Tag: lists

Presidents’ Day is an American holiday celebrated on the third Monday in February–this year, February 19, 2018. Originally established in 1885 in recognition of President George Washington, it is still unofficially called “Washington’s Birthday” by many. The holiday became known as Presidents’ Day after it was moved as part of 1971’s Uniform Monday Holiday Act, an attempt to create more three-day weekends for the nation’s workers. Several states still have individual holidays honoring the birthdays of Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and other figures.

Here are fifteen ways to celebrate in your classroom including websites, games, activities, printables, quizzes, audios, songs, interactive maps,  crafts, flashcards, videos, webquests, books, posters, trading cards, lesson plans, word searches, puzzles, speeches, articles, animations, biographies, and more:

1. Activities

From Apples 4 the Teacher, a well-known resource site for teachers and homeschoolers, this site provides links to President-themed coloring pages, stories, biographies, word searches, word jumbles, puzzles, and book reviews that can be used to reinforce learning about all of America’s presidents.

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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 2018:

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 2018. Between these ten, they had over 174,000 visitors during the year.

1. 10 Tech Tools for Your Math Class
2. How to Teach Digital Citizenship in 1st Grade
3. 169 Tech Tip #146: 18 Ideas for Warm-ups, Exit Tickets
4. How to Teach Mouse Skills to Pre-Keyboarders
5. Is Orton-Gillingham Right For Your Students?
6. Use the SAMR Model to Spearhead Technology in Your Classroom
7. 5 Ways Teachers Can Stay on Top of Technology
8. Image Copyright Do’s and Don’ts
9. What to do When Computers Are Down
10. 9 Mistakes Teachers Make Using Tech in the Classroom

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For a decade, when I thought of desktop publishing, I turned to Microsoft Publisher. I loved its flexibility, adaptability, and ease of use both for classroom projects and home. But then I moved on to other alternatives, like Lucid Press that were more flexible and affordable for educational purposes.

Really, I didn’t see a lot of other alternatives until Sara Stringer, from the Ask a Tech Teacher, came up with this great article about desktop publishing options. Some of these–like Word–have changed so much over the years that they are now a provide reasonable alternatives to laying out an attractive professional design in a program everyone is familiar with:

Technology advanced drastically in the past few years, allowing people to create different products with the aid of a computer. One of the most popular products that were drastically improved by the presence of technology is printed materials, which were commercially printed from a single file that was created using desktop publishing software. Printing digital files can be performed in a short period of time, with the finished product being bound with the help of a strong type of glue, which securely holds the pages together.

With the prevalence of digital computers, tablets, and smartphones nowadays, people could easily create their own digital files with the help of software programs. Publishers would have total control of the things that they wanted to do, and their ideas could produce high-end digital published materials such as brochures, menus, books, and magazines, among others. It is important to find out the best software program that will be used by a desktop publisher. Because there are many available software programs in the market today, the preference among publishers varies. The following software programs are the most common desktop publishing tools used by amateurs and professionals:

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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. How to Use Google Sheets in the K-12 Classroom
2. Quick Review of 7 Popular Math Programs
3. 9 Best-in-Class Digital Storytelling Tools
4. What is Microsoft Sway?
5. What is Kiddom? Why is it right for you? And free resources to inform your teaching
6. What is Google Keep and Why Use it in Your Classroom?
7. 3 Comic Creators That Will Wow Your Students
8. Gamechanger: Type to Learn is Now in the Cloud!
9. 14 Ways to use Scribble Maps
10. How to Use Google Forms in the Classroom

Oh–I don’t get enough followers on Twitter! Would you mind adding me to your list? Here’s the link:

@AskaTechTeacher

Thanks! Have a wonderful 2019!

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

1. College Credit Classes onTechnology in Education
2. End-of-year Maintenance: Image and Back-up Digital Devices
3.  End of Year Maintenance: Update Your Online Presence
4. End-of-Year Maintenance: 19 Steps To A Speedier Computer
5. 3 Free SEL Activities from SafeSchools
6. Why Should Students Learn Computer Science? A Teacher’s Perspective
7. Root Robotics–Great Way to Extend Hour of Code
8. Holiday Gifts for Teachers
9. 13 Holiday Websites and 13 Projects

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Since we at Ask a Tech Teacher started this blog eight years ago, we’ve had over 5.3 million visitors to the 2,112 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 and apps to fill in sponge time? Here are Thanksgiving websites that will keep students busy and still teach them:

1. Canadian Thanksgiving
2. Online/Offline Thanksgiving activities
3. Plimoth Plantation
4. Starfall–Silly Turkey
5. Thanksgiving edu-websites–CybraryMan
6. Thanksgiving Games
7. Thanksgiving games and puzzles
8. Thanksgiving games–Quia
9. Thanksgiving information–history, more
10. Thanksgiving Jigsaw
11. Thanksgiving Jigsaw II
12. Thanksgiving Lesson Plans
13. Thanksgiving Tic-tac-toe
14. Thanksgiving video–Brainpop
15. Thanksgiving Wordsearch
16. The First Thanksgiving

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

1. The 101 of Research for Kids
2. Differentiating with Personalized Learning
3. Learning Strategies for your Classroom
4. How to Teach Critical Thinking
5. What to Consider When Assigning Homework
6. New Ways to Gamify Learning
7. Print or Digital Textbooks? What’s the Low-down?
8. High School Technology Curriculum Coming!
9. Great Back to School Activities
10. Mouse and Trackpad Websites for your Classroom

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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 (or 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?

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