Sept. 25, 2013

Hi everyone,

Alicia and I have been keeping tabs on all that’s been happening with teaching, learning and technology… you all have been busy!  Here’s the update on how we’re pushing our boundaries; our successes and struggles so far this year.  We hope this is useful to all of you, let us know!

What’s working:

• Marina, Cecilia, Ben and I are taking an online course with the Global Online Academy –– about Online Learning Environments.  We’re learning lots and eager to share with others.   
• The EOM (end of message) heading seems to be helping us be more succinct in emails.  An important note from Alicia – if replying to an EOM message, remove those letters from the subject to avoid confusion.
• Scott and Jeremy (and others!) are huge fans of the Snipping Tool – it’s popular because it lets you quickly grab a selected screen shot of your computer.  This can be helpful for all sorts of things – lesson plans,  
• We’ve had steady attendance at our open lab tech workshops.  Stay tuned for more sessions next week, advertised in the Monday Memo.
•  We’ve purchased 250 licenses for Adobe Creative Suite, each of which includes both an in-school and an at-home install.  All of those installs are available for faculty to request:
• If faculty would like a particular machine (or all the machines in a particular room) at school to have ACS, send an email to helpdesk@northwestschool.org , and this will happen.
• If faculty would like to install ACS on a home machine, send an email to helpdesk@northwestschool.org . A dvd will be burned for you to take home, do the install from, and then return.
•  Last year many teachers used our Flip Cameras and Bloggies to record student presentations, class trips and create student videos.  You requested more of these simple, hand-held video cameras and we bought 10 more cameras, we now have 15 working Bloggies.  

What’s wonky:

• The Earth Lab Smartboard’s mouse has been hijacked by the right hand corner of the board… We are working to fix this.  The work around is to unplug the usb connection to the Smartboard (this has already been done, but just in case – you’re now in the know!)
•  The Fisken classroom has an icky smell from time to time, and it seems to be connected to how long the bulb has been on in the projector.  This will be solved shortly with a new bulb.

What you wish for:

•  Perhaps one of the cutest tech issues reported lately, the new Hutch Laptops have touchpads that are too big for the little hands of middle school students.  So, a classroom set of mice will accompany the new Hutch laptop cart.  We hope to have this portable collection ready next week, in the meantime, pop by the Library to borrow a set from the AV closet.
•  Many of you have expressed interest in more hands-on training using Smart Boards.  There is a workshop offered through NWAIS – the Classroom Technology Workshop - happening Oct. 25^th at Epiphany School.  http://www.nwais.org/page.cfm?id=18&verbose=7845  We will also have ongoing open lab sessions.
• The humanities department is considering collaboratively study a novel with the ILEA school in Ethiopia -  using Voicethread as a way to leave comments (video/audio) on a shared document/presentation.  We’re looking into purchasing a school license – you can find out more about Voicethread here: http://vimeo.com/32856071 (ignore the Penn State info at the end)

Have a fabulous day!

Catherine and Alicia