Tag: lists

Invention Convention Worldwide is a global K-12 invention education curricular program mapped to national and state educational standards that teaches students problem-identification, problem-solving, entrepreneurship and creativity skills and builds confidence in invention, innovation and entrepreneurship for life. Signups for the annual Raytheon Technologies Invention Convention US Nationals (2023) start March 31st.

Here are websites to help you and your students learn about the excitement of inventions:

1. A Guide to Inventions
2. Famous Inventors
3. How Inventions Change History (video)
4. How the popsicle was invented (a TEDEd video)
5. Invented by accident I
6. Invented by accident II
7. Inventions from the Military –crazy ones

Check back here for updates on this list.

More about inventions

• Teach About Inventions with PowerPoint
• 5 Ideas for Teaching Students the Most Important Skill They’ll Need
• 5 Fun Science Experiments Kids Do at Home

Here are popular online resources about Chemistry:

1. Beaker–a digital beaker app
2. Chemistry collection from Carnegie
3. ChemCapers
4. Chemistry instructional videos
5. ChemmyBear–resources for Chemistry and AP Chemistry classes
6. CK12 Chemistry simulations
7. Collisions Chemistry
8. Concord Consortium–chemistry, earth science, engineering, life science, physics
9. Crash Course: Chemistry (videos)
10. EMD PTE — periodic table
11. Interactive Periodic Table
12. Molecules–Molecules is an application for viewing three-dimensional renderings of molecules and manipulating them using your fingers.
13. Periodic Table of Elements–interactive
14. Periodic Table videos 
15. PhET Simulations for chemistry and physics
16. Reactions–short videos on chemistry topics
17. Slow Motion Chemistry — videos on chemistry

(more…)

Spring websites, lesson plans, printables, activities:

1. 7 Science Experiments that Teach About Spring
2. Books from Scholastic about Spring
3. Life cycle of a snake
4. Life Cycle Lesson Plans
5. Life Cycle resources
6. Life Cycles
7. Life Cycle Symbaloo
8. Plant life cycle
9. Spring Puzzle
10. Spring Garden–click to find flowers
11. Spring Games
12. Spring Vocabulary (video)
13. Spring Word Scramble
14. Spring Word Search
15. What Happens in Spring (video)
16. What Happens in Spring–PS (video)

Ideas from TeacherVision:

Printables

1. The Very Hungry Caterpillar Activities Booklet
2. Butterfly Life Cycle Worksheet
3. Baseball Fun
4. May Day
5. Butterfly Facts and Questions
6. Butterfly Life Cycle Quiz
7. The Very Hungry Caterpillar Poster & Activities
8. More Spring Printables

Lesson Plans

(more…)

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

1. #WorldReadAloudDay February 1st
2. Groundhog Day and the 100th Day of School
3. 14 Tech Assessment Strategies
4. 72: Check Your Math in Excel
5. Is ChatGPT Writing Your Students’ Homework? New Tech Will Detect It
6. Tech Tip #45 My Screen is Sideways!!
7. 57+ Kindergarten Websites That Tie into Classroom Lessons
8. You Know You’re a Techy Teacher When…
9. 3 Projects to Teach 1st Grade Architecture
10. Teach Vocabulary with the Frayer Model

(more…)

Here are popular puzzles resources teachers are using to teach mouse skills, critical thinking, and more. There are a few for the upcoming St. Patrick’s Day:

1. Digipuzzles–great puzzles for geography, nature, and holidays
2. I’m a Puzzle–create your own puzzles
3. Jigsaw Explorer–make your own
4. Jigsaw Planet–create your own picture jigsaw
5. Jigsaw puzzles
6. Jigzone–puzzles
7. Jigsaw Puzzles–JS
8. Kindergarten puzzles
9. Puzzle—St. Pat’s Puzzle
10. Puzzle—drag-and-drop puzzle
11. Puzzle—St. Pat’s slide puzzle

Copyright ©2023 usna.wordpress.com – All rights reserved.

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’s the list of Kindergarten websites I use most often during the school year. Notice that many of the headings are links to more websites under that theme:

Animals

Art

1. 1. Coloring Books
   2. Drawing

Coding

Critical Thinking

Digital Citizenship

1. 1. Bullying–a read-along book
   2. Cybersmart Hero
   3. Hector’s World–Cyberbullying

Farms

(more…)

Here are fourteen fun Valentine sites to fill those few minutes betwixt and between lessons, projects, bathroom breaks, lunch, and everything else:

1. Apps for Valentine’s Day
2. Drag-and-drop games
3. Google Drawings Magnetic Poetry from Ctrl Alt Achieve
4. Games and puzzles
5. Games and stories
6. ‘I love you’ in languages Afrikaans to Zulu
7. Match
8. Poem generator
9. Puppy jigsaw
10. Rebus game
11. Sudoku
12. Tic-tac-toe
13. Typing
14. Write in a heart

Do you use any I missed? If you’re looking for more, here’s my collection.

(more…)

Good websites and apps, some for kids, some for adults. Beware: Many have in-app purchases and advertising

(more…)

Ask a Tech Teacher has a book of 169 tech tips to energize your classroom. We’ve added about ten more since publication. Here are some of the tips educators find most useful. The heading will click through to a more detailed article on the tip:

Tech Tip #167–How to Evaluate Apps

Here are thirteen tips to evaluate the apps you’ll find useful in your classroom:

1. 1. free or small fee
   2. stand the test of time
   3. positive parent reports
   4. rated ‘for everyone’ or ‘low maturity’
   5. no in-app purchases or billing
   6. support the ‘4 C’s’–creativity, critical thinking, communication, collaboration
   7. offer compelling content (this is subjective: ‘Compelling’ varies teacher-to-teacher and student-to-student)
   8. are not distracting or overwhelming in colors, music, or activity
   9. offer levels that become increasingly more difficult, providing differentiation for student needs
   10. few ads–and those that are there do not take up a significant portion of the screen
   11. intuitive to use with a shallow learning curve that encourages independence
   12. easily applied to a variety of educational environments
   13. doesn’t collect personal information other than user credentials or data required to operate the app

Tech Tip #68: Make Desktop Icons Big or Little

• Highlight all desktop icons by clicking and dragging a box around them.
• Push Ctrl and roll the mouse wheel.  It enlarges or delarges them.

Tech Tip #147: 5 Ways to Involve Parents

1. have an open door policy
2. create a family-friendly environment
3. offer parent technology classes
4. communicate often with parents
5. solicit help in/out of the classroom

Tech Tip: The Windows Clipboard

Windows has a native clipboard (I see some of you rolling your eyes, like of course you know this. Bear with me) that holds twenty-ish clips. Here’s how you access it:

• • Click the Windows Key and V.
  • That opens the multi-clip clipboard.
  • If you don’t have it activated, the shortkey will ask you to activate it.
  • If the clip is one you want to save–maybe a temp

Note: If you click through to the original article, you’ll have to scroll down a bit because this was posted under ‘What’s Happening on my Writer’s Blog’.

Tech Tip: Get Rid of Spam in Text Messages

The law requires email senders include ‘unsubscribe’ in the email (at least, they do in America–not sure about other countries), but that doesn’t apply to text messages. Here’s a trick that will stop some:

• • Select the text message.
  • Select the sender from the top detail with click-hold (in the case of the video, I click-hold the phone number). It will open the contact card
  • Click ‘Info’
  • One of the options toward the bottom will be ‘Block’. Click that.
  • When you return to the email, it will show it’s blocked.

Note: If you click through to the original article, you’ll have to scroll down a bit because this was posted under ‘What’s Happening on my Writer’s Blog’.

I hope these are helpful. I’ll have more later!

Copyright ©2023 AskaTechTeacher.com – All rights reserved.

Here’s the sign-up link if the image above doesn’t work:

https://eepurl.com/chNlYb

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, and author of the tech thrillers, To Hunt a Sub and Twenty-four Days. You can find her resources at Structured Learning.

Since we at Ask a Tech Teacher started this blog fourteen years ago, we’ve had almost 5.9 million views, about 10,000 followers who read some or all of our 2,931 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)
  • 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 topics. 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.

Here they are–my top 10 lists for 2022:

(more…)