Learn how to make money with the digital finance transformation and discover key strategies for modern financial technology.

Technology came front and center this past spring as teachers everywhere suddenly turned into remote learning specialists managing the ups and downs of all things digital. While eLearning did have a learning curve, the sudden thrust does have many teachers bringing their digital distance teaching knowledge back into the classroom… whenever that will be. ... Read more

Want students to express ideas and collaborate digitally with each other? This post goes over how to use padlet for collaborating digitally

Do your students need lessons about online safety and digital citizenship? We created these lessons to help our students stay safe online.

DESIGNED FOR THE TECHNOLOGY CLASSROOM. Teach Digital Citizenship: Netiquette to beginning technology students. COMPLETE LESSON INCLUDES: 10-slide editable teacher PowerPoint 1 page corresponding questions worksheet in Microsoft Word All answer keys included Students will follow along with teacher and fill in a digital questions worksheet. Specific information will be presented about how to be safe when posting online, digital etiquette to follow when posting online, and basic email procedures. For a Google friendly version, please visit: Digital Citizenship: NETIQUETTE Presentation & Digital Worksheet GOOGLE DRIVE For more technology resources please visit: Emily Hart's Technology Resources

Digital lessons made simple and effective. Learn how to use Padlet to teach a digital lesson with student interaction and feedback.

Picture Books to Help Teach Digital Citizenship: This post contains 5 Reasons to Use Picture Books to Teach Digital Citizenship

I know - shocking! I DO laminate all games and activities that will be handled by the sweeties. But after many years I have come to an understanding with my dear darling husband that a printer-ink budget comes along with life married to me. I would rather print a new set of things each year than waste time laminating. Here are a few things to consider before you laminate EVERY piece of paper that is going into your classroom. 1. Time vs Money How much is your time worth? I replaced the coloured ink in my printer twice last year, and printed everything I wanted. What can you do with your time that you usually spend laminating? 2. Laminating Expense If you don't laminate you are not purchasing pouches, and you can offset your ink cost. When I laminated, I had to accomodate storage of the laminated treasures. Because they can NEVER be thrown out you know, you are laminating them to use FOREVER. When I went to a print and recycle and print again system - I didn't have to worry about storage or tubs or the hassle of storage for the storage tubs. Life got much easier. And less expensive funnily enough. 3. Glare Baby Glare I love decorated classrooms, but walls full of plastic glare. Not for me. Nor is visual overload. If you need a poster for every mortal concept covered in a curriculum, consider rotating them or having them in a flip file format. Posters without glare are more readily accessed by students. 4. Environment Plastic can take from 450 to 1000 years (and even more) to disappear off our planet. That is a huge burden. Plain paper? About 5 months. Glass (hmmmm iPad) - 1,000,000 years. 5. Consume vs Create I like the message plain uncoated paper sends my students. Paper is creative. Flexible. I can change, modify and make with it. It reeks of opportunity. 6. Need Do you really need to laminate those alphabet posters? Are they really going to be rendered useless after a year if they have not been laminated? Are you honestly going to use them again next year and not want a change in style and design to match your newest decor? Laminate only the things you know you will use for a lifetime. These fun math activities have been laminated and certainly will need it with all the little fingers using them! Fill it Up will help students work on counting up to 30! Heart Number Order is a fun way to practice counting and numeral formation up to 50. By laminating this, students can use dry erase markers and practice over and over again! Have a lovely day, friends!SaveSave

Give your students a taste of adventure with over 20 free digital escape rooms to try at home or at school. Doing distance learning? These are perfect!

Microsoft Paint is a simple program included with Microsoft Windows. It is basically a graphics editor and a painting utility that allows its users to create simple and interesting graphic art on their computers.

5 EASY techie ideas for digital citizenship activities. Technology in the classroom! iPads, GAFE, websites

Are you setting up Google Classroom for a new school year with new students? Then avoid these 5 mistakes! Discover and learn what mistakes to avoid.

Give your students a taste of adventure with over 20 free digital escape rooms to try at home or at school. Doing distance learning? These are perfect!

Come learn about my FAVORITE technology tools for digital communication and collaboration with elementary students. Use these tools with Chromebooks, laptops, computers and some can even be used with iPads. Global learning is making its way into the classroom and we need to make sure our students are prepared so they can make the most of these authentic learning experiences!

Hey, all! I hope you’re doing well! Summer has officially started in the Petty family, and we’re well, basically not doing anything differently than we were during self-isolation. If we’re able to safely have in-person classes this fall (fingers crossed!) I’ll need to retrain my teacher bladder and grow accustomed to NOT taking an afternoon ... Read More about MUST-HAVE Chrome Extension

BACKGROUND There are few students I have met that don’t enjoy art to some degree whether it’s full-on finger painting or just doodling in a notebook. The only question is what form that ‘art’ takes. It might be photography and selfies, sculpting clay, graffiti, or cutting up pictures in magazines. Most students also enjoy the concept … Continue reading Digital Art for Students: No Photoshop Required →

Self-portrait ideas around the topic "Identity" or "Personality" but I could also work for general descriptive adjectives lesson as well.

Teaching email in the Elementary classroom can be a challenge, and there is little to find online about how to do it.

As my 3rd grade students become proficient in coding with Scratch, I wanted them to depend less on me and more on building their own resources. I decided to give them some classroom real estate (AKA t

This is a list of my Google digital activities that can be used in the elementary classroom. Disperse to your students via Google Classroom, Google Drive Shared Folder, your Learning Platform, etc..

Gamification: Create games, digital breakouts, digital escape rooms and more with Genially

Lights, camera, action! Do you love going to the movies? Imagine the lights dimming, the smell of popcorn in the air, the previews starting on the big screen. I am sure your students love going to the movies too!! You know what would be even more amazing, your students creating their OWN movies! Movie making ... Read more

Let's dive into some new options to teach vocabulary, for those who have the time and energy to pursue them. In this post and podcast, I'm sharing ten ideas for making the study of vocabulary something students might even look forward to.

A list of free digital resources for google classroom! Perfect for teachers who are teaching virtually online or using Google Classroom.

Digital Art. The website is called Digital Art Teacher, but have you ever noticed that we don’t actually have an art curriculum focused on digital art? Today, I am delighted to tell you that this is no longer the case! Below you’ll find a sequence of lessons that will fill a semester with creative and informative digital art lessons […]

With distance learning in full swing, here’s a closer look at ten resources that English teachers can digitally assign their students. All of my SMARTePlans

We're mixing pen and paper with digital in our blended classrooms, and everything's going great. At first (for me) it was just about throwing in some digital

Need a way to engage your students and motivate them to learn. Use try using games to woo them into learning by incorporating technology in the classroom.

Here are some useful websites that you can share with your students to teach about web literacy and critical thinking. Can they work out which websites are true, and which are fake?

Technology in the classroom constantly changes and so are the classroom tech tools that we use every day with our students.

We all know and love Kahoot, right? If you do not know about Kahoot then we have a few blog posts with tips and ideas to get you up to sp...

Shop all The Little Ladybug Shop upper elementary resources. Find Reading, Writing, Grammar, Classroom Decor, Digital Resources

3 Beginning Photoshop Lessons Anyone Can Teach Engagement % %

How are you introducing multiplication to 3rd graders? How about teaching multiplication with an activity that has an entry point for all students? It involves using these numbers: 12, 18, 24, 30 and 36? Why those numbers? Discover and learn more with this informative blog post on how your students can be successful with learning the concept of multiplication. #twoboysandadad #multiplication

Technology today has provided new ways to present information to our students. If you are getting ready to teach the Silk Road, consider taking your students on a virtual tour! This activity is set up for digital learning and is a great option whether you are teaching face-to-face, hybrid, or are fully online.

It is so important that we teach our students about internet safety. Here are my tips and tricks to help them be internet safety superstars!

Credit: The 3AM Teacher, Zip-ah-dee-doo-dah Designs, KG Fonts, Hello Fonts It's no secret that I use my iPad ALL the time in my classroom. Some teachers are REALLY lucky and they have a cart of iPads or a class set. I only have one Wi-Fi iPad (my personal iPad) to use with my kiddos but we make it work! Before we begin let me say that I am lucky to have a Smartboard and projector in my classroom. I bought this handy little gadget to hook my iPad up to the Smartboard which helps ALOT to make the iPad more accessible to all students. This is a VGA adapter for the iPad, you can get it from the Apple website or at Best Buy. Now that we're hooked up, here are 10 of my favorite apps/activities using my iPad that benefit all the kids in my classroom. 1. iBooks This is a free app to download from the iTunes. Any read aloud book I read this year (Magic Tree House, etc.) I downloaded it from iBooks. To help with cost, I asked for iTunes gift cards for my birthday, Christmas and as a wish item for my classroom. When we read the book aloud, I would hook up to the projector so my kiddos could see the books much better than if I just held it for them. Sometimes my kiddos would read along on the Smartboard or have a specific set of questions they were working on while we read it aloud. I found that my kiddos were so much more engaged when I projected books onto the Smartboard. 2. mClass Assessment My district uses the mClass 3D Reading assessment (which also includes Diebels Next) as the K-3 reading assessment for our kiddos. I originally used a mini-laptop and a Bamboo tablet before I found out that I could use my iPad! This quickly became the only way to assess since it was so much easier! Sometimes I use a stylus when assessing but you could use your finger just as easily. (Note: my school also has Wi-Fi which makes it easy to sync, if you do not have Wi-Fi at your school you can sync when you take it home to your personal Wi-Fi or whenever you are in a Wi-Fi range) HERE are the directions to get the mClass button on your iPad. 3. Storia I have talked many times of my love for Scholastic Book Clubs, well the Storia app has added to that love. I send home Scholastic Book Clubs every month and my kiddos order books. I can spend my points to get FREE e-books using the Storia app, which I then project onto the Smartboard and read aloud to my class. They also offer some books with audio. 4. Class Dojo About halfway through the year my kids grow a little tired of all the incentives I offer for good behavior. Around January I set up Class Dojo for a new, fresh approach. Now that Class Dojo is available as a FREE app it has gotten even better! The best part of this app is that I can I project my class dojo page on the Smartboard and then open the app on my iPad. While I am sitting with my iPad and teaching small group (which is usually the time that is most difficult for classroom management) I can give Dojo points by clicking on my iPad and it shows up on the Smartboard! I don't have to say anything, I just teach my small group, do a quick scan of the rest of my kids working on centers and give a few points (or take a few points) as needed. As soon as my kids hear the "ding" of points being given it becomes super quiet! It also has an option to pick a random student, no more popsicle sticks! If I need to call on a student, I open Class Dojo and pick at random! 5. Brain Pop Jr. App We LOVE some Brain Pop Jr. in my class!! Usually I just project the website using my computer but sometimes I want to watch a video while teaching small group. I teach small group reading and math instruction everyday so I spend a lot of time at my horseshoe table. (Note: you must have a subscription to access all the brain pop videos, but there is also a FREE Brain pop video of the week you can watch each week if you don't have a subscription). 6. Small Group Instruction I use my iPad ALOT in small group. I play short videos from Grammar Jammers, read short stories from iBooks/Storia or use skill specific apps depending on my kiddos needs. So, how do we do this without disrupting ALL the other kids who are working independently and want to see what's on the iPad?? We plug in headphones using this fancy splitter! I have heard of some teachers requiring students to bring a pair of headphones to school like any other school supply at the beginning of the year so that they have headphones ready to go when using a headphone splitter. I bought headphones from Dollar Tree so I would have enough to use, they aren't the most durable but they get the job done! 7. Tap Roulette App This is the simplest app but it is AMAZING! Do you ever have an argument in your classroom that you don't want to solve?? Well this app will solve it for you! Have whichever kids are arguing put one of their fingers on the iPad and you click "Pick Finger". The iPad will flash and then pick one of the fingers, solving the argument by random selection! If you need to solve a simple problem (who was there first?? who should get the first pick?? who gets the red crayon first?? ) then this app is a lifesaver! 8. Pandora Radio My kiddos LOVE listening to music! Sometimes we dance to pop music, play freeze dance, play musical numbers/words/operations and other times we write while listening to soothing classical music. I plug my computer speakers into my headphone jack on the iPad, we choose a kid friendly station and we are good to go! Pandora has it all! (Note: Wi-Fi is needed to access Pandora) 9. Mad Libs This is another app that I project to practice our parts of speech as a whole group or for just a fun brain break. This is a great review of the different parts of speech. There are many FREE stories and also ones you can buy. I usually move around the room and choose different students to fill in each blank. They always find the final story to be hilarious : ) 10. QR Codes I found myself incorporating QR codes into more and more activities last year. My kids were fascinated with them. QR codes are SUPER easy to make using THIS website. And I usually make QR codes with answers or hidden riddles for different centers/activities around the room. I don't let the kids walk around with my iPad scanning them because I know kids sometimes drop things and I would be so sad if my iPad dropped on the floor and broke. These FREE QR codes were fun to use for test prep and then I used these QR codes in HERE to countdown the last 10 days of school! The countdown codes were a big hit at the end of the year. I also have some ideas for them in the upcoming school year! And that's how we do it folks! I hope I have given you a few new ideas for how to use 1 iPad in your classroom of many!

This interactive tool is worth the subscription.

Have you ever wanted to add slides to existing Google Slides presentations your students have already started working on? Come read about the Slip-in-Slide Add-On that is ideal for teachers who use digital notebooks, digital writing journals, digital activities and more that are created in Google Slides! This is a game changer for the Google Classroom.