This video was sent to me by our Queen of Attendance, Margie C. I thought it would be great for the last Feel Good Friday of 2007! It’s a fun compilation of holiday songs done by Indiana University’s a capella group, Straight No Chaser. For information about their work, go to http://www.a-cappella.com/product/646/video-performance-pop.

Have an absolutely wonderful winter break. See you next year!

Download Video: Posted by tekkieteacher at TeacherTube.com.

We’ve added quite a few more links to Hylton’s PortaPortal that you will want to check out. One of these is Primary Source Learning that our Gifted Education teacher, Janice G., shared it with me. It looks like a great resource! She was also kind enough to share the training materials for the site. If you would like copies, just come by the IT Lab.

Additionally, if you are looking for the SOL remediation resource links, they are also now on the PortaPortal.

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!

1. In IGPro, in the Show drop-down list, choose Tasks/Students/Notes.
2. At the bottom of the spreadsheet window, make sure Show Inactive Students IS checked.
3. Click the transfer student’s name. The date the student transferred out of your class and his/her average at the time displays in the Notes window at the bottom of the screen.

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.

I love classic Carson. I spent hours a few weeks ago watching clips on YouTube. I laughed so hard I almost cried. This one I thought was especially funny.

Enjoy and have a great weekend!

Download Video: Posted by tekkieteacher at TeacherTube.com.

As we are in the midst of SOL remediation and testing, I found Alfie Kohn’s post, Do Kids Read Less for Fun? Blame Standardized Tests from The Pulse, particularly poignant. One quote, in particular, stood out:

“We haven’t been doing any reading since we started preparing the kids for the reading test.”

We’ve all heard about Facebook and MySpace, but for those of us just a teensy bit older than 25, there’s another social networking service called Ning. Just like MySpace and Facebook, the site is blocked by the school system. However, I found I could still get to a really great Ning community called Classroom 2.0. The pictures don’t work if you are in the school building, but the text is there. It’s a great resource! If you’ve been thinking about learning more about social networks, nothing’s better than giving one a try!

You are teaching class. You are incredibly excited because your lesson utilizes some very neat Web 2.0 technology. Your ITRT is very proud.

You set the stage for you lesson by introducing the blog (or wiki, or podcast, or any other Web 2.0 teaching tool) that you’ve integrated into the day’s lesson. You look out into the their eyes, expecting to see looks of appreciation for your awesome lesson planning creativity. Instead, you get nothing but blank stares–nada, nothing, zip. Where is the excitement for technology that your ITRT and the experts have promised will be there?

Yes, it does happen. In spite of the studies that tell us that our students know more about and are more comfortable with techology than any of us born before 1990 could ever hope to be, the fact is that we do have kids who are still wading in the shallows rather than riding the technology tidal wave. And that’s OK.

David Warlick wrote about this recently in his post, Such a Quiet Revolution. In it he wrote, ”Today’s change is fast. I suspect, aside from great cataclysms, faster than any at time before. But it’s not so fast that it really stirs up the wind.” And that’s what we have–a technology revolution that’s moving rapidly, but the winds of change are more like a whispering breeze rather than a hurricane gale.

Does that mean we should give up on technology? Of course not. Just because some of our students are still waders, that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t learn to swim. According to the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, technology needs to be an integral part in our students’ education if we hope for them to be able to compete in today’s global economy.

So what does this mean for teachers? It means that in spite of the occasional blank stares, don’t feel disheartened. Like virtually everything we do in teaching, we just have to keep trying. It’s hard to imagine, but just a few years ago “surfing” meant something totally different and “googling” and “blogging” were gibberish. Things are changing. Our kids WILL “get it”.

They have to.

I had a very nice conversation last week with one of our Language Arts teachers, Jennifer C. We were talking about our Learning Management System, SchoolFusion, and she mentioned that she’d been getting some really wonderful responses using the Discussion Board feature. She said that her students’ online writing was generally more thoughtful than what she received from them in class. We talked a little bit about the reasons why and theorized that it may be because our students today are Digital Natives and the online world is very much a part of their “comfort zone.” More so, perhaps, than even the “real world”.

Given this conversation, those of you not currently using the Discussion Board feature might want to give it a try. If you are interested, here’s how to enable and use it:

To enable:

1. Log in to SchoolFusion and go the your class webpage.
2. Click Update Class/Section Configuration.
3. On the right under Class/Section Settings, click the pencil next to Message Board.
4. Adjust your message board settings as desired and click Click here to edit the Message Board Setting.

To use:

1. Return to your class/section webpage. You should now see a section called Discussion Board on the right side.
2. In the Discussion Board section, click start a discussion.

For Feel Good Friday, here is a nice video done by South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone. In it they remind us that life, and especially one’s education, is not a just a means to an end, but rather something to experience and treasure.

Download Video: Posted by tekkieteacher at TeacherTube.com.

I hope all of you are able to take some time to sing and dance!

Check out the finalists for the 2007 Edublog Awards!

Today we have a whole list of featured websites–just slide your eyes a bit to the right and down and check out the Blogroll! Every blog has a listing of other blogs the author likes to read.  Therefore, if you like what you are reading here, chances are you’ll like what you find in the Blogroll. Although I read them all, my current favorites are Warlick’s 2 Cents Worth, McLeod’s Dangerously Irrelevant, Fisch’s The Fischbowl, and Gate’s Tipline. These blogs are much better written, much better researched, and way more interesting than mine. While my blogroll reflects my interest in technology and education, but there are over 50 million blogs out there on every subject. To find one on a subject of your choice, just google it!

While our student use of SchoolFusion is skyrocketing, there are still some students who have not added their email address to their account information, thus hindering you ability to communicate with them using the system. You can check to see if yours students have added their email address using these easy steps:

1. Go to http://cdhylton.com and login.
2. Go to your class or section webpage.
3. Click Update Class(or Section) Configuration.
4. Click Email Entire Class.
5. Complete the email message and click Send Email.
6. The next window will display a list of all the students who did not receive the email because they do not have their email address in the system.

For those of you extra kind teachers who want to provide students with the steps to add their email information, here you go:

1. Go to http://cdhylton.com and login.
2. Click My Personal Settings.
3. Add your email address to the Email Address field.
4. Click Change Information.