The name is exactly the same–just hosted somewhere else. The new site has everything the old one did, including
The old site will still be live so all your links will work. But I won’t update the collections. For that, go to https://askatechteacher.com.
Questions? I’m here at askatechteacher@gmail.com.
Since we at Ask a Tech Teacher started this blog fourteen years ago, we’ve had almost 5.9 million views from visitors, about 10,000 followers who have 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:
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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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):
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.
Two maintenance tasks lots of people skip are:
Every teacher I know has lost critical work because they didn’t back up on a regular basis. There’s no reason for that. Backing up is easy, fairly quick, and usually free. For details on backing up your computer, check out LifeHacker, PC World, and Windows online help.
A reminder from Janet over at Focused on Story:
“…check your external hard drive to make sure it actually has the computer backed up files on it. Unfortunately we backed up to it, but all of the files weren’t getting backed up. We’d had the back-up a long time, so when the tech checked it, he heard something rattling inside. It was broken! sigh.”
Yep–I had that happen once, too!
Another suggestion from Andrew over at Andrew’s View of the Week:
“On a Mac, use an external USB drive and time machine to backup and consider using iCloud for remote backups.”
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):
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.
Finished? Have some eggnog. Any suggestions I missed?
Here’s the sign-up link if the image above doesn’t work:
https://forms.aweber.com/form/87/838503387.htm.
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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.
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):
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.
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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December 2nd-10th
Code: HAPPYHOLIDAY15
How to use this:
I wish you and all yours a wonderful US Thanksgiving Break. Enjoy your family and friends, take time to rest.
I’ll be around in a limited way until December 2. Then, I’ll be back fulltime.
Continue readingI’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:
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:
If you’re looking for projects, you’ll find two on Ask a Tech Teacher:
For more, click here:
Here’s a gallery of some of the Thanksgiving/Holiday projects:
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Here is a great list of coloring book websites for kids and adults to share for the holidays. Many are color-by-number, some even auto-fill the right color with a long-click. Beware though: Many have in-app purchases and advertising so preview them before sharing:
Click here for a great summary of several of these sites.
–image credit Deposit Photos
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This is a duplicate of the post on Ask a Tech Teacher’s current home. Please follow us over there.
Surprisingly, 15-20% of the population has a language-based learning disability and over 65% of those are deficits in reading. Often, these go undiagnosed as students, parents, and teachers simply think the child is not a good reader, is lazy, or is disinterested. Thankfully, the International Dyslexia Association sponsors an annual Dyslexia Awareness Month in October aimed to expand comprehension of this little-understood language-based learning condition.
What is Dyslexia?
Dyslexia is a condition that affects people of all ages, male and female equally, and causes them to mix up letters and words they read making what for most is a joy-filled act challenging and frustrating.
“Dyslexia refers to a cluster of symptoms, that result in people having difficulties with specific language skills, particularly reading. Students with dyslexia often experience difficulties with both oral and written language skills. … It is referred to as a learning disability because dyslexia can make it very difficult for a student to succeed… ” — the International Dyslexia Foundation
There is no cure for dyslexia. Individuals with this condition must instead develop coping strategies that help them work around their condition. In education, it is not uncommon to accommodate dyslexic students with special devices, additional time, varied format approaches (such as audio or video), and others. Most prominent educational testing centers (like SAT, ACT, PARC, and SBACC) make these available for most of the tests they offer.
Continue readingThis is a duplicate of the post on Ask a Tech Teacher’s current home. Please follow us over there.
I don’t write enough about special needs so when Rose contacted me with an article idea, I was thrilled. Rose Scott is a literary teacher with a goal of making education comfortable for students with special needs. Her dream is to help students explore their talents and abilities.
In this article, Rose writes about a little-known problem that students may unknowingly suffer from that may make it look like they are plagiarizing when–to them–they aren’t.
Read on:
Many people have come to believe that plagiarism is intentional and evil, and all students whose works have text coincidences are shameless wrongdoers. While it may seem that the majority of plagiarists do turn out to be cheaters, there are exceptions. Have you ever heard of cryptomnesia?
Cryptomnesia, according to the Merriam-Webster medical dictionary, is “the appearance in consciousness of memory images which are not recognized as such but which appear as original creations.” In other words, a person says something for the first time (as he or she thinks), but in reality he/she has already mentioned it, and now just doesn’t remember the previous occurrence.
This is a duplicate of the post on Ask a Tech Teacher’s current home. Please follow us over there.
#ISTE had an interesting discussion on how to foster digital citizenship in schools. This is especially critical because students are spending so much more time than ever before online. Here’s a peak at their conversation and then a link to the rest:
For teachers, it can be difficult to know when and how to instill digital citizenship skills. Fortunately, there are a number of ways to weave digital citizenship into the school day and for parents to reinforce it at home. ISTE has a few suggestions:
For more on Digital Citizenship, check our K-8 curriculum here and these additional articles:
Continue readingThis is a duplicate of the post on Ask a Tech Teacher’s current home. Please follow us over there.
Here are popular resources teachers are using to teach about digital citizenship. Click the titles for more links:
This is a duplicate of the post on Ask a Tech Teacher’s current home. Please follow us over there.
Information that will help you teach digital citizenship to your students. Below, you’ll find everything from a full year-long curriculum to professional development for teachers:
Resources:
Digital Citizenship: What to Teach When (a video)
Curricula:
K-8 Digital Citizenship Curriculum
More on Digital Citizenship
How to Grow Global Digital Citizens
Teaching Digital Rights and Responsibilities
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Curriculum-Based Assessment (CBA), often equated with Curriculum-Based Measurement (CBM), is any form of assessment that measures progress toward fulfillment of a stated curriculum. More succinctly:
“…repeated, direct assessment of targeted skills in basic areas using materials taken directly from the teaching curriculum”
While CBA is assessment based on the curriculum, it isn’t chapter tests from a text. The latter measures student achievement of a particular set of lesson knowledge while the former measures student achievement of the broader class goals. CBAs are useful not only to measure student learning within a unit but over time toward larger goals.
There is no setup required to start using CBA — no website signup or software download. What you will have to do — and may already do — is identify the criterion you are committed to accomplishing with students. These will be beyond what is required of the State or National standards and may or may not align perfectly with the textbooks you use. They are developed by you, likely in conjunction with grade-level teammates and your school administration. They help you identify your goals and the resources required to achieve them and then measure progress toward their completion.
Once these are in place, you devise the assessments — formative and summative — that will provide the evidence of achievement. This is done exactly as you would normally develop assessments during a unit of inquiry to evaluate progress and — at the end of the unit — to evaluate success with one big difference: Curriculum based assessments evaluate progress toward broad learning goals rather than textbook chapters or lesson plans.
You continue to teach classes as you normally would, with lesson plans, projects, and resources aimed to teach critical standards laid out by the school, the State, or the nation. These may be augmented with a scope of criterion — sometimes replaced with a Scope and Sequence or Curriculum Map — to be used as references in measuring learning. Here you will carefully identify the criterion CBA will use to provide and measure evidence of learning. These can be 1) measured against what is expected (called “benchmarks”), or 2) measured against prior assessments.
Welcome to my virtual classroom where I've collected over 900 articles on all aspects of teaching technology in the 21st Century classroom.
I have lesson plans, tech tips, great websites to integrate technology into your curriculum, the most popular apps you'll find useful with your iPads, and current trends in tech ed. I'll answer your questions about how to teach tech, what to teach when, where the best virtual sites are. Need more--let's chat about issues of importance in tech ed.
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