Lesson Plans for SMART Goal Setting

Storyboard That is a great tool that can be used for creating cartoons, flowcharts, timelines, and wireframes in addition to typical storyboards. Storyboard That also offers a huge library of lesson plans on everything from classic literature to history to cyber safety. One of the newest lesson plans added to the Storyboard That library is about helping students set and reach SMART goals. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Action, Realistic, Time.

The SMART goals lesson plans are designed for use in middle school settings. Each of the five lesson plans focuses on a different aspect of the goal setting and goal reaching processes. A significant component of any goal setting process is being able to identify and visualize the steps needed to reach a goal. That's where Storyboard That shines as it helps students create a clear picture of the steps they need to take in order to reach their goals.

Applications for Education
As we move into the time of the year when many schools have their first rounds of parent-teacher or parent-teacher-student conferences, the SMART goals lesson plans could be useful in helping your students identify what they want to improve upon after the first conference.

Disclosure: Storyboard That is an advertiser on FreeTech4Teachers.com

Vocabulary Lists, Jazz, Grateful Dead, Conversations, and Search

On March 29, 1990 Branford Marsalis sat in with the Grateful Dead. It was an unlikely pairing. It produced amazing music! Here's a sample to enjoy. I'm sharing this music trivia because of a conversation that I saw on Facebook this week. The gist of it was that a friend who teaches high school language arts was bemoaning the fact that many of her junior and senior year students didn't have vocabularies that were large enough to fully understand some of her assessment questions. My friend's complaint is not unique. In fact, a handful of other friends weighed into the conversation with comments like, "I've experienced the same."

The lack of vocabulary doesn't just hold students back in a classroom conversation or on an assessment. It holds them back when they conduct research online. Without a strong vocabulary students will struggle to use alternate search terms and develop alternate search phrases. That's why I continue to believe and advocate for vocabulary lessons.

So back to that Grateful Dead and Branford Marsalis show in 1990...if Marsalis and the members of the Dead didn't have a common understanding of the basic vocabulary of music they wouldn't have been able to seamlessly blend their styles together to make a remarkable performance. Likewise, if our students don't develop a vocabulary that enables them to fully participate in conversations and in research activities.


These are vocabulary resources that you might find useful:
Vocabulist
ABCD Wordie

Built to Last - GeoGebra

GeoGebra is the fifth entry into my Built to Last series. This is a series of blog posts celebrating the free resources that have been available to teachers and students over the ten years that I have been publishing Free Technology for Teachers.

When I started writing Free Technology for Teachers GeoGebra was available to use as free software on your Windows or Mac computer. Over the years versions of GeoGebra were developed to work on iPads, Android tablets, and eventually on Chromebooks. One of the marks of a program that is built to last is that it is flexible enough to adapt and change to the tastes of the ed tech community.

I am not a math teacher and have never taught math beyond basic addition and subtraction of fractions therefore I am not an expert on GeoGebra's capabilities. That said, over the years I have had friends and colleagues who do teach mathematics rave about the capabilities of GeoGebra for modeling functions and graphing equations.

GeoGebra has a huge community of users who share ideas and tutorials for using GeoGebra in a wide variety of settings. You can join that community here.

The GeoGebra YouTube channel is probably the best place to find tutorials to help you get started using GeoGebra on your laptop, tablet, or Chromebook.

X-Ray Goggles Help Students See How Webpages Are Made

Mozilla's X-ray Goggles is a neat tool that helps students learn the code that powers much of what they see on the Web. X-ray Goggles is a free tool that lets you remix any page that you find on the Internet. You can install X-ray Goggles in your Chrome or Firefox bookmarks bar. Then you can launch it on any webpage. When you launch X-ray Goggles you will be able to select images and text on a page and then shown the code behind your selection. X-ray Goggles will let you then alter the code to display new things on that page. In the video embedded below I provide an overview of using X-ray Goggles.


Applications for Education
Mozilla offers a free lesson plan called Hack the News that introduces students to the features of X-ray Goggles. In the lesson students will remix a news story by putting their favorite fictional characters into the page on which the story is published.

How to Use Grid View In Google Slides

Last week Google introduced a handful of new features for Google Slides. One of those new features is a grid view. There are two ways to access grid view in Google Slides. I demonstrate both methods in the short video that is embedded below.