Tag: lists

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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Wikispaces, one of education’s standout collaborative websites, closed at the end of June 2018. Thousands of teachers have used the free Wikispaces platform to share materials with students and colleagues, to run online classrooms, or as the virtual arm of a blended course. Its robustness and versatility allowed teachers to engage in discussion boards, forums, share all sorts of media, and create a personalized environment that could be tweaked to adapt to individual needs.

Its end has left teachers scrambling for alternatives that accomplish the same goals within a tight education budget.

Let’s back up a moment: What is a wiki?

A wiki is a collaborative website that collects and organizes content created and revised by users. 

The most well-known example of a wiki is Wikipedia but others include Wikimedia Commons and WikiHow.

If you’re one of the over 10 million teachers and students forced to find an alternative to Wikispaces, start here:

Wikispaces Replacement 101

1. Build a wiki from scratch

If you want to simply recreate your current Wikispaces environment, here are two wiki platforms that will allow you to do that:

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Resource list constantly updated here

Many of my most popular articles are about mouse skills. Every year, tens of thousands of teachers visit Ask a Tech Teacher to find resources for teaching students how to use a mouse. No surprise because using a mouse correctly is one of the most important pre-keyboarding skills. Holding it is not intuitive and if learned wrong, becomes a habit that’s difficult to break.

The earlier posts are still active, but I’ve updated this resource with more websites and posters to assist in starting off your newest computer aficionados.

Mouse Skills

1. Bees and Honey
2. Drawing Melody–draw in many colors with the mouse and create music
3. Hover skills–drag mouse over the happy face and see it move
4. Left-click practice while playing the piano
5. MiniMouse
6. Mouse and tech basics–video
7. Mouse practice—drag, click
8. Mouse skills
9. Mouse Song
10. Mr. Picasso Head
11. OwlieBoo–mouse practice
12. Wack-a-gopher (no gophers hurt in this)

Puzzles

Kids love puzzles and they are a great way to teach drag-and-drop skills with the mouse buttons. Here are some of my favorites:

1. Digipuzzles–great puzzles for geography, nature, and holidays
2. Jigsaw Planet–create your own picture jigsaw
3. Jigsaw puzzles
4. Jigzone–puzzles
5. Jigsaw Puzzles–JS

Adults

1. Mousing Around
2. Skillful Senior

Posters

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As of June 16, 2018, Today’s Meet closed (read the full details here). That iconic backchannel chat platform for classroom teachers and learners, the one that for ten years was the first name thought of when discussing feedback and collaboration, one that quickly became a staple in classrooms and conferences. I went to my PLN for thoughts on what they’ll use in its stead. It turns out, there are good options, depending upon whether you primarily use Today’s Meet for:

• backchannel and student response
• polls, forms, or surveys
• warm-up and exit tickets

Here are webtool replacements you can use for summer or fall classes:

Backchannel and Student Response

A backchannel is a way for students to chat about lesson material while it’s being taught. It occurs in realtime but is non-intrusive to classwork. The teacher can throw a question out to students and evaluate learning or needs based on answers. Or students can pose a question and get answers from classmates. Here are three options you will like:

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

1.  How to Wrap up Tech for the School Year
2. Touch-Typing: Rote vs Integrated Learning or Rote and Integrated Learning?
3. Kiddom’s Content Library Makes Differentiation Faster Than Ever
4. Positive focus; Positive behaviors
5. EdTech Magazine’s 50 Must-read K-12 IT Blogs
6. 10 Ways to Wrap Up the School Year
7. 5 Best Websites for IELTS Exam Prep
8. Study.com Makes the College Dream a Reality for Lots of Students

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Wrapping up your school technology at the end of the school year is as complicated as setting it up in September. There are endless backups, shares, cleanings, changed settings, and vacation messages that — if not done right — can mean big problems when you return from summer vacation. If you have a school device, a lot of the shutdown steps will be done by the IT folks as they back up, clean, reformat, and maybe re-image your device. If you have a personal device, assigned by the school but yours to take home, the steps will be more numerous but really, not more complicated.

Here’s a list. Skip those that don’t apply to you and complete those that do. I won’t take time in this article for a how-to on each activity so if you don’t know how to complete one, check with your IT folks or Google it:

Read more on TeachHUB

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Memorial Day (May 28, 2018) is the time we remember all of those soldiers who gave their lives in the defense of American freedom. In war and peace, they made the ultimate sacrifice and because of them we are privileged to live the American Dream.

Once a year, we honor them, their sacrifice, and those they left behind. Here are some activities to help students understand the import of this day:

1. Folding the American flag
2. In Flanders Field--poem
3. Memorial Day Messages, Speeches, Oaths, Poems, Anthems, and images
4. Memorial Day Poems
5. Memorial Day Poetry–poems
6. Memorial Day Prayer
7. Memorial Day puzzle I
8. Memorial Day Puzzle II
9. Memorial Day DigitPuzzle
10. Memorial Day Quiz
11. Memorial Day Word Search
12. Primary source recollections of War
13. Quotes about Memorial Day/Wars
14. Who you are remembering–Americans killed in action

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