Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Technology Support Included in My Book

Teachers have the weight of the world on them.  Increasingly, they are responsible for more material including educating students in the common core, social skills, emotional intelligence, morality and citizenship, and the ever-changing world of technology.  Additionally, teachers must maintain a website, a blog, an electronic grade book, while constantly collecting and disseminating data on each of their students in their overfilled classrooms. (Wow! Just writing all that made me tired!)

In the mind of making teachers' burdens a little lighter, I insisted my book, Teaching Technology Through Interest Projects, include access to instructional slideshows and student examples.  I am pleased to say that my publisher created an amazing webpage that includes links to the very slideshows I use to teach my Interest Project curriculum in my own classroom.

Here is instructional slideshow for Activity 3 -  Would this help you teach?  If you answered yes, please buy my book!

Monday, December 10, 2012

Great Teaching Technology Sites

Start the week off right 
by learning something new!  

Let's face it, technology will outstrip us in the great race if we don't stay in touch with new developments each week.  In my never ending search for excellent sites for students and teachers, I have found few that I would like to highlight each Monday.

I'll start with some free stuff:

Free Tech for Teachers delivers excellent news on the latest in technology and how to download some freebies.

Free Scratch Download works on practically any computer and any computer operating system.  Scratch is the best critical thinking activity for ages 7-97 that I have found on the Internet.  Created by students at MIT (that's Massachusetts Institute of Technology- one of the most prestigious universities in the world), SCRATCH makes computer programming as easy as stacking Legos.  Use your stacks to program custom animations to tell a joke or teach a class about your Interest Project.  I love this program so much that I included it in my Teaching Technology Through Interest Projects resource book.  Click to see a sample Scratch Interest Project.