Entries Tagged 'General' ↓

My personal blog got a junior high rating.  I wonder if that has some kind of significance?

Go to FreeRice.com and take the vocabulary quiz - for every correct word they will donate 10 grains of rice through the united nations to help end world hunger.  Here is an example:

Spending some time cleaning out email entails reading through some newsletters that contain websites. There is so much out there and not enough time to really look at it all but I am going to try to find good links for this post and in the process, shrink my overloaded inbox.

One website that caught my attention was this interactive version of The Raven. This would be a great Halloween lesson! The website is appropriately spooky and they have marked all the alliteration, assonance, and internal rhyme in the first half of the poem - just hover over the different colored words! You will also find vocabulary words highlighted and defined. This is found at TeachersFirst which is an educational resource site that has been around since 1998.

Here is a website that lets you upload a photo, choose the month, year and size and then print out a personalized calendar. The Reflection Generator let’s you upload a photo and it creates a new image with a reflection added to the bottom. I used the reflection generator to create a new image that I uploaded to the calendar generator and made a November Calendar with our High School pictured at the top. It is here in PDF form if you would like a copy! November Calendar to print It was fun, easy, and free!

I recently signed up on Twitter. If you haven’t looked at it, it is basically instant messaging but throughout the day online by thousands of people. You can sign up to “follow” people. I have resisted because I lead a pretty boring life for the most part. If I am going through a time that is not boring, chances are I won’t have time to “twitter” it, and will blog about it when things calm down.

I signed up because I thought I would try out the “follow” option and follow some of the educational bloggers that I read. During conferences some interesting conversations take place on twitter. You can have Twitter send notifications to your cell phone too so you can keep up with people that way. I’m not clear on how it works as I am a pay as you go cell phone person and didn’t want to use up phone time having Twitter call me.

If you see a Twitter badge in a blog that you read and think you might want to check it out you can sign up for an account for free. Once you have verified your account via your email you can type an update (just tell what you are doing), then search for people you want to follow. I was interested in what some of the early adopters thought about the new version of the Mac operating system and the “tweets” were pretty informative! If you sign up and search for me prepare to take a nap! I basically work, watch TV, surf the net, and go to church.

My last recommendation is Dy-Dan - and his blog entry on a math lesson that was taught on TaaDaa…How I Met Your Mother (called the Hot/Crazy Curve). There is a clip on YouTube which is blocked at school but if you missed the show last week you can watch the clip at home, wait for re-runs, or read the dialog he has below the embedded video on his webpage.

See, as Barney explains, being crazy is fine so long as you match your neuroses with good looks in a one-to-one correspondence (or better). Which makes sense. In a fantastic hey-mister-scientist moment, Barney terms that line the Vickie Mendoza Diagonal, which, I mean, holy cow, I don’t care who you are, there’s no way to mess that one up.

Of course Mr. Meyer couldn’t leave it at that - he has created an entire lesson in which the students graph the data (which he claims he fabricated from ten ex-girlfriends LOL) and their rank on a ten point scale of looks and craziness. He then has the students graph them and tell him which ones fall below the Vickie Mendoza line. I’m not sure but I think at the end of the day he may have had more fun with this than the students! I want to go back to school and learn math in your class Dan - you ARE the man!

6th six weeks grades

1) Student receives grade earned even if it is below 50.

2) Enter a 0 for incomplete work and export. Incompletes are not acceptable at year-end for any six weeks. Missed work can be left with the counselors along with answers and the student will be called. If the student completes the work the grade will be re-averaged.

Semester Exams - (ignore if you do not give exams).

1) Click on Class (on the toolbar), then click on Grading Periods. Scroll down on the right to 2nd Semester Exam and enter the line number (from the assignment window) of the semester exam next to Starting Assignment. If you have exemptions also click the check box “ Allow Alternate Grade“. When you return to the Assignment window type “Semester Exam” in the description box, 100 in the points column — when you tab over exam or semester exam should automatically fill in the Category column. The colors should be white (4th six wks), yellow (5th six wks), white (6th six wks), and yellow (semester exam). If this is not true call for help.

2) Student receives grade earned even if it is below 50.

Semester Exam Exemptions

Click on Class (on the toolbar), then click on Grading Periods. If you have not already done so scroll down on the right to the semester exam and click the check box “ Allow Alternate Grade“. Click OK. In the Score window, i f the Semester Exam grade is NOT on your screen next to the student’s name click on Style (on the toolbar), click on Screen Prefs…, then click on Grading Period and show the semester exam in the drop down box. Scroll to the far left — leave the “Alternate Percent” blank and enter an “E” in Alternate Description. This will not show up on your reports. You may want to type an ex (excused) in the actual grade column where you are entering the other students grades.

Semester Exam Absences

Enter a “0″ for the semester exam and export. Leave a copy of the exam with the student’s name on it along with the answer key with the counselors.

Semester Averages

1) Check semester averages by showing the average next to the student’s name. Click on Style (on the toolbar), click on Screen Prefs…, then click on Overall Summary.

2) If a student had an incomplete in either the 4th or 5th six weeks and you entered the “1″ and “I” , you must remove the 1 and I from the Alternate percent column in the 4th or 5th six weeks.

Export Term Marks

When you are ready to export term marks be sure to check the 6th six weeks, 2nd semester exam, 2nd semester average and Year End average.

Print a Group Report

Print a Group Report for each class (instructions attached). The beginning assignment should be the first assignment of the second semester. The Group Report will be turned in after the grades are validated at the end of the year.

Friday we tested the Xtenda boxes in our lab. we have a generic PC hooked up to the three Xtenda boxes making a total of four stations out of one tower. This great little piece of technology consists of a card installed in one towe and then three little boxes to plug in three more monitors, keyboards, mice, and speakers and only costs about $240. So far I see no downside. They have worked well. The counselors had freshmen logged in all morning working on scheduling in an Access database all morning and this afternoon I had students log on and told them to go ahead and do the things they would normally do and let me know if they seemed to slow way down or crash. I had no complaints and the PC is one that doesn’t have more RAM installed so I am very encouraged. This would extend our number of computers at much less expense than having to replace all the towers. It also means that if you are a classroom teacher with one decent computer in your room and several old not so good computers, you could have four working computers with much less space and for about the cost of a decent printer.

Welcome to my new blog! I hope to provide assistance and resources for issues involving the computer lab, teacher tech support, gradebook issues, and whatever else comes up! Sometimes I post on things that I am learning or reading about and hopefully you will find something to interest you as well. Please come back to visit often to see the changes I make and don’t hesitate to leave a comment. This is intended as an ongoing conversation so to make it work you have to join in the discussion!