While the process of supporting everyone through the successful implementation and distribution of report cards can be extraordinarily time consuming, upon doing a little bit of "web-surfing," it did seem necessary to share one important link that can take you out to all kinds of other really interesting and useful education links, The 2007 Edublog Awards website, a site which gives awards to education-related websites in number of different categories. With second trimester underway, take a few moments from some professional learning of your own, and see how it can inspire you to create units and lessons that challenge even more students in even more effective ways!

Once report cards have been successfully distributed to School District 21's third through eighth grade students, there will be a series of new posts here on The Modern Pen. These posts feature exciting instructional and assessment topics from the podcasts that are being created in elementary and middle school classrooms to a video which poses difficult questions and frames the challenges of educating our students' for their difficult-to-predict futures. Check out The Modern Pen next week!

As the hours count down until we begin to print the new intermediate report cards, one of the consistent questions that has arisen among teachers is, "What prints from PowerGrade and PowerSchool as a student's academic grade on the report card?" The answer is that the letter grade from the letter grade scale is what prints. Percentages do not print. This traditional "90, 80, 70, 60" scale is depicted in another post with an indication of the pluses and minuses that also exist in the scale. For Learner Qualities in the elementary schools, the "X" will simply appear when a teacher wants to express a specific concern. Comments will appear as they are entered. Also, the absence and tardy information does appear on the front page of the report card. This information is drawn from that which is entered on a daily basis in PowerSchool Teacher.

This note is specifically directed at 3rd through 5th grade teachers who have intended to put comments on the report cards in Spanish. For those doing comments in Russian and Polish, unfortunately, we will be using the Microsoft Word version of the page 4 Comments page that was e-mailed to you. If you have questions or need another copy, please e-mail Jason Klein.

For weeks/months, we have been working to ensure that we can successfully create and distribute report cards, including comments, in Spanish, Russian, and Polish. During this time, we have developed a number of creative solutions, and we are proud to say that we are in the final moments of successfully being the first known PowerSchool School District to produce report cards in four languages according to both PowerSchool and Phoenix Learning Systems.

What has proven to be “trickiest,” though, are the comments. We believe that the following steps will allow comments to work without becoming garbled with other symbols as the accents and punctuation in Spanish are “foreign” to PowerSchool’s programming and can corrupt—looking like a bunch of “mumbo jumbo” (the technical term!).

These steps must be followed exactly and in order.

1. Write your comments in Microsoft Word. Our Mac OS X computers do have an International window that can allow the computer to be set to Russian, Polish, or Spanish to make typing slightly easier. (We are in the process of buying keyboard stickers for Russian and Polish for students and teachers to use in the future when writing in those languages on the computer.) Using Microsoft Word has the added benefit of the fact that you can save your comments. If something problematic and unanticipated comes up, you will be able to print those comments and distribute them or re-copy and paste them into PowerSchool Teacher!

2. Copy and paste your comments in to the appropriate comment space in PowerSchool Teacher. Check to be sure that all of the characters look appropriate there before clicking “submit”. If they are not, please fix them at this time.

3. Check your work for both the Learner Qualities and Comments for this particular student. You will not be able to verify again later unlike people making comments in English.

4. Click “submit”.


***At this point, when we run the report card, the comments come out “just fine.”***

WARNING--If you go back to PowerSchool Teacher and look at your comments again, they will be corrupted. For example, “É” may come out instead as the symbol for the Euro or for Forte in a musical composition. Once you re-submit, those symbols will now be what prints!

For a general discussion of comments, please see this entry!

Throughout the school year, in every setting possible, we have listed many sources for help with PowerGrade and PowerSchool. These include:

-The Manual (purple) and Elementary Addendum Manual (Yellow)
-District 21 PowerSchool Support Site
-The Modern Pen
-For PowerGrade, AtomicLearning.com

In addition, though, PowerSchool AND PowerGrade have some support built right in! Have you ever noticed the question mark in the upper right-hand corner of the window?

If you click on that question mark, you will get some general information. Often times, this information is not as helpful for teachers as the materials that we have created from scratch that specifically explain our "situation" in District 21. Nevertheless, if you have a question, this is another source that may provide your answer in either PowerSchool or PowerGrade!

If you have decided to wait to enter academic grades in PowerGrade until Thanksgiving weekend, you may be in for a big surprise that will unnecessarily scare you! Read this to avoid just such a scare.

Back when it was warm and everyone was optimistic about the potential of the Bears (and the Cubs!), we set the Preferences in PowerGrade to only view assignments from this current trimester. We entered the last day of the trimester as November 20th. Any assignments entered after that point will not be visible (but will actually be in PowerGrade). So, obviously, if you are entering your "one assignment" for the trimester on Thanksgiving morning (November 22nd), it will not show up unless you change the Preference setting.

Resetting the visible assignments window
With one of your classes open, go to File > Preferences.





Now, in the Preferences window, click on the "Display" tab.





In the bottom half of this window, the date range appears that we entered during your initial PowerGrade workshop. Notice that the last day of visible assignments is November 20th. You can change this by just clicking in that date box and changing the date (see below).



Click "OK"!


***Now, the important part--Dating your assignment in the "Assignments" window!
For your assignment to count in your first trimester grade, it must have been assigned during first trimester! To ensure that this is the case, please be certain to date your assignment in the "Assignments" window, so it falls NO LATER THAN the last day of the trimester. (In the case of first tri of the 2007-2008 school year, the assignment must be dated on or before November 20, 2007!)

Extra credit is a very interesting assessment topic that, while part of the "unquestioned" fabric of education culture and history in the United States, ought to be re-explored within the framework of assessment for learning. Let's say, for example, that a teacher gives a weekly ten question geography quiz based on what the students have studied relating to geography from social science, science, and/or reading and literature. In addition, the teacher always includes 2 extra credit questions.

Upon nearing the end of a trimester marking period, the teacher begins to realize the significance of the "extra credit" in the grades of various students. Unsure how to handle this, the following reflective questions may help the teacher determine what role, if any, extra credit ought to play in classroom assessment.

Questions to Consider

• Why are you giving extra credit?
• For example, why is it “extra”?
• If it is for additional challenge, should different students simply be receiving different questions on the weekly quiz?
• Do all students receive the same questions? If so, is that appropriate based on their needs and previous performance?
• As a teacher, are you giving extra credit to see how many more items a student knows beyond what you expect?
• Are the extra credit questions more important or less important than other questions?

• Are you giving extra credit to see how motivated, or Self-Directed, a student is?
• Are you giving extra credit to see how much attention to detail is paid by the student (ie, Quality Producer)?

Points to Consider

• Two questions is 20% of the total number of questions if all questions count equally. So, simply based on the math, this can have a significant impact on the grade of the assignment.

• More importantly, is the nature of these quizzes simply fact-based recall?
• How do these quizzes fit in to a wider assessment plan for Social Science within your team?
• How are other more high-level, application-oriented assignments weighted?

• Finally, if the “extra” stuff is important enough to be assessed, it should be included as a "regular" part of the assessment. If it is a description of high levels of self-direction or quality work, it ought to be captured within those Learner Qualities. If it is not so important, it should not be included in the assessment at all because it detracts from what is important. This then muddies the communication to the student and his or her parents of what important skills and concepts the student actually knows and understands.

A district-wide timeline has been developed for the entry of grades, the verification of grades, and the printing of report cards for all three trimesters. This has been, or is being, distributed in schools. Click here to view the 2007-2008 School District 21 Grade Entry Timeline.

Some reminders about the verification process...

• Academic grades will be verified on paper, using sheets that the secretaries will print the morning of November 26th.
• Learner Quality marks and Comments will be verified by teachers going back to the PowerSchool Teacher screen in which they originally entered those.
• If there are changes that need to be made to an Academic grade, Learner Quality mark, and/or Comment, the teacher will make those changes in PowerGrade or PowerSchool by 9 AM on November 28th.

If you are a middle school teacher, stop reading. Report card comments are being handled differently in grades 3 through 5 than in grades 6 through 8!

For our intermediate grade level teachers, all of the information related to comments is contained within the yellow addendum manuals that should have been distributed in the past week. Here, we summarize that information as well as provide some additional tips:

Special Area Teachers
Special area teachers do not have a dedicated location for comments on the report card. If you are a special area teacher, and you have a comment that you would like included on the report card, please pass that along to the student's homeroom teacher. We are encouraging you to pass it along electronically, so the homeroom teacher can simply copy and paste it in PowerSchool. The homeroom teachers will need to have these comments entered by 9 AM on November 26th, the Monday that students and teachers return from Thanksgiving Break, so please provide this information to homeroom teachers well in advance of Thanksgiving weekend.

General Comments
The top section of comments on page four of the intermediate report cards is reserved for general comments about the student throughout the day. This will be entered by the homeroom teacher, though the content of these comments may come from the core academic team or a special area teacher. While most web browsers now have spell-check capability, we are encouraging you to write your comments in a word processing document. They can be revised and edited in that document. Then, simply copy and paste them from the word processing document to PowerSchool Teacher. The amount of space available has been tested in this defined in terms of words and characters in the yellow addendum to the PowerSchool/PowerGrade manual.

Special Services Comments
At the bottom of page four of the report card, there is a smaller section for special services comments. These will either need to be entered by the homeroom teacher (and should then be passed along electronically--see above!) or, if the special education teacher, speech pathologist, or GATE teacher inputs these comments, this individual will need to know the teacher's user name and password in PowerSchool in order to access this field.

During professional development activities over the course of this week, principals and teachers have been encouraged to begin getting in to the habit of taking a few minutes two-to-three times per week to look at the most recent postings on The Modern Pen. After skimming what is there, if something is relevant to the reader, that individual can read further and/or follow any related links. Like with most websites over the past twelve years of the world wide web's emergence in people's lives, this strategy requires the reader to remember to go visit the website. He or she must also know the website's address, or URL, or have it bookmarked.

The Modern Pen, like many popular websites as well as many blogs and podcasts, is enabled with an RSS feed, which actually turns this interaction with the web on its head. Through an RSS feed, the web comes to the reader, just like an e-mail or a phone call! Websites that have an RSS feed enabled will have one of the symbols below in the URL, or website address bar, at the top of your web browser window.

___ ___

So, what is an RSS feed? RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. A great description of it was produced through this short video by Common Craft. Check out the video definition of an RSS feed now.



Most up-to-date web browsers can also capture RSS feeds. For example, FIrefox comes with the BBC's Breaking News RSS feed built right in to the browser. Of course, it can be taken out, but it's a great way to keep up on what is taking place around the world. It is as simple as clicking on the "Latest Headlines" link in the Bookmarks Bar, scanning the headlines, and then, clicking on one if you would like to go read the entire story. The headlines simply come down like a traditional computer pull-down menu.



So, if you would like The Modern Pen's RSS Feed to be placed right in to your Bookmarks Bar, just click the RSS feed icon in the website address (URL) bar at the top of your browser window. It will ask you what you would like the title of the link to be and where you want it. (The title is set to default to "The Modern Pen RSS Feed," and its default placement is the Bookmarks Bar. (See below for an image of what this will look like when you click on it.) This will make it very easy to remember to check out The Modern Pen a few times a week and to do so!

If you have previously visited The Modern Pen, you'll notice some changes in its style and structure. While it is still a blog, a website which publishes individual entries--using categories to help organize them and putting the most recent entries first, the color scheme has changed and a category navigation bar has been added.

New colors--The color scheme has changed to look a bit more professional, make links noticeable yet more subtle, and to allow for easier reading and printing (though this is an online source and need not be printed).

Navigation bar--Along the top row of the website, a series of buttons includes the names of the main categories within the website. These categories also appear at the bottom of the sidebar on the left side of the page. Click either the button or the link at the bottom of the sidebar, and you will see all of the entries for a particular category, but only the entries for that category.



While so far, The Modern Pen has primarily focused on all-things PowerSchool, over time, it will become a central hub for up-to-date professional development information and links on all of the most important topics in School District 21's Professional Learning Community.

Yes. There is a quick way to fill in the same score for all students in PowerGrade. This is particularly useful, for example, when you have assessed students using a rubric, and most students have earned a "3". There is a "Fill" feature that can save you time. This is described on page 19 in the purple PowerGrade Manual. Check it out!

Nothing. If you have entered one or more grades in PowerGrade, the final trimester grade is what will be placed on the report card.

Remember, PowerGrade talks to PowerSchool. Your data is sent from PowerGrade to PowerSchool. Within PowerSchool, the Report Card template will pull all of the necessary data to fill the fields--student name, attendance information, academic grades, Learner Quality marks, Power Standard marks (2nd & 3rd Trimester), and comments.

So, you want to print the main "spreadsheet" screen from PowerGrade to see all of your students and all of their grades in a particular assessment area, or class, such as Math, Science, or Physical Education. In most pieces of software, this is really, really easy to do. You simply go to File > Print (see below).

Regular File Menu with Print

Of course, in PowerGrade, if you look under the File menu, there is NO "Print" command! So, what do you do?

PowerGrade wants (and expects) you to run a report. If you would like to do that, but do not know how, please review "Reports" within the Advanced section of the purple PowerGrade Manual that was distributed at the start of the 2007-2008 school year. More information on creating Reports in PowerGrade can also be found at AtomicLearning.com.

Depending on how many assignments you have (and whether they go off the screen on the right), you can also take a picture of the screen and then print that. (This is how I take pictures of the screens that appear in instructions and manuals.) "So, how do I take a picture of the screen?" you ask.

Hold down the "shift" key. Hold down the "apple" (also known as the "command" and also known as the "") key. Now, while holding those two keys down, hit the "4" key.

Keyboard View
Hold down the dark gray keys--Only hold down one shift key and one apple/command () key!

Once you have done that, the pointer/cursor on your screen will change in to a crosshair. You can move it to the upper left corner of the window, drag it, and when you let go, your picture gets taken. It will place an icon of this picture on your desktop that ends with the extension ".png".

Double click on this icon, and the image will open in Apple's built-in Preview software. Now, print.

***Once this has printed, please do not forget to trash this icon and empty the trash! You do not want to leave student data on your computer's desktop for anyone to open and look at!***