TaraBytes

As the school year draws to a close, you may be looking at some creative ways to engage your students in meaningful discourse. The three activities on this page are guaranteed to invoke creative thinking, passionate debate, and engagement for all students.  Hyperdoc Activity (Debate) Fidget spinners--the bane of many teachers across the country. Nearly everyone has an opinion on this new toy that has swept the nation by storm!  Nicole Beardsley created an excellent hyperdoc that allows your students to research, analyze, and debate fidget spinners and their value in the classroom. This is a topic many of your students are very interested in and this great hyperdoc is sure to spark some great conversations in your classroom. Assign it in Google Classroom to allow students to work on it online (with Chromebooks or computers) or use it as a class activity on your SMARTboard. The directions you need to get started are listed on the hyperdoc itself, and you can get a copy of

Yesterday, we were caught up in what is referred to as a "phishing" attack. Suddenly a ton of emails came through our district accounts with the same subject line: _________ has shared a document on Google Docs with you. It seemed so legitimate, right?  Phishing  is a form of fraud in which the attacker tries to learn information such as login credentials or account information by masquerading as a reputable entity or person in email, IM or other communication channels . You've probably seen notices by your bank warning against phishing attacks--but phishing can happen in ANY type of online account. In the phishing attack yesterday, people all around the world received that same innocuous email.  Just like the fish swimming in a pond, many were unable to resist the lure of the bait so cunningly placed before us. The good news is that w ithin one hour of the report of the first phishing email, Google had resolved the issue and shut it down.  So, the question has to b

Conspiracy theories are everywhere today, aren't they?  From false news reports on Facebook to actual news reports on the television, you can find a new conspiracy theory every minute! Very few people I have come in contact with seem to be immune to the allure of a good conspiracy theory. I recently read an interview on the vox.com website with a social and organizational psychologist from Amsterdam by the name of Jan-Willem van Prooijen on the subject of why we are susceptible to conspiracy theories. One of the reasons he cited that people fall for conspiracy theories is also linked to  why   someone creates a conspiracy theory: we can't always know or understand everything that happens to us--we try to make sense of something we do not know about and assume the worst (Resnick, 2017). In other words, ignorance of a subject leads to the spread of more ignorance. Which leads me to an interesting conspiracy theory I recently heard about Google Forms. For those of you who may