Tag: lists

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

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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.

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

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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.

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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:

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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 Celebrations Across the World (video)
3. Christmas puzzles and games
4. Christmas—history—fun video
5. Christmas Traditions Around the World (video)
6. Gift Hunt–updated version of 12 Days of Christmas–just as much fun
7. Holiday Crossword
8. Holiday Elf Games
9. Holiday Hangman II
10. Holiday music II–sing along with the music–the site provides the words
11. Holiday—Math Facts
12. Holiday—North Pole Academy
13. Phone call from Santa
14. Santa Tracker

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This week, I’ll post updated suggestions to get your computers and technology ready for the blitz of projects you’ll swear to accomplish in New Year resolutions. Here’s what you’ll get (links won’t be active until the post goes live):

1. 8+ Ways to Speed Up Your Computer — December 13th
2. 9 Ways to Update Your Online Presence — December 14th
3. Backup and Image your computer — December 15th

Regular readers of Ask a Tech Teacher know these are updated each December. New readers: Consider these body armor in the tech battle so you can jubilantly overcome rather than dramatically succumb.

9 Ways to Update Your Online Presence

For most teachers I know, life zooms by, filled with students, parents, meetings, grading, and thinking. There are few breaks to update/fix/maintain the tech tools that allow us to pursue our trade.

That includes your online presence and all those personal profiles. But, that must happen or they no longer accomplish what we need. If they aren’t updated, we are left wondering why our blog isn’t getting visitors, why our social media Tweeple don’t generate activity, and why we aren’t being contacted for networking. Here’s a short list of  items that won’t take long to accomplish:

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I’ve updated Ask a Tech Teacher’s list of ten math tools we posted in 2016 to be shorter and with a new option. The new one is larger and in the #1 position. I think this will better reflect what’s going on today in our classrooms:

It can be difficult to teach math, but with the proper tools, it can often be made easier. This article will discuss some of the best tools for tutoring math online, and the way they can help teachers to improve their student’s skills. The 5 best tools for tutoring maths online are:

1. ByteLearn.com – Digital math teaching assistant for teachers

ByteLearn is a platform that helps teachers spend less time preparing materials and still gives each student individualised training. Using ByteLearn, teachers can track students’ development, keep tabs on their performance, and adjust the curriculum to suit each student’s needs. With just one click, teachers may produce 7th Grade Math worksheets like Combining Like Terms, Grade 7 Math quizzes like Distributive Property , Seventh Grade Math unit tests, and 7 Grade Math Practice Questions on Distributive Property etc.

Give ByteLearn a try in your classroom today!

Pricing: Free for teachers and students

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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. Berenstein Bears Give Thanks (app)
2. Canadian Thanksgiving
3. Online/Offline Thanksgiving activities
4. Plimoth Plantation–a field trip of a Pilgrim’s life. Included on this real-life site is a video of the Pilgrim’s crossing to the New World
5. Thanksgiving coloring book
6. Thanksgiving edu-websites–CybraryMan
7. Thanksgiving Games
8. Thanksgiving games and puzzles
9. Thanksgiving games–Quia
10. Thanksgiving information–history, more
11. Thanksgiving Jigsaw
12. Thanksgiving Lesson Plans
13. Thanksgiving Wordsearch
14. Turkey Templates — activities in Google Slides

If you’re an iPad school, try one of these:

1. Berenstein Bears Give Thanks
2. Primary Games–games, coloring books, more
3. Thanksgiving coloring book

If you’re looking for projects, you’ll find two on Ask a Tech Teacher:

1. A Holiday Card
2. A Holiday Flier

For more, click here:

• Thanksgiving ASCII Art
• Comics
• Countdown Clock for the Holiday
• Team Challenge
• Thanksgiving Poll

Here’s a gallery of some of the Thanksgiving/Holiday projects:

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