Thank you for joining me for Week 2 of Tech for Teachers! Have you ever gotten a notification that your iCloud storage is full because of all the pictures in your camera roll? Think of the average tween and teen today that owns a phone. The sheer number of pictures they take, and usually not going through it periodically to delete “bad” photos, makes your collection look tiny! Richard Byrne addresses that phenomenon this week and offers the suggestion to make your snap-happy students put their skills to work in your favor. Often students must find photos on the web in the public domain for use in their projects, but it would make sense for them to use their own work. Put the power of collaboration into their hands by creating a classroom gallery of media for everyone to pick and choose from. You can create either a Google Drive, OneDrive, or Dropbox that can be used to drop photos they take into. Another idea is to teach your students to take pictures of their physical documents or artwork and submit it digitally to perhaps be presented to the class or for other reasons. Just like we did in our assignment this week, they could use an app such as Microsoft Office Lens to submit projects from paper to digital. Lastly, allow students to take photos during special activities or field trips and then create a presentation on something like Canva or Google Slides to share their memories and fun moments with the class. Skills like this come in handy in not just your professional life, but also your personal life. I can’t begin to count all the ways I used photos to create things this past year alone, birthday invitations, graduation announcements and senior memory slideshows, the list goes on. Don’t neglect the wonderful opportunities you have at your disposal to teach valuable life skills that intersect with technology in your classrooms!

Jacqui Murray had a simple but powerful tech tip to remind us as teachers to follow when we create assignments using technology. Have you ever been on a website and are trying to find something and you end up clicking on a plethora of links until you can’t even remember the progression of how you got to it and are unsure of where your original link is? Referencing web designer Jeffrey Zeldman, she explains the 3-click Rule where the end destination should never be more than 3 clicks away from the starting point. Jacqui finds that this holds true with teaching tech information to her students. If you keep the progression to just 2 to 3 steps, it will be remembered and used well, any more than that and students will glaze over and reject it. As a rule for myself, as someone that does NOT like reading directions, I can tell you that I can resonate with this. Keep it simple…just like this blog post. Now that’s something you can remember!

References

Byrne, R. (2023, July 16). Three good ways to use all those pictures. Retrieved from Practical Ed Tech: https://practicaledtech.com/2023/07/17/three-good-ways-to-use-all-those-pictures/

Murray, J. (2023, July 18). Tech tip #108: Three-click rule. Retrieved from Ask a Tech Teacher: https://askatechteacher.com/three-click-rule/