Career and Technology Foundations Grades 5-9

What is visual literacy and what is the importance of this type of literacy for teaching and learning? This guide provides a good base for researching and understanding visual literacy.

Create your own comic strips. Select from 10 fun characters with different moods and write words for blank talk/thought balloons to make the characters talk and think. There also are story ideas and prompts to help you create graphic stories.

A fun typing game where the speed of your race car depends on your speed and accuracy of your typing.

Search for icons that can be downloaded and used in student and teacher creations. There is also the ability to create and share your own unique icons.

Pixar in a Box is a behind-the-scenes look at how Pixar artists do their jobs. You will be able to animate bouncing balls, build a swarm of robots, and make virtual fireworks explode. But you'll also explore Pixar's storytelling method.

This comic creator can be used on Chromebooks, PCs, Macs, iPads, and Android tablets.

A collection of 14 very short films from the National Film Board that introduce the basic concepts and skills needed to create your own stop-motion animation film.

Students can use this storyboard tool to create presentations. There is a video that can help you get started.

This is a free program that lets you publish interactive data visualizations to the web.

Students and teachers can use this tool to create timelines. Users must sign in to access the building feature.

Hardware makes your computer work. Hardware is an umbrella term used to describe any of the physical components of a computer. Computer hardware can be categorized as either internal or external components. Watch to learn more about hardware and how it differs from software.

A useful set of videos designed to help students explore careers in the audio/visual industry. Employees in Audio/Video Technologies design, install, and maintain systems and equipment used to present information in the form of sound and pictures to a particular audience.

Teachers will find many useful documents that they can share with students that focus on many aspects of digital literacy.

A useful series of videos for students that explore careers in the information technology industry.If you’ve got top-notch math skills, a mind that locks onto details, and the creativity to devise solutions to any problem, you could have a future in IT.

A series of videos that support students learning about careers in the telecommunications industry. Employees in Telecommunications Technologies design, manufacture, install, and repair telecommunications equipment.

Word Clouds For Kids makes it very easy for students to print or save their results. The results can be edited for color, font, layout, etc.

What is visual literacy and what is the importance of this type of literacy for teaching and learning? This guide provides a good base for researching and understanding visual literacy.

These media resources from Medal Quest and PBS help students explore how science, technology, engineering, and math support athletes with physical disabilities as they compete at elite levels.

Students become product engineers in a bouncy ball factory as they design and prototype a polymer bouncy ball that meets specific requirements: must be spherical in shape, cannot disintegrate when thrown on the ground, and, of course, must bounce.

Students are given the engineering challenge to design and build doghouses that shelter a (toy) puppy from the heat—and to create them within material, size and cost constraints.

This site provides videos and a downloadable toolkit to help educators learn more about design thinking.

For this maker challenge, students decide on specific design requirements (such as good traction or deep cushioning), sketch their plans, and then use a variety of materials to build prototype shoes that meet the design criteria.

Free lesson plans for students to learn to use Canva to create information graphics

Kathy Schrock has a video presentation "to help you develop formative or summative assessments that have students creating infographics to showcase their mastery of knowledge." There is a short overview of the presentation at 2:27 minutes or the full presentation which is 50 minutes.

Ayoung designer named Nick demonstrates a painless process for designing and constructing attractive, sturdy chairs from cardboard.

A free-to-download software that lets students build with virtual lego.

An instructable for making a dome playhouse out of cardboard and a few other supplies

Easy to follow instructions for making eight different types of books.

Students study the materials and designs used in construction tasks. They compare paper, clay, cardboard, styrofoam or other available materials to see which are the strongest—which ones resist bending, crushing or tearing—and which are most easily shaped and joined.

Activities and videos from PBS that challenge students to think about developing green technology.

Excellent activities and videos for students to learn about designing technology to help others in their community.

Here you will find activities are hands-on challenges that focus on the engineering design process and videos that explain building concepts.

A lesson plan for four blocks of time that can be used for 7-12 classes.

The Polona Typo project makes it possible to type, share and print your own sentences using thousands of letters from historic books, posters and maps created over more than six centuries.

This online tool (in html 5) is a full suite of painting and drawing tools. Upload an image to use as a base or start freehand. Add layers, stamps and many other cool features to your art.

Students are challenged to find a way to get school t-shirts up into the stands during sporting events.

These imaginative lesson plans bring art, design, and nature into the classroom. Concepts like organic architecture and community design, are connected with cross-curricular themes including geometry, biology, visual art, and social studies

These imaginative lesson plans bring art, design, and nature into the classroom. Concepts like organic architecture and community design, are connected with cross-curricular themes including geometry, biology, visual art, and social studies

In Islamic culture, geometric design is everywhere. Despite the complexity of these designs, they can be created with just a compass to draw circles and a ruler to make lines within them.

Ideas for making machines, toys, and experiments from things others might throw away.

Ideas for making machines, toys, and experiments from things others might throw away.

Students construct simple structures based on the light-but-strong design of the geodesic dome using gumdrops and toothpicks.

A useful series of videos for students that explore careers in the arts.

The activities presented in this video segment adapted from ZOOM demonstrate the properties of several bridge designs modeled using just a sheet of paper, some books, and lots of pennies.

Test your knowledge of the different eras for fashion by dressing the male and female characters in the correct clothes for a particular era. Have the appropriate music play along, as well.

If you've had a hard time finding jeans that fit or figuring out your size, there's probably a good reason why. Experts say it's likely by design.

This seven minute video describes the process of creating a costume for a play. The costume designer walks you through the process from design, to fitting, alterations and the finished work.

For this maker challenge, students decide on specific design requirements (such as good traction or deep cushioning), sketch their plans, and then use a variety of materials to build prototype shoes that meet the design criteria.

Find out which clothing habits actually matter most as you learn that what you have in your closet adds to your ecological footprint.

Using examples from an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum for fashion and design, this timeline is an exploration of the history of shoes.

Here's a short animated video detailing the history of the word "pants", from the 4th Century Roman Saint Panaleon to its modern use in print.

A useful series of videos for students that explore careers in the arts.