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!

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.

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/!

Please don’t forget that our faculty calendar is officially online this year! You should all be receiving daily email notices about all the upcoming events. These events “pull” from every webpage that you are associated with, including your class webpages, the faculty calendar, and the IT webpage. If you are not receiving these messages, please contact your friendly ITRT.

To see everything that is on the Faculty Calendar, login to SchoolFusion and click My Calendar on the left. You can search for specific group events by checking/unchecking the boxes below the calendar.

If there is anything missing from the calendar that you believe should be included, again, please contact your friendly ITRT.

The first week of school is behind us now and, unless there are some hidden casualties I don’t know about, we all survived! We may feel battered, beaten, bruised, and definitely exhausted, but we have successfully kicked off another school year!

This week’s Feel Good Friday is short and sweet. Now….go get some rest so we can do it all again starting Monday!

Since last week’s Technology Kickoff presentation, a number of you have asked about the tool I used to create the opening slide, http://wordle.net. Wordle is a completely free tool that allows you to create a word cloud out of any text, including poetry, literature, speeches, etc. All you have to do is copy/paste the text into the create field and viola – a personalized word cloud. Wordles can be used to introduce a lesson and spark discussion, or in our Language Arts classes to convey the main ideas in a piece of literature. This site created Wordles for every presidential inaugural address since Washington!

To get started, I recommend copying/pasting your favorite poem or a couple of paragraphs from your favorite book to see what kind of Wordle is created!

I’ve posted this one before, probably more than once, but I just love it and I think it’s a great video to watch right before the first day of school!

Enjoy!

(Originally posted 12/8/2008)

For the past year, the Tech Team and I have maintained Hylton’s webportal at http://guest.portaportal.com/pwcs. However, I recently moved all of our links (and added lots of new ones!) to http://delicious.com/hyltonhs. Both PortaPortal and Delicious are online bookmarking tools. However, Delicious has proven to be much more user-friendly. It is easier to create bookmarks, and it is also easier to search your bookmarks. Once you have over 100 bookmarked sites (we currently have 297!), the search capabilities become very important!

Hylton’s Delicious site hosts a collection of bookmarked sites for teachers, students, and parents. Just go to http://delicious.com/hyltonhs, and use the tags listed along the right side to find tons of links to online tools for virtually every subject. We will continue to add bookmarks, so check back often to find out what’s new! And, if you know of a site that you would like included, forward it along to your friendly ITRT.

Hylton’s PortaPortal site will remain “live”, but no new bookmarks will be added. Instead, everything new will be posted at http://delicious.com/hyltonhs.