July, 2022

article thumbnail

Teaching Computer Science–Moving atoms not pixels

Computer Science Teacher

On my first visit to the Lifelong Kindergarten Group and the MIT Media Lab, I notices a message on the windows. “Some people would rather move atoms than pixels.” That has stuck with my for years now. And it is quite true. Robots, game controllers, Internet of Things, and more are ways that computer science interacts with physical objects and not just pixels on a screen.

article thumbnail

The Joy of Watching a Lesson Come Alive

User Generated Education

Number one on my love list of teaching is spending time with my fantastic students. High on my list is also my love of designing and creating learning activities for my students. I get such joy of seeing my designs come to life in the hands of my learners. Recently, I designed a pinball machine using a pizza box, Strawbees, Makedo screws, and an optional micro:bit scoreboard.

educators

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

The 7 Skills Kids Can Develop from Playing LEGO

Educators Technology

Since its creation in 1940, LEGO has grown into a worldwide phenomenon with ripples extending to the field of education. LEGO was created in Denmark and started as 'a set of.read more.

Education 271
article thumbnail

HS Financial Training Classes

Ask a Tech Teacher

Such an important topic, especially as we see kids aren’t graduating with basic knowledge of budgeting, paying bills, and more. CNBC has a great article on one of their blogs on this subject you’ll appreciate: High schools, scrambling to prep Gen Z for the real world, are teaching students to make and manage money. We at Ask a Tech Teacher have written often about financial literacy.

article thumbnail

Can Brain Science Actually Help Make Your Training & Teaching Stick?

Speaker: Andrew Cohen, Founder & CEO of Brainscape

The instructor’s PPT slides are brilliant. You’ve splurged on the expensive interactive courseware. Student engagement is stellar. So… why are half of your students still forgetting everything they learned in just a matter of weeks? It's likely a matter of cognitive science! With so much material to "teach" these days, we often forget to incorporate key proven principles into our curricula — namely active recall, metacognition, spaced repetition, and interleaving practice.

article thumbnail

Principals Are on the Brink of a Breakdown

ED Surge

Principals, in many schools, are seen as the person responsible for the mental health and well-being of their staff, serving as sounding boards and problem solvers for their teachers, who are carrying the emotional burdens of their own personal and professional lives as well as the struggles, stresses and trauma of their students. In effect, principals absorb the experiences and exasperations of both students and staff, and in many cases, hear complaints and worries directly from parents and mem

Physics 364

More Trending

article thumbnail

Welcome New Computer Science Teachers

Computer Science Teacher

Spring is an interesting time on social media. I help moderate a couple of CS teacher groups on Facebook and let me tell you, membership is booming! Why? Well, several reasons. For one thing a lot of teachers have been voluntold that they are going to teach computer science in the fall.Some have never taught CS before. Others have some CS background but are being asked to teach a more advanced course.

article thumbnail

How to Start a Robotics Club in Your School

Robot Lab

By Carla Jose. Image Source: Pexels. So you’ve got a passion for robotics and you want to share it with your classmates? Or perhaps you’re an educator and you’re eager to introduce students to this rapidly expanding part of the tech sector. In either case, starting a club dedicated to the topic of robotics, including theoretical discussions as well as practical experiments, is a great way to fulfill your ambitions.

Robotics 141
article thumbnail

Best Presentation Tools for Teachers and Students

Educators Technology

The purpose of today's post is to share with you some of the best tools you can use to create engaging presentations without the need for any graphic design knowledge. All of these platforms.read more.

361
361
article thumbnail

Tech Ed Resources for your Class–K-8 Keyboard Curriculum

Ask a Tech Teacher

I get a lot of questions from readers about what tech ed resources I use in my classroom so I’m going to take a few days this summer to review them with you. Some are edited and/or written by members of the Ask a Tech Teacher crew. Others, by tech teachers who work with the same publisher I do. All of them, I’ve found well-suited to the task of scaling and differentiating tech skills for age groups, scaffolding learning year-to-year, taking into account the perspectives and norms of

article thumbnail

Harnessing The Power Of Math Manipulatives

Mathematics, a subject steeped in abstract concepts, often poses challenges to students, especially those in grades 5-10. But imagine a bridge that transformed this intricate maze into an interactive adventure.

article thumbnail

Business Leaders Say Computer Science Needs to Be A Core Subject

ED Surge

Today, a collection of more than 500 prominent business, education and nonprofit leaders called on states to update their K-12 curriculum to make computer science a core subject. In a letter sent to governors from all fifty states, they write, “computer science provides an essential foundation—not only for careers in technology, but for every career in today’s world,” and call upon state leaders to update curriculum to ensure that all students have an opportunity to learn computer science in sch

article thumbnail

The Future of EdTech

Cool Cat Teacher

From the Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis Follow @coolcatteacher on Twitter. Education technology has good uses, but as we’ve moved through the pandemic, sometimes it may have been mis-implemented or implemented without teacher PD. As a result, technostress has impacted teachers negatively. Today’s guest, Al Kingsley, has worked with edtech for over thirty years.

EdTech 198
article thumbnail

Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft at #CSTA2022

Computer Science Teacher

I blog about what interests me or stirs my curiosity. One thing that fits that is what are the really big tech companies doing to support CS education. So I am going to write briefly about the presence of Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft (alphabetical order). Anyone else notice that we never see Apple at CSTA? All of these companies have sessions at their booths and as regular conference sessions to talk about what they offer.

article thumbnail

Back to School: Focusing on SEL and Our Wellbeing

Defined Learning

It has been a challenging couple of years for all of us. We’ve all had to adjust in our personal lives as well as professional lives. The routines we had for working, connecting with family and friends, and the many other things we kept ourselves involved in, shifted suddenly in March 2020. From that time onward, it has been a constant work in progress for everyone to figure out how to handle the challenges we faced.

Schooling 133
article thumbnail

Downloadable Design Briefs for an Integrative STEM Curriculum

These easy-to-use design briefs outline student objectives, challenges, and materials needed to complete each 30-minute to 4-hour lesson. ITEEA’s Integrative STEM curriculum, Engineering byDesign, includes many more standards driven hands-on activities just like these!

article thumbnail

Best Platforms to Create A Classroom Website and Blog

Educators Technology

Creating a digital presence for your class is now a required pedagogical investment to help you boost your teaching and enhance students learning. Now that the world is going digital, having a.read more.

Teaching 359
article thumbnail

9 Ways to Add Tech to your Lessons Without Adding Time to Your Day

Ask a Tech Teacher

I update these suggestions every few years to remind teachers there are easy ways to techify your lessons even on a tight schedule. I’d love to hear your suggestions in the comments about how you do this in your classes: Because I teach graduate classes for educators, I talk to lots of teachers all over the country. It’s become clear that for most of them, adding technology to their lessons means layering more work on top of their already overburdened lesson plans.

article thumbnail

The Pandemic Put Student Poverty in Plain Sight

ED Surge

“He called me a ‘b h’ and then kicked my door in when I tried to shut it.” I’m sitting at my desk listening to Kris, one of my eighth-grade students, during our lunch. I have room-temperature leftovers and day-old coffee. She hasn’t brought anything because she doesn’t have anything. She depends on the food pantry at school. I let her eat some of mine.

article thumbnail

My Best Books of Summer – 2022

Cool Cat Teacher

From the Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis Follow @coolcatteacher on Twitter. My goal is to read books for an hour each night. In this episode, I wanted to share some of the books that have me thinking this summer. It is a wide assortment of books that I've linked to at the bottom of the show. From technology to interpersonal skills to ponderings from history, sometimes patterns emerge between random books in surprising ways.

article thumbnail

Jacdac and Micro:Bit 2.0–First Look

Computer Science Teacher

Learning about Jacdac devices was my incentive to buy a Micro:Bit 2.0 The Micro:Bit 2.0 has a number of upgrades and new features from the original. These include a microphone and a speaker among others. That is probably justification enough to get an upgrade but being curious about the Jacdac devices, which requires the newer model, was the deciding factor.

IoT 206
article thumbnail

Physical Computing with micro:bits and Makecode

User Generated Education

I am quite fond of facilitating physical computing activities with my learners as I’ve discussed in Scratch and Makey Makey Across the Curriculum . For that post I created the following graphic to represent the benefits of physical computing. I think it is important to extend the use of coding and microcontrollers into creating physical objects for the following reasons: Standards Addressed.

Physics 118
article thumbnail

Reading Bear: Free Phonics and Vocab Lessons to Help Kids Learn to Read

Educators Technology

Reading Bear, an educational project of WatchKnowLearn.org, helps kids develop reading and vocabulary skills through presentations, review activities, and quizzes. The site contains over 50.read more.

Learning 350
article thumbnail

How to Teach Venn Diagrams to Elementary School Students

Ask a Tech Teacher

Venn Diagrams are one of the most visual approaches to showing students the logical relationships between sets and connectivity of data. It uses overlapping circles to show the wholeness of data and then where they overlap other data sets. It’s easy to find templates for them–in MS Office, Google Apps, Canva, and more. One of our Ask a Tech Teacher crew has organized the basics on how to teach Venn Diagrams to elementary-age students: What is a Venn Diagram.

article thumbnail

As Child Care Challenges Threaten the American Workforce, Business Leaders Call for Action

ED Surge

Many business leaders are asserting that a lack of child care solutions for American employees is a key business challenge that’s threatening the workforce and limiting U.S. businesses’ bottom line performance. Many are also taking action to address child care challenges at their organizations and nationally, after the pandemic brought greater attention and awareness to the issue.

article thumbnail

Use Cases For Robotic Process Automation At Educational Institutions

Robot Lab

By Carla Jose. Image source: Softbank Robotics. Whether it is creating a favorable learning environment or holding teacher-parent meetings, administrative and educational processes in universities, colleges, and schools are filled with a lot of paperwork and repetitive processes. These processes consume a lot of resources and time, things that can be used in other areas to improve learning experiences.

Robotics 119
article thumbnail

My Day Four at #CSTA2022

Computer Science Teacher

It’s a short day today but with plenty to learn. Last night was a great party at the Museum of Science and Technology. I left early (age?) but I know that a lot of people stayed late and partied hardy. There may be some tired faces in sessions this morning. It was a great community building event so well worth it. First session for me was “You CAN Teach Cyber Security with CYBER.ORG’s Cyber Learning Standards.

article thumbnail

An Open Letter to Our DEN Community

STEM Discovery Education

Hello DEN Community! We hope this message finds you well and in good spirits as you enjoy your much-deserved summer break! Looking ahead to the upcoming school year, we are 100% focused on supporting your love of teaching and collaborating with fellow educators. Therefore, we’d like to introduce you to the new DE Blog! We SEE You. At Discovery Education, we are continuously amazed by our educators and have the deepest respect for the many roles you perform daily: resilient teacher, classro

article thumbnail

Online OCR- A Free Image to Text Converter

Educators Technology

Online OCR is a free picture to text converter that enables you to easily extract text and characters from digital images and scanned PDF documents including multiple page documents. Online OCR is easy to use and works right on your browser. No software download is required and you can even use it without registration. There are different ways to use Online OCR in education.

article thumbnail

25 Websites for Lesson Planning

Ask a Tech Teacher

Here are a few of the popular resources teachers are using for lesson planning: Organize/Create lesson plans. Alma –create standards-based lessons and gradebook, with analytics. BlendSpace –blend a variety of digital materials into one canvas for students. CK-12 — and differentiate for student learning styles. Educreations. Explain Everything –screencasting, interactive whiteboard.

Geography 344
article thumbnail

High School Students Say They Learn The Most Important Skills Outside of School

ED Surge

If you ask middle school and high school students these days the most important skills they’re learning, they’re likely to name something they picked up on their own, outside of normal school hours. That’s according to Julie Evans, CEO of the nonprofit Project Tomorrow, who has been doing focus groups with students for years—both before and after the pandemic—and whose organization conducts an annual survey of middle and high school students about their learning.

Schooling 298