Beta Grade Book

The color of the cells in the new grade book are related to things other than the percentage. It is displaying the students grade in relation to the other students in the class. This is a valuable data process that is not easy to understand. For example, if you have a majority of your students who are getting red coloration with a score of 90%, then you know that the tool you are using to assess the students is too simple. You need to come up with something that will challenge the students. It is also very useful to sort the class according to grades on one project. You can quickly see which students are falling in to which quartile of understanding. This is a neat feature, but it may need to be communicated with the staff before it goes live. It is a lot easier for adding flags. If you click on the assignment at the top, there is a slot for each one to enter comments and flags.

District Technology Meeting

January 7, 2013

Michelle and Trevor shared lots of information about the district's technology in our meeting last night.

The Beta Program on gradebook will be up and running sometime around mid-January. It will happen soon after the update takes over. After that time, there will be two gradebook links under your instruction tab in gradebook. One will be marked (Beta). You will be able to use either one. Both will store data, so if you want to experiment you can. If you do not want to use it, you do not have to.

In the messenger program, which can send emails to large groups through infinite campus, you need to include your name and email in the body of the message. The email has a standard address, so parents will not be able to tell who the email is from if you don't include that. It is also good to include your name and the school in the subject line. Parents have been calling the front office questioning who these emails are from.

Also, you can create and save templates in the messenger so that you can reuse them. If you use the "failing grades notice template," then that is what is in the subject line of the email. If you create a new template called "Superior Work Notice," your parents will not get a heart attack. Be sure to test before you send, especially if you are copying and pasting, to make sure that it is not giving strange characters for the formatting.

On the teacher web pages, there is clip art available. While working on your web pages, put the cursor where you want it, and then hit the bottom right button in the manager, preview and insert the clip art.

To archive or unarchive a class:
When you click the My Classes link, you should see an area below the class list that displays the Archived classes.
 - Click the class name link for the Archived class to go to that online classroom.
 - Click Manage > Edit Class
 - Scroll to the bottom of the page and change the Class Status to Online then save.
This is really handy if you want all of your fall semester classes to not show up right now.

Notice, when you are working on your web pages in the design setting, there is a "History" link you can click on right next to the "Edit" link. You can recover any different version you have saved in the past. Very handy if you want to have your web page build over the year. You can make the different versions live as you progress through the year.

Using the portlets for unit specific information is also a nice way to keep content relevant. You can minimizing the portlet during all of the year except the one month you use it.

You can manually add students to your classes with the roster link. You can also add parents or staff. You can also send emails to groups of students from this area as well. You can also drop students who have moved.

There is a link, status.sharpschool.com, where you can see the status of all of our sites. It also has the links and phone numbers for technical support. They are very upfront with all users, and they will be more than willing to help you out with any problems. They will be much more timely over breaks and weekends than the district technical department, though they are great too.

Making Movies - Using Digital Texts to Document Personal Connections

This project was published on the Digital Is webpage.

In my junior level American Literature classes, we need to cover a play by Shakespeare each year to be able to meet our Common Core State Standards. Last year, however, I didn't get it done. I just couldn't figure out how to connect a Shakespeare play to one of the fulcrum texts we were already reading in class-at least not in a meaningful package that wouldn't distract for too much time.

Then, I found a great unit plan by Cindy O'Donnell-Allen and Jenny St. Romain, and I knew connecting Hamlet to Of Mice and Men with an overarching theme of resilience would work perfectly.

Next, I started to look for interesting ways to have students represent what they learned in a compact way. I was thinking of having students perform a scene from the play in groups. Yet, when I had done that in the past, students never created something worth capturing on film. The time for preparation and creative application just wasn't sufficient on my timeline. I needed something more focused.

In my reader program, I stumbled upon the Australian Theatre for Young People group, and saw their wonderfully stitched together version of the main soliloquy in Hamlet. I was intrigued. All I needed then was a way to connect it to the student's lives to make it work.

As I thought about what was really happening in Hamlet's monologue, I was simultaneously covering Joseph Campbell's ideas in other classes. Soon, I became convinced that each of my students would have had a similar moment in their lives which they could include in the film through location, setting, and reflection.

Students Published

I am very happy to announce that my spring 2012 American Literature class had their work published at Bookdrum.com. While reading Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, the class gathered and formatted information about the book, the setting, unknown cultural references, unknown words, and the author, and also wrote a book review. I am so proud of the work they put into this project.

You can see their book profile on Bookdrum's Website. Included under the "contributor page" are links for student's Post Modern Multimedia Research Projects and their Letters About a Thing They Carry which were both published as missions on Youthvoices.net.

Post Modern Research Project

My American Literature class created Post Modern Multimedia Research Projects in coordination with the book The Things They Carried. They researched a question that was interesting for them and used Movie Maker Live to combine perspectives from the book, from interviews, from music, from movies, and from any other source they could find. The results are very open and very connected. I am very impressed with the whole class. All of the results, along with student reflections on the project, are posted on Youth Voices, and I will embed a couple of examples below.

While the movies worked well, and the students were very engaged with them, there are a few things I would change next time. First, I would schedule in some work with movie maker before hand. Perhaps have the class work in groups to make something. This would minimize the learning curve, and it would also allow for more experimentation with techniques like layering in audio tracks. Second, I would require the use of proper MLA citations in the reflection as well as a bibliography in order to meet the state standards for research papers.

Media Studies Movies

For this project, students had to include product placement, greenscreen technology, some film shot outside of school, various types of shots, and a complete story. Most of the filming was done on phones, and the editing was done on iMovie and Windows Live Movie Maker.

The project started with creating storyboards for various scenes in the movies.

Once the movies were finished, they entered them into the Youtube Your Film Festival competition.

On the last day of the unit, we viewed all of the movies in class. We also voted on which film was the best. Students asked if the winning team could remake their movie using everyone in the whole class to help make it better.

Working 21st century Skills Definition

A Working 21^st Century Skills Definition

The relationship between curriculum and instruction is obviously a very close one. Curriculum is essentially a design, or roadmap for learning, and as such focuses on knowledge and skills that are judged important to learn. Instruction is the means by which that learning will be achieved. To meet the needs of the 21st century learner and achieve the student outcomes described in its Framework, the Partnership calls on schools

To integrate a 21st century curriculum that blends thinking and innovation skills; information, media, and ICT literacy; and life and career skills in context of core academic subjects and across interdisciplinary themes. To employ methods of 21st century instruction that integrates innovative and research-proven teaching strategies, modern learning technologies, and real world resources and contexts.