Summer is a great time to reset your personal pedagogy to an education-friendly mindset and catch up on what's been changing in the ed world while you were teaching eight ten hours a day. My Twitter friends gave me great suggestions, but
first: A comment on the selections: I did get more suggestions than I could possibly list so I avoided books that involved politics or hot-button subjects that teachers are divided on and focused on positive and uplifting reading. Yes, there is a lot wrong with education around the world but I wanted a selection of books that would send me -- and you -- back to teaching in the fall with a can-do attitude
for how to accomplish miracles with your next class of students. Having said that, here's a granular list of teacher-approved books to keep you busy this summer: Click for list |
Most elementary-age students struggle with typing. This doesn't surprise me. They've been handwriting since kindergarten. They're proud of their new cursive skills. It's easy to grab a pencil. Typing requires setting up their posture, hand position, trying to remember where all those pesky keys are (why aren't they just
alphabetized? Discuss that with students). In third grade, we chat about why they learn to keyboard when they can already handwrite--faster. The discussion eventually ends up with a comparison of handwriting and keyboarding: More As a working technology teacher, I get hundreds of questions from parents about their home computers, how to do stuff, how to solve problems. They’re always brief and focused. Enjoy! Sometimes, they find a version of the document, but not the latest
version. This usually means they performed a ‘save-as’ rather than a simple ‘save’ when last they updated the file—so students need to remember where they might have saved it. Often, students save it to a default location—like My Documents on the local drive. This means they have to know where they were sitting, because that’s the ‘local drive’. Show them the logical steps they can follow that will find many a lost file. These are common sense questions such as where
did they save it? Can they search the network for it (which requires they know the name of the document)? Here’s a poster with five ways to prod students into finding a lost file: Click for poster Understanding how to use the internet has become a cornerstone issue for students. No longer do they complete their research on projects solely in the library. Now, there is a varied landscape of resources available on the internet. But with wealth of options comes responsibility to use resources properly. As soon as children begin to visit the online world, they need the knowledge to do that safely, securely, responsibly. I've collected a long list of resources here: Today, we focus on Kindergarten--1st Grade. More |
|
