comes across in their daily teaching as well as materials shared by others we think you’d like. Some you agree with; others, not so much. Here’s a run-down on what you thought were the most valuable in 2019:

Top 10 Tech Tips

As a working technology teacher, I get hundreds of questions from parents about their home computers, how to do stuff, how to solve problems which I share with you. Here are the Top Ten tech tips from 2019. Between these ten, they had over 174,000 visitors during the year.

1. 16 Great Research Websites for Kids
2. 22 Websites and 4 Posters to Teach Mouse Skills
3. 11 Projects to Teach Digital Citizenship
4. Unplugged Activities
5. How to Create a Curriculum Map
6. 22 Digital Tools You Must Have in Your Classroom
7. 9 Good Collections of Videos for Education
8. 28 Unique Ideas for Publishing Student Work
9. How to Teach Mouse Skills to Pre-Keyboarders
10. Tech Tip #60: How to Add Shortcuts to the Desktop

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Throughout the year, I post websites and apps the Ask a Tech Teacher crew’s classes found useful, instructive, helpful in integrating technology into classroom lesson plans. Some, you agreed with us about; others not so much.

Here are the reviews you-all thought were the most helpful in efforts to weave tech into the classroom experience:

1. Quick Review of 7 Popular Math Programs
2. How to Use Google Drawings
3. 61 K-8 Hour of Code Suggestions–by Grade Level
4. 10 Tech Tools for Your Math Class
5. 4 Great Alternatives to Google Classroom
6. 11 Webtools That Make Images Talk
7. 6 Ways to Make Classroom Typing Fun
8. How to Use Google Sheets in the K-12 Classroom
9. Metaverse–Education Game-changer
10. 25 Websites for Poetry Month

Oh–would you mind adding me to your social media links? Here’s where you can find me:

Twitter:   @AskaTechTeacher

Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/kali.delamagente

Instagram: @AskaTechTeacher

Thanks! Have a wonderful 2020!

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Since we at Ask a Tech Teacher started this blog eight years ago, we’ve had almost 5.1 million views from visitors (about 10,000 follow us) to the 2,184 articles on integrating technology into the classroom. This includes tech tips, website/app reviews, tech-in-ed pedagogy, how-tos, videos, and more. We have regular features like:

• Weekly Websites and Tech Tips (sign up for the newsletter)
• Dear Otto Help Column
• Edtech Reviews
• Lesson plans

If you’ve just arrived at Ask a Tech Teacher, start here.

It always surprises us what readers find to be the most and least provocative. The latter is as likely to be a post one of us on the crew put heart and soul into, sure we were sharing Very Important Information, as the former. Talk about humility.

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Need a few websites to fill in free minutes? Here are Holiday websites that will keep students busy while teaching them:

1. 12 Days of Christmas
2. Christmas puzzles and games
3. Christmas—history—fun video
4. Holiday Crossword
5. Holiday Elf Games
6. Holiday Hangman II
7. Holiday music II–sing along with the music–the site provides the words
8. Holiday—find the word
9. Holiday—Math Facts
10. Holiday—North Pole Academy
11. Holidays around the world
12. Phone call from Santa
13. Santa Tracker

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To meet state and national requirements (and receive critical funding), schools must be open a minimum number of days each year. When dramatic weather hits — be it snow or violent storms or another emergency — it becomes impossible to reach the classroom. That means lesson plans aren’t completed, assessments aren’t taken, and kids don’t learn. There used to be no alternative but more and more, schools are using technology to keep the learning going. For example, Wabash County issues all students MacBook Airs and iPads (your school could use Chromebooks) that are available to students who can’t get to school:

All Wabash County students in grades 3 through 12 have a MacBook Air they take home every day. For snow days, K2 students can bring home the iPads they use at school. 

Pascack Valley Regional High School District in northern New Jersey makes available lesson plans and assignments that can be accessed from home, on the Internet:

Before the snow fell, teachers were prepped, parents were warned and students had received enough assignments to fill a snow day.

These Districts make education-related emergencies easier on all stakeholders by using tools that are simple to roll out and intuitive to use — in some cases, already implemented in daily classrooms.

If your school is looking for virtual teaching tools, you’ll want to consider two options: 1) a virtual meeting room that closely replicates the traditional class where students see both teacher and classmates and have access to whatever is normally shown on the class screen; and/or 2) virtual access to lesson plans, resources, assessments, and chats usually available in a schoolroom.

Here are seven options that satisfy these requirements. The first four are virtual meeting programs while the last three are robust Learning Management Systems that include everything required to run an online class:

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