Lemon Tech Tidbits

Every December, there is a global movement in classrooms called The Hour of Code. The movement was started as a way to encourage students in the field of computer science by showing all students the basics as a way to overcome the fear of coding through a one-hour time period. In a blog post by Kasey Bell , she provides some information to help you get started to participate in the 2019 Hour of Code. There are many links to resources on her post from how to sign up for free resources to a list to classroom tips. If you scroll down, you can even find a list of recommended Coding Resources and Lessons that includes a brief description, devices it is used with, and a handy age recommendation. If you want to find even more activities for your students, you can go to the Hour of Code where you will be able to drill down by age group and comfort level to find exactly what you want. Finally, ISTE has a blog post talking about how you can keep the Hour of Code continuing throughout the year...

We teach kids all the time how to be safe when using the internet or social media accounts. So shouldn’t we be following the same advice? In an article by Alice Keeler titled Digital Citizenship Alert , she addresses some of the bad habits she sees teachers make everyday. These include clicking on a sentence between parenthesis, not analyzing a link before clicking, and unintentionally sharing false information. Alice states, “I took a defensive driving course as a teen. They told us “assume everyone is out there to hit you.” Assume everything you click on the internet and especially from emails is out to get you.” Often, we are in a hurry and quickly glance at our Social media feed without spending the time to analyze exactly what it is that we are seeing. Take a moment to read the advice given by Alice Keeler in her article and start incorporating it into your own daily habits. After all, if we want our students to be good digital citizens, then we must model what we preach.

TesTeach with Blendspace: Create digital lessons in five minutes. Tes Teach has interactive lessons and projects already built in ready to use in less than five minutes. Or you can create your own custom lesson plan by simply selecting and dropping in the digital materials you need. TesTeach works seamlessly with Google Classroom as well as all of your other Google Apps. For more information on how it works, watch this short introduction video:  https://youtu.be/iTqantAbjlk There are many different video’s created by the company to help get started. Let’s take a look at one titled Primary Sources:  https://goo.gl/7i9Kq6 To access TesTeach to try it out for yourself, go to:  https://goo.gl/5b7nUA