Tech Tuesday for 9/13

Happy Tuesday everyone. I hope the first week of the school year has gone smoothly for all of you. I hope your tech issues have been resolved. If not, please know that everyone is working hard to get everything going. If you are still having problems, please contact the Help Desk to make sure they are aware of any issue you might have.

Here is the text from an email Mike sent out on Monday. We are excited to get into your classrooms and look forward to hearing from all of you.

Hello,

This year, Nick Provenzano and myself will be filling the technology curriculum specialist roles at .5 FTE each. Our role is to help you incorporate technology into your curriculum and your instruction. We are looking forward to getting into classroom to work with you and your students on technology-based lessons, projects and training.  We are both teaching in the morning and are available from late morning through the rest of the school day and after school as needed.

In order to organize and schedule as efficiently as possible, we are going to split our coverage geographically.  I’ll be covering the north end of the district and Nick will cover the south end.  While this is how we will generally be dividing things, we will be very flexible in scheduling for specific needs and to meet specific requests. We will each be in every building at some point.  We’ll also be spending time in buildings for drop-in training, help with projects, learning new tools for instruction, etc.   

Contact us at any time to bring us in.  We’ll be contacting teachers and administrators to arrange visits and training.

As always, for any hardware or software related problems, troubleshooting, etc., contact helpdesk at 5199. 

Thanks,

Mike and Nick

Mike: North, Parcells, Ferry, Mason, Poupard, Kerby, Monteith and Barnes.

Nick: South, Brownell, Pierce, Defer, Maire, Richard, Trombly and Barnes.

Here are some great resources I have found the past couple of weeks.

SMART Resources

Here is a link to some quick SMART resources that you might find helpful. One of the tips involves changing the language of Notebook. This could be great for our language teachers. If you look around the site, you might find some other tips worth sharing.

RealWorldMath.org

Real World Math is a resource offering free math lessons and activities for grades 4-10. The unique feature of these lessons is they are presented on the virtual globe of Google Earth.

How to use a Google Calendar

Here are some great tips on how to use your Google Calendar if you have one.

How to use your Outlook Calendar

Here is a video that shows you some tips and tricks to Microsoft Outlook.

I hope you enjoyed these tips and I will have more for you in the next week or so.

Have a great day!

Nick

Welcome Back #GPPSS

Welcome back everyone! It is wonderful to be back in this great district ready to help our students achieve all of their goals and dreams.

My schedule has changed a bit from last year. I will be teaching 3 sections of English at South and the rest of the day will be dedicated to working with all of you to integrate technology into your curriculum.

My number one job is gong to be getting into your classroom, when invited, and work with you on integrating technology to best fit your needs. I'm currently working on the best way to reach out to all of you, so please be patient as we start the year.

I look forward to working with all of and your curriculum to find the best way to utilize the tools we have for the lesson you are creating. Just using any tool doesn't make the lesson better, the right tool for the right lesson is needed to get the most out of it.

The blog will be up and running and I will be sharing great resources as I stumble across them.

Here are some great tips from Greg Johnson of North and Scott Peltier of South. If you have great tips you would like to share, leave a comment on the post or shoot me an email.

From Greg: LCD Adjustment


The screen resolution on the teacher computer monitor was adjusted over the summer to 1280x1024. However at that resolution, the LCD projectors do not provide the correct image size on the Smartboard (left and right vertical sides are blank).

If you would like to lower your monitor’s resolution back to 1024x768 so that the image from the LCD projector will fit the Smartboard properly, please submit a helpdesk request so that it can be changed.


From Scott: Pinnacle Seating Charts

I found out that there are some who are not familiar with the seating chart in Pinnacle. Trust me, it is so much easier than Zangle’s version. Just drag the photos wherever you wish and print.



I hope everyone had a great summer and are ready to keep this the best district in the state.

- Nicholas Provenzano

@MrProvenzano

Tech Tuesday 5/24

Tech Tuesday

Sorry for the long delay between posts, but I was becoming a first time daddy! Leonardo Nicholas Provenzano was born on Mother’s Day. He’s an adorable baby boy with the cutest little smile.

I wanted to take a moment and thank everyone who has been supportive of this blog for the past year and a half. I’ve worked very hard to provide the best sources to support the amazing things you do in your classrooms. However, this is going to be my last post.
Keeping up with the blog is a full time job. Reviewing sites and seeing where they would fit took many hours of outside of school and those are now reserved for Baby Leo. I still have my personal blog that will be updated regularly. You can stop by TheNerdyTeacher.com anytime. I’m still a full time English teacher and I want to focus my energy on creating amazing lessons for the kids in my classroom. I will still try to help teachers when I can, but in my current position, I can’t keep the blog going. Below you will find some great sites from friends of mine that share a tremendous amount of resources for the classroom. Please bookmark their site and see what they have to offer. It’s been fun sharing with all of you and hope to be able to do it again.

iLearntechnology.com

This is an awesome site run by one of my bestest friends. Kelly provides wonderful resources for all ages. She is always willing to help teachers with questions and point them in the right direction when needed. She is currently involved with creating a new school in Denver. She is a tech rockstar.

 http://www.freetech4teachers.com/

Here is a great site run by Richard Byrne. He fills it with tons of great resources for teachers to use in the classroom.

The Daring Librarian

I love this site. It is not for librarians only though. Gwenyth Jones is an awesome person that I will have the pleasure of presenting with this summer in Phildelphia at the national tech conference. She really takes an exciting approach to tech integration and shares amazing resources.

Thanks again for the support!