March 4, 2009
Our Classroom Websites
I’m seeing a number of
good classroom websites being
created and used by our high
school teachers. I’ve shared some
of them in the past with different
groups of teachers, however, I
thought it might be a good thing to
list a collection of them in one
place so that you can see what
other ACPS teachers are doing.
Here are some of the sites they
have created.
Social Studies
Ms. Baker-AHS—World Hist.1
Ms. Bebee CHS history, math,
language arts
Ms. Walker AHS--English
Ms. McAvene AHS -Spanish
Hannah B.-AHS-Spanish
Ms. Anderson—AHS- math
Ms. Finney-alternative education
Aim for the Stars
The Virginia DOE Division of
Technology and Career Education
has launched “the nation’s first
statewide initiative that enables
students and teachers to study as-
tronomy in real time during the
daytime without leaving the class-
room. “ You may ask, “how it this
possible?” Well, the telescope is
located in western Australia. So
that the times in which our stu-
dents would be in school are times
at which it is very dark out over
there.
By utilizing a telescope lo-
cated in Australia, students also
gain the advantage of using a tele-
scope located far from most of the
“light pollution” which occurs in
eastern United States.
This program makes use of the
technological infrastructure which
was developed in this state to faci-
litate on line testing. The human
component of this infrastructure
includes the ITRT teachers who
are there to assist you should you
be interested in this program.
The teacher registers for an
account and then reserves a time
when their students can use the
internet to control the 14 inch
(with a 77 inch focal length) tele-
scope. To learn more about this
initiative you can visit
http://www.sharetheskies.org/hom
e.cfm.
Document Camera Update
By now, most of you have
been introduced to the AverVision
Document Camera. I’ve found the
average teacher to be delighted
with the uses that can be made of
it by simply hooking it up to an
LCD projector and substituting it
for the old overhead.
But, you may not be aware of
how much more useful the camera
becomes when the accompanying
software is installed. By installing
the software: 1. It becomes very
easy to take pictures (jpg files) and
put them on your computer—just
two clicks of the mouse. 2. You
feed the image into your laptop
and project it from there—
meaning that you can draw on it
with a pencil under the lense (as
always), OR you can use the
mouse to draw on the image as
well. 3. You can create a video
clip—so you could teach a lesson
by drawing on the image and giv-
ing a narration which can later be
played back. This opens up many
possibilities, such as creating a
lesson for a substitute to play on a
day you know you are going to be
out.
Back Up Your Documents
Data loss has become an issue.
You don’t want your computer to
crash and in the process lose les-
sons, grades, powerpoints, etc.
which you’ve taken months to de-
velop. It is not difficult to back up
your documents. Let me show
you how—just click here.
TurningPoint Testimonial
I've found Turning Point to be
very successful in math class. I've
taught the lower ability level for
math the past two years and I can
honestly say that when I break out
the Turning Point all students try
to get the problem solved and to
click in as fast as possible. This
program moves the slow pokes
along too. I have several students
who can spend the entire class pe-
riod and not get one problem
done. With Turning Point, I keep
them moving along. Another nice
feature is that students get imme-
diate feedback. If the results aren't
so good when I close out polling
and see the results, we stop and go
over the problem right then and
there. If everybody in the class got
the problem correct, we cheer and
move along to the next question.
No explanation needed. I will add
that making math Turning Points
is much more difficult than history
or language arts ones....It's like
anything else though -- the more
you use it, the easier it is.
Blabberize.com Two
In the last newsletter I told you
about blabberize.com. However,
I’m coming back to it with this
newsletter, because now I’ve spent
some time at the site and created
my own talking head. To see it,
click here and then click on the
forward arrow. Be sure and watch
both scenes.
If you do a search at their site
on “Lincoln” for example, you
will get a whole lot of examples
that were obviously done by stu-
dents. Here are some that I came
up with:
For math--Pythagoras
For Black History Month
For Literature—Mary Shelly
For Science-the planet earth
It’s not hard for your students
to make their own, by going to:
http://blabberize.com/ I believe
all of the laptops on carts have
built in microphones, so use those
rather than the desktops.
Free Quizmaker for Online
Testing
Melissa Rollosson
http://www.classmarker.com/
ClassMarker is an easy-to-use
online quiz maker that marks tests
and quizzes for you. Although
there are different plans you can
use, the free plan allows you to
create and save quizzes, and store
results online. You can have mul-
tiple classes to which you can as-
sign different quizzes. Time limits
can be set, images can be included
in questions, and both questions
and answers can be randomized.
The pay plan ($24.95/year)
eliminates advertising and allows
you to have results emailed to you.
Out with the Old,
In With the New
Melissa Rollosson/Larry Blodgett
This is the last year we will be
using SASI and IGPro. Starting
next school year, Pearson will no
longer be support either program.
Accomack County Public Schools
will use PowerSchool for our stu-
dent information system, replacing
SASI. PowerTeacher, a web-based
gradebook, will replace IGPro.
Click here for an overview of Po-
werTeacher.
All three lower-shore Mary-
land counties have been using
PowerSchool for at least one
school year. Both teachers and
parents have had positive things to
say about PowerSchool. Parents
especially like the ability to access
information in real-time, such as
grades and attendance.
Although data will be migrated
to PowerSchool this spring, we
will continue to use the current
system for the remainder of this
school year.
The current plan is to train
teachers in the new gradebook in
August when we return for the
next school year. An overview of
the new system will be given after
SOLs and before school is out for
the summer.
New fair-use guide offers
copyright protection for
educators
Melissa Rollosson/Larry Blodgett
Hoping to clear up the confusion
over the “fair use” of digital mate-
rials in teaching and learning, a
panel of university professors has
developed a “Code of Best Prac-
tices in Fair Use for Media Litera-
cy Education.” The document cla-
rifies how fair use applies to the
most common situations where
media-literacy educators make use
of copyrighted materials in their
work, and it offers guidance for
instructors so they can make more
informed judgments about using
these materials. The code identi-
fies five principles of consensus
about acceptable practices for the
fair use of copyrighted materials,
wherever and however it occurs:
in K-12 schools, higher-education
institutions, or nonprofit groups
that offer media-education pro-
grams.
Rather than linking to the
document itself, I’ll link to a site
which provides links to this doc-
ument, as well as related teaching
material, videos, podcasts, case
studies, etc. I spent probably an
hour here and learned quite a bit.
Basically the authors take
the view that it is time for educa-
tors to quit letting copyright own-
ers tell us what their rights are and
intimidating us. We need to un-
derstand the principles that guide
the interpretation of the laws so
that we can determine what is and
what is not fair use.
Click here to go to this
table of contents on fair use.
KeepVid
Melissa Rollosson
Ever see a video on YouTube
and wish you could use it in class?
Well, you can. At home, simply
copy/paste the URL for the video
to http://keepvid.com/. You will
be able to download the video in
one of two formats. The larger
file is a better format, the smaller
file uses an FLV player (free).
See me for more information.