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!