Tech Goodness for your Spring Break!!

A teacher saying: "I'm not good with technology," better be ready to hear a kid say: "I'm not good with books." edchat via @education_geek
— Dr. Justin Tarte (@justintarte) March 8, 2015

It's the week before Spring Break and tomorrow is April fools day! Everybody have thier riot gear ready? If we stick together I know we can do this and get to a much needed break.  I'm sure all of you have nothing planned and really need some tips and some extra reading for the week, so I saved up some great stuff for you to peruse on your time off!

• ALL TEACHERS: The Atlantic featured an article last week entitled The Deconstruction of the K-12 Teacher, which reads as ominous as the title would suggest but I would highly recommend reading it anyway.  I personally don't see the removal of what I call "the human element" from K-12 schools as a possibility at all.  However, the changes that are happening in society are going to flood schools over the next few years and we need to be prepared.  There are plenty of intangible lessons that we all help student's with throughout their time in school, but we should think more about the curriculum that we teach and the way in which it is taught. 
• Math Teachers! Check out this resource that I heard some hype about this past week: Prodigy Math
• Remind users: The company recently announced a Chat feature in which students can "have safe, simple, one-to-one conversations with students and parents".  As great as REemind is, this feature really does not follow our electronic communications policy that was approved at the beginning of the school year.  But don't lose faith! There is a solution - E-mail! If students are not availing themselves of their own school email address you should encourage them to do so.  It's one of the easiest (and approved) ways for them to communicate with you.  Not to mention, it's the form they will be using as college students and beyond, so all the more reason to encourage its use now. 
•  Cool stuff... Video is really becoming the new medium for social media.  It's pretty cool that we are actually capable of video conferencing just like Marty McFly did with Needles in Back to the Future. Last week, the app Periscope was released and I think the potential is amazing.
  
   You can live stream to your Twitter followers and get "likes" and comments in real time.  Yesterday, after downloading it I saw a teacher asking for feedback on a student's blog design and I talked to another teacher about his video game design class.   I haven't streamed anything yet, but maybe a future Tech Tuesday can be live and we can interact.  Give it a try.
• Jeopardy Powerpoints are long gone...  Thanks to Valerie Sanchirico for this one! Build an online Jeopardy game for a review.  If you been playing Kahoot and want to change it up, give this a try!
• Digital Citizenship - We've all heard the message that social media can get kids in trouble when they apply to college.  I thought this news story brought up some ideas I had never thought about though.  Take a look: 

I hope you all have a great and restful Spring break.  Enjoy the time off and let me know if you need any help with anything!