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.
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
Continue reading
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.
Here’s a great list of age-appropriate, safe websites that will inspire 1st graders whether they’re in your classroom or at home:
1st grade digital tools and websites
21 Websites and 5 Posters to Teach Mouse Skills
Here are the most-read posts for the month of June:
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starts Monday, June 29, 2020
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If students use the internet, they must be familiar with the rights and responsibilities required to be good digital citizens. In this class, you’ll learn what topics to introduce, how to unpack them, and how to make them authentic to student lives.
Topics include:
At the completion of this course, you will be able to:
Assessment is based on involvement, interaction with classmates, and completion of projects so be prepared to be fully-involved and an eager risk-taker. Price includes course registration, college credit, and all necessary materials.
To enroll, click the link above, search for MTI 557 and sign up. Need help? Email askatechteacher@gmail.com for upcoming dates.
In these 169 tech-centric situations, you get an overview of pedagogy—the tech topics most important to your teaching—as well as practical strategies to address most classroom tech situations, how to scaffold these to learning, and where they provide the subtext to daily tech-infused education.
Today’s tip: Quick Browser Fixes
Category: Internet
Sub-category: Problem-solving
Q: The browser I’m using is quirky. Sites I know should work don’t. Is there a quick way to fix that without a reboot?
A: Here are four ideas you can try before rebooting your computer:
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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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