Happy Tech Tuesday for 9/27

Happy Tech Tuesday everyone! I hope the week is going well. I have a couple of things I want to share with you that you might find helpful.


I want to remind everyone that Mike and I have split the district to best help teachers with their technology curriculum needs.

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

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

Feel free to email us and set a time to meet. We have already been in some buildings helping teachers and it has been great. We look forward to meeting with you helping you integrate technology into your already brilliant lesson plans.

Writing Prompts

I found this on my Google Reader the other day and I love it. This site has over 250 pictures that pose a question for the reader. Here is one example that I love,

Here is another fun one,

I think this would be great for most ages at the start of class. Check it out and see how you could use it.

Draw A Stickman

This is just a fun site that would be great for little kids. It allows you to draw pictures that interact with a preset story. This would be great to use on a Smartboard.

Cell Phones is the Classroom

This is a great article on Edutopia on the use of Cell Phones in the classroom. The article has some links to sites that are designed to help teachers utilize the cellphones the students have in class. If you have been thinking of ways to use the phones in your classroom, here is the perfect article for you.

I hope you find these sites helpful. If you have something you would love to share with the rest of the district, please feel free to leave a comment or send me an email.

Give it a try!

Nick Provenzano

Tech Tuesday for September 20

Happy Tech Tuesday everyone! I hope this day find you all doing very well. Attached to the email was the Notebook file that will show you some neat tricks to do with the upgraded Notebook Software. Many of these features were new to me and this file was helpful in walking me through them. Note: Some of the features are for the new Smartboards and are not compatible with our boards. They are marked with an 800 next to them.

Here are some great links I wanted to share with all of you on using the Clickers and a website for Science Teachers.

Smart Response Clickers

This is a nice little site that will walk you through signing up with Clickers and using them in class.

Importing from Microsoft into Notebook for Clickers

This link will show you how to import exams you already have created into Smart Notebook so you do not have to start from scratch. It's a really helpful page.

Sun Moon Scope

Here is a write up of an interactive site that would work great on your Smartboard. It's a tool that allows people to see the movement of the sun and the moon. It's worth a check for all of the Science teachers out there.

These are just a few great resources I found this week. If you find something great, please feel free to share it with me so I can pass it on to everyone else.

As always, give it a try!

Nick

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