Be aware: Sometimes, posts are delayed. We apologize for that! Tell me if this sounds familiar: With the 2023 New Year, you resolved to build your Professional Learning Network--finally, to stop living in the 20th century where your world revolved around a sticks-and-bricks building, a landline phone, and the mailbox. You joined all the big social media platforms (X, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogging--just for starters). The plan was to learn from the movers and shakers in education, have them as a resource when you needed help on a lesson plan or to select the perfect webtool for a project. You committed hours to it, and
then days, eager to make this work because everyone you know talks about how much they learn from social media. Now, six months into it, you know too much about your followers' lunch plans and almost nothing about their educational pedagogy. You're frustrated, angry, and ready to give this whole failed effort up. Without knowing anything about you other than that paragraph above, I'm going to predict that you became overwhelmed by the volume of information that flooded
your inbox every day. The purpose of a social media-based PLN is to extend your reach beyond the narrow confines of the bubble you live in, not lose everything important in constant noise. Before you unplug, try these seven steps to clean up the clutter, smooth out the wrinkles, and put you back in the driver's seat of your online life: Click for details |
Let's start by clearing up a misconception: Rigor isn't unfriendly. Adding it to your class doesn't mean you become boring, a techie, or overseer of a fun-free zone. In fact, done right, rigor fills your class with Wow, those epiphanies that bring a smile to student faces and a sense of
well-being to their school day. Rigor provides positive experiences, is an emotional high, and engenders a pervasive sense of accomplishment students will carry for years--and use as a template for future events. It is NOT: Click for links If parents don't value tech, students won't. If parents are confused by what you teach, they will pass that on to their children. Be open to parents. Answer their questions. Never EVER leave them feeling intimidated. Let them know that lots of people feel exactly as they do. A great
solution I've had a lot of success with: Have a parent class. I schedule this after school while parents are waiting for their children to finish enrichment classes or sports. They're hanging around anyway--why not learn something. Cover topics that parents are asking about, should be asking about, and/or their students are asking about: Click for more I used to be pretty good at accounting because I was a whiz with spreadsheets and data analysis. That changed when accounting began relying heavily on technology. Well, to be honest, traditional accounting--financial analysis, auditing, and tax knowledge--might still revolve around my sweet spots, but the
rest, I now hire skilled professionals. And I'm not the only one who realizes the importance of tech skills in accounting has changed. One of our Ask a Tech Teacher crew has a great article outlining the tech skills you'll want to look at if you're interesting in pursuing an accounting career after high school: Click for more Time: About 30 minutes Steps: - Open MS Word.
- Add a title–Where We Are (or your choice)–centered, bold and font 14. Use this to teach students about the tool bar's alignment tools, bold, fonts and font size
- Insert a graphic
organizer (insert-diagram or one you have pushed out to students). Have this as part of a series of lessons that use graphic organizers and never use the same one. Give students a chance to become comfortable with the variety available.
- Add enough layers to give ten (unless you aren't going to use that many location layers). Have students use math skills to decide how many more they need.
- Make font size 10 and use abbreviations to fill in names. Discuss the
abbreviations.
- Use the tool bar to re-color the diagram.
- 3rd grade: Add one sentence at the bottom about each location. Be concise and factual.
- 4-5th grade: Create a table using MS Word.
Click for more Q: I’m paranoid about losing lesson plans, report card comments, and other school work. I backup, but is that enough? A: Truth, I am the most paranoid person I know about technology. For backup, I have an external hard drive, Acronis, a 512-gig flash drive for ‘important’
stuff (which turns out to be everything), and still I worry. Here’s my additional five-second backup: Every time I work on a document I just can’t afford to lose (again, that’s pretty much everything), I email it to myself. In MS Office, that’s a snap (see Tech Tip #61). Other programs–just drag and drop the file into the email message. I set up a file on my email program called ‘Backups’. I store the email in there and it waits until I’m tearing my hair out. I’ve never had to
go there, but it feels good knowing it’s available. Note: That doesn't work on my cloud spreadsheet files, say in Google Sheets, because they're usually too big. In this case, I download to my local drive and save to a dedicated folder. Click for more
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