Technology and Teaching, Together
Discovery Education (formerly United Streaming) has tons of really wonderful resources for teachers and students! One of the participants in last week’s training said that it was the best training she’d ever had (Thanks, Angela J.!)!
With that in mind, for those of you having trouble accessing this great resource, here are the steps:
This Feel Good Friday post was submitted by our very own Assistant Principal, Mike. D.
Be sure to crank up the volume on your speakers!
Oprah’s Kickoff Party Dance
During The Oprah Show’s 24th season kickoff party, Harpo staff and more than 20,000 people pulled off a massive surprise for an unsuspecting Oprah. The entire crowd performed a choreographed piece to the Black Eyed Peas’ “I Gotta Feeling,” and Oprah was not only shocked, she was thrilled! Award-winning director Michael Gracey says the interaction between the Black Eyed Peas and the crowd is what made the flash mob so extraordinary. “There’s something really special when you take an audience and instead of just being passive and watching, you invite them to participate,” he says. “That’s why it was so magical for both parties. Two groups of people came together to create something that neither of them could have done alone.”
Click here to check out the flash mob that took over Chicago’s Magnificent Mile.
Now that grades are in and report cards ready to go home, it is just about time to switch your gradebooks to the new Marking Period. In order for the grades to show on Edulink, the new Marking Period spreadsheet name must be displayed in italics. That is what tells Edulink to “grab” those grades each night and post them online.
To make this change:
Since report cards go home tomorrow, I recommend waiting to make this change until we return to school Thursday. That way what parents see in Edulink will match what they see on the report card.
The message here — even those who are very different can still be the best of friends. Enjoy!
The first Marking Period export of the year is upon us! The final step in the export process is to check ClassXP and make sure the grades you see are correct. However, you can’t check that until our SASI administrator imports your export file into SASI. So, if you think you exported your grades, but you’re not sure and you want to check:
Since I’m filling is for the SASI Adminstrator right now, I’ll contact everyone once I’ve pulled the grades in to SASI so that you know when you can check and confirm that not only did the export file “fly”, but that the grades are all correct.
New technology here to clean your screen internally.
Click here to start this process.
Happy Friday!
(I really hope this isn’t blocked!)
At the start of the school year, during the Technology Kickoff presentation, I challenged teachers to take their Professional Learning Communities to the next level – beyond the walls of the building and the boundaries of the school district. I thought that now, right before our PLC Professional Development Day, it would be a good time to re-issue that challenge and provide an idea on where to start.
I wrote about Twitter.com last year. This is a GREAT place to start. I know some folks will say, “What? Why on earth would I want to know what other people are doing during all hours of the day, every day of the week, and in 140 characters or less?!?!” Well, the key is in WHO those other people are. In Twitter you “follow” people with similar interests and backgrounds. They, in turn, “follow” you. It may sound like one big stalkfest (I know stalkfest isn’t a real word. But this is a blog and not even remotely close to anything resembling literature), but Twitter has proven to be the most valuable online tool I have used during the past year. After logging in to Twitter, within minutes tips, tricks, and resources come flying in.
If the key is in who to follow, how do you find the people? Twitter4teachers provides lists of educators on Twitter by subject area. Once you find folks that post information that you find useful, check out who they are following and follow them, too. If you know of others in your field, you can search for them on Twitter. It’s amazing how many people are tweeting–authors, professors, politicians (and, yes, Ashton Kutcher is tweeting, too, if you are into that sort of thing). Or, you could check out who your friendly-ITRT is following and start there. You will find me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/tekkieteacher.
Once you have started setting up your online PLC, the next step is to actually post something. For those of you who are a bit shy, try “re-tweeting”, or just re-posting someone else’s post that you found useful. Be sure to include the “RT” indicator and attribute the post to the original person with the “@” symbol like the example below:
When working within an online PLC, you will get more out of it if you are a contributor to the conversation rather than just a bystander. Before you know it, people will start following you, too! I recommend always screening your followers and blocking anyone that you aren’t sure about. However, I have to admit that it was also very cool once some of the big names in the the Ed Tech world who I was following started following me, too!
Our PLCs are about helping and learning from each other to improve ourselves and the instructional process. There are 195 people in my Ed Tech PLC and I am much better at what I do because of them. Come join me!
With the end of the marking period upon us, it’s important to make sure all our students are receiving credit for the work they have done. If you had a student who has transferred out of your class and gone to another teacher’s class, please be sure to forward that student’s grade to his/her new teacher. If you are no longer seeing that student’s average in IGPro, here’s what you do:
If a student has come to your class from another school, please check with guidance for that student’s grades.
For some “Feel Good Friday” chuckles, here are 20 of some of the best one-liners I’ve found on the web:
So….which was your favorite?
For those of you who are interested in one of the 10 SMART Boards we are purchasing, here is a great site with resources for SMART educators. This might be a nice place to start for your lesson ideas!
I want to thank all of you for your patience. This has been a very busy start to the school year this year and consequently I have not kept up with my weekly posts. Many of you have told me not to worry about it, that you know how busy I am with the extraneous duties I’ve picked up, and I appreciate your understanding.
The reality is, though, that we in education are traditionally overtasked. Back in my consulting days, when my colleagues would complain about their workload, I would tell them that teachers work more in 9 months than they ever would in a year’s worth of consulting. They never questioned me about it. I like to think that was because they knew I’d done both, but it was more likely because they were afraid I would assign them more tasks if they did.
With as busy as I’ve been, I still know that I do not work as hard as a classroom teacher. I do not have to take home papers to grade and although I try to collaborate with teachers on lesson plans, it’s nothing like what I had to do when I was in the classroom all the time.
So, I’m going to do my best to keep up with these posts. The extraneous duties I’ve picked up have to take a back seat to my primary responsibility of helping teachers. Teachers are the stars in education. The rest of us are just support personnel.
Now for today’s mini-byte….
Many of you are still having trouble logging in to Novell in the mornings. Over the summer, how users are set up in Novell was changed by the Department of Information Technology Services. The “context” was reset for everyone. However, for some reason, your computers aren’t always ”remembering” your context and it has to be set by hand.
If you aren’t able to log in to Novell, please try the following:
You should be able to log in once the context is set correctly. However, if this continues to be a problem, please submit a Help Request indicating that your computer will not “hold it’s context and has to be re-set”.
Several staff members have asked me where in the world their SchoolFusion Message Center has gone?!?! There used to be a link beneath where you now see “FusionTools”. With this summer’s upgrades, that link was removed, probably because it was redundant. You see, your Message Center is located on your profile page, and since there was already a link for that I suppose the engineers decided to do away with the other.
So, to get to your SchoolFusion Message Center, click FusionTools/View My Profile. Your Message Center is located just below your profile picture.
Although all of the messages sent to staff members through SchoolFusion are also delivered to your GroupWise inbox, it is still a good idea to check the Message Center every once in a while to make sure nothing was skipped. Also, even if the sender does not have an email address in the system, you can still respond to their message through the Message Center. Britt B. has found that feature especially handy lately!
I posted this last spring and thought it might be a good time to re-post it. If there was a week when we all needed someone to stand by us, to give us a shoulder to lean upon, this was probably it.
Grammar Girl’s Quick & Dirty Tips is a site is sent in by our very own Jennifer H. According to Jen, “This website is a fantastic way for students and/or teachers to brush up on grammar. It is styled after Gossip Girl – a tv and book series. The quick and dirty tips are amazing.”
Have you had a student transfer out of your class and now the new teacher or school needs that student’s grades? In the past that information was hard to recover in IGPro. With the later versions of IGPro we are now using, it’s much easier!
Please remember, NEVER delete a student from your gradebook. Instead, wait for the auto-update to inactivate the student. Once the student is deleted, their records are gone forever. There is no way to recover them.
Welcome to Friday!
This video is for any one who may be, like me, finding themselves wondering “who’s on first, what’s on second, etc.”
The whirlwind of the kickoff to a new school year has me spinning!
Our school has purchased Scantron’s Achievement Series to make the administration of common formative assessments easier. Tech Team member Marc S. will be heading up the implementation of this “web-based assessment solution” with assistance from fellow Tech Team member Jason F. Many thanks to both of them for graciously volunteering for this duty!
For those of you interested in learning more about this assessment tool, check out the website at http://www.achievementseries.com/!