Mattifest conference edition: Wise advice from Borimir

Hope your conference went by smoothly! Just think, only seven more school days until Thanksgiving break. You can do it!

Please take a few minutes to peruse "The Rausch Report" and "The Hall Monitor" links at the top of this blog. They are great resources for you from the rest of the middle school instructional technology team. 

Now that we're through the conference season, I'll be looking to set up more PLT times in December. I'm going to start with my fifth grade folks and then to those of you who have met with me in the past. If you haven't met with me or your media specialist this year, we'd still like a chance to work with you...

Awesome tip of the day...
Have you ever been on a site in Safari and it just doesn't work like it does on a computer? You're not alone. But instead of winging the iPad across the room, you should try to set Safari in "desktop mode". Here's how:

• Browse to your site like you normally do
• Hit the sharrow button (or the export button for you traditionalists out there)
• On the bottom row of grey icons, swipe over ("Swiper, no swiping" - sorry, couldn't resist) to the one that says "Request Desktop Site"
• The page will reload and you can try again

This tip is brought to you by Alisha Long, who couldn't view PDF submissions in Schoology through Safari. Once we switched to desktop mode, the submissions were visible and she could grade more efficiently. Yeah! 

Tech updates that might interest you...

• Full Google Integration is now available through the Schoology app! Yippee! The Schoology app should update on its own. Now students can activate their Google assignments through the app. More detailed information can be found here. 
• If you have a student without an iPad, please ask them why! If they say it's been misplaced, have them come to the media center immediately. We've had great success finding iPads that go missing during the day.
• Apparently closing Excel files and hoping for the prompt to save your work is a gamble these days. When working in Excel, always save your work before closing.

Have a great weekend!

Newsy, Apple Teacher, and more!

Fall is in the air! Hope you survived the week full of sugared up kids! 

I got to spend Monday morning at the Newsy headquarters learning about their operation and some great tie-ins to media literacy instruction. I added the Newsy app to Self Service. Check it out. 

Have you tried...

• Newsy? This news platform started in Columbia (and is still headquartered here even though it's big-time now) and is a video news network that produces short-form video news pieces. They focus on "second tier" reporting to explain the why and get different perspectives about the stories. Grades 4 and up.
• Apple Teacher? It's a program created by Apple for teachers to learn how to use Apple apps in their instruction. Materials are presented through interactive iBooks. Visit appleteacher.apple.com, sign in, and start earning your badges for free. For all teachers.
• Poly? It's a new 3D object library created by Google. Visit poly.google.com to search for and download 3D objects. Grades 4 and up

Cool things happening in my classrooms (and can also happen in yours)...

• Erin Thompson and Michele Winter have continued their stellar work with flipped instruction and self-paced learning powered by Schoology's student completion rules. If you are interested in trying this strategy for an upcoming unit, just let me know.
• Lemetria Pegg's students are wrapping up their Sparta vs. Greece iMovie projects. I had a good time refreshing their memories on iMovie and turning in projects to Schoology.

Building your digital PLN...

• CPSSteamBus, @CPSSteamBus - check out what's happening with Craig Adams' STEAM Bus. It's such a great resource for our students!
• Kelly Schaffer, @MsSchaffer - if you've been around Smithton in recent years, Kelly is no surprise. She shares great ideas to implement in your reading and social studies classrooms.

Tech updates that might interest you...

• The BrightBytes survey is open. You are probably already getting emails about it. This data comes back to buildings to help determine what's going well, and what needs to be improved.
• At some point at the end of next week, there will be a new button in the "materials" area of your Schoology courses and resources. It'll say "Add Assessment". This feature includes the new question types from Schoology, but it's very much still in beta form. It currently does not work on tablets or on laptops that have tablet mode. So unless you are creating an assessment that you want students to complete on a laptop or desktop, you can avoid this option for now. Continue to use the regular "Add Test/Quiz" option. Hopefully it will be available on tablets soon...

Have a great weekend!