As you may know, we are preparing for the launch of our PowerTeacher Pilot. PowerTeacher will carry us into the future as PowerSchool's new portal for teacher entry into the PowerSchool system.

PowerTeacher is web-based, meaning that it can be used throughout our school buildings, at the library, and at home on up-to-date web browsers on a Mac, a Windows-based machine, or even a computer running Linux!

PowerTeacher is not simply PowerGrade moved from the hard drive to the Internet. PowerGrade has its origins in software that was originally created in 1982, before a number of current District 21 teachers were born and before computers, DVD players, digital video recorders, and mp3 players filled our homes. During the past quarter century, new research into the human brain, the development of language, and the processes of learning have led to advancements in the classroom, too.

PowerTeacher seizes on such such changes. PowerTeacher is software designed for the world in which District 21 students and teachers live. It allows for the entry of individual assessments from exit slips to quizzes that you may want to analyze and utilize but not include in the child's trimester grade. PowerTeacher can do this. It has far more student grouping capability than does PowerGrade, and because it is web-based, it facilitates collaboration among team members--even if they are not all in the same room at the same time.

While there will be a limited number of slots as "pilots" available for PowerTeacher's pilot this year, there is no time like now to begin reading about the potential it holds for classroom instruction and the management of other important elements of teaching. Click here to begin learning more!

Thanks to the hard work of our field engineers, Jay, Rob, and Sami, PowerGrade has now been installed on classroom computers in third through eighth grade classrooms. Obviously, a classroom may have been inadvertently missed here or there. If your classroom was missed, please go ahed and call the Help Desk (847.934.8100--Press 2) and a ticket will be issued. A field engineer will be out to install PowerGrade as soon as possible. In the meantime, PowerGrade is also located in your Mac Mini computer labs as well as on the LMC computers and, in some buildings, on a number of laptops, too! Now, with greater access to PowerGrade, take advantage of using it. To support you, after school classes/work sessions are coming up at the start of next week!

Uruguay has made the first official purchase of laptops from the $100 laptop project. Though, the laptops currently cost nearly $200, Uruguay has made a commitment to purchase one for every child in the country in the next three years. This ambitious plan comes from a country that is not nearly as economically impoverished as some of the international states that this project hopes to benefit in the future. When one considers an initiative such as this, it does raise questions about how soon alternative machines, which are just beginning to be released even in suburban Chicagoland, how long it will be until inexpensive laptops have become as common as the textbook. When they do, what does that mean for student learning in a world in which 24 out of every 25 students that have Internet access have some type of web presence like a MySpace or Facebook page?

People who have used electronic gradebooks in the past, remember the beginning of the year tedium of typing in all of the names of the students. PowerGrade and PowerSchool work together to change that. Now, when the secretary or school administrator enrolls a new student student in to your class, the student is automatically added the next time you open PowerGrade! A message even opens telling you who the new student is that is joining your class. Likewise, when a student leaves the school (or, for whatever reason, the class), PowerGrade will remove that student from your class roster, but it will also tell you beforehand that Johnny or María has left your classroom.

If a new student is in your classroom, but he or she has not appeared on your flashdrive (since the student began in class, not since the last time you looked at your flashdrive, which may have been before the student started in your classroom), then, you should check with your secretary to make sure that the student was “scheduled” for the class. If the secretary says, “Yes,” and the student still does not show up, a flashdrive update should take care of it. This almost never happens. Once kids are scheduled, they pop in to the class immediately. The PowerGrade/PowerSchool Teacher user cannot change who appears in the class list. This happens at the Administrative level. IF the child is scheduled but not appearing in PowerGrade, "rebuilding from the server" should solve the problem.

Some special area and exploratory teachers have questioned what they ought to do if they do not see the correct classes under the classes menu on their flashdrive.

First, this is one of the reasons that part of everyone's "homework" following the first round of training at the start of the year was to open all of their classes. Teachers were to check to make sure that both the classes and students were there. If not, in the middle schools, this should be reported to the assistant principal. In the elementary schools, this should be reported to the school secretary. In either case, if these individuals need help problem solving how to add the class or student, they can contact Sue or Jason. Teachers are not able to add or delete students from PowerGrade. PowerGrade receives this information from the PowerSchool server, which is adjusted on the administrative side by the secretaries (elementary school) or administrators (middle school).

If an administrator or secretary (or you!) looks at the student schedule and everything is there with the correct courses and techers at the correct times, then you can update your flashdrive by "rebuilding the data from the server". All third through fifth grade core teachers have needed to complete this process. It is only a couple of steps and very easy for even the novice computer user. Visit the following Modern Pen entry to learn how to do perform this task that just may solve your problem.

Finally, if your problem persists, please contact your iTech teacher or Sue or Jason. Remember, not only will a member of this group need your flashdrive, but they will need the password, too.

*********VERY IMPORTANT REMINDER*********
If you are a 3rd through 5th grade core academic teacher and you have not "updated your flashdrive" to reflect changes that were made to courses and the schedules of our English Language Learners at the end of September, you must go through that process. Links to these directions are here:

- Directions for "updating" the flashdrives of Core Academic Teachers in Grades 3-5 (PDF) (10.04.2007)
- Updating Your Flashdrive Video Tutorial (Quicktime Video) (10.04.2007)

Finally, if you have additional, specific questions about using PowerGrade or PowerSchool, please e-mail Jason Klein. We will answer those questions and post the answers here. Then, check back frequently to see the answers to the questions that others have asked!

If you have not been using PowerGrade throughout the trimester, you will still need to enter one assignment in PowerGrade in order to give a grade. If no assignments have been entered in PowerGrade, nothing will appear on the report card--no academic grade! By entering one assignment, whatever grade is given on that assignment is the grade that will be the "average" and the final grade, which is what PowerSchool will print on the Report Card.

To enter an assignment, you need to have created a "Category" for each class. For elementary special area teachers, this means all of your classes. For elementary school core academic teachers, this includes the following classes: Reading, Writing, English as a Second Language Reading and Language Arts, L1 (Spanish, Russian, or Polish) Reading and Language Arts, Science, and Social Science. For middle school exploratory teachers, all of your classes need a category. For middle school teams, it varies by school based on how scheduling took place in your school.

To create a "Category," at the top of the screen go to the word "Windows" in the menu and go down to "Categories" (the fourth option down). We recommend naming this Category, which will last all year meaning you only need to do this task once, "Total Points". Then, click "Accept". Now, you can click the red dot in the upper left corner of the window to close this window. (This information is in the first section of the purple manual.)

Then, you need to create an "Assignment" to give grades. Click on the "Assignment/Composition Book" in the upper left corner of PowerGrade. If you are only entering one assignment for the entire trimester, we recommend calling it, "Final Assignment Tri 1". Type this in for assignment name. Then, in the points possible, type "100". Click the "Accept" button. Then, click the "Close" button in the lower right corner of the window.

Now, the assignment pops up in the main "spreadsheet-style" window. Click in the assignment's column in the row of the first student and enter his/her score using a NUMBER. (Do not enter letters!!!) So, with 100 total points, available, you can enter 95 for an "A" and 85 for a "B". There are pluses and minuses in the grade scale. If you would like to use those, please do so.

Use these numbers for entry for a single, "whole trimester" assignment:

A+ ~ 99
A ~ 95
A- ~ 91
B+ ~ 89
B ~ 85
B- ~ 81
C+ ~ 79
C ~ 75
C- ~ 71
D+ ~ 69
D ~ 65
D- ~ 61
F ~ 55

This process must be repeated for each class.

This system allows you the flexibility to decide that you want to use PowerGrade regularly come Second Trimester. You are set and ready to enter assignments after Thanksgiving, and you will not need to hand-calculate your grades! (Of course, when differentiating and giving students different assignments adding up to different totals over the course of the trimester, the computer can save a boatload of cumbersome and tedious work that is a distraction from focusing on instruction.)

This week, teachers will be receiving an addendum to the original purple PowerGrade & PowerSchool Teacher manual. There are two versions of this addendum. One is for elementary school (3-5) core teachers, and the other is for elementary school special area teachers. Additionally, two videos are posted on the School District 21 PowerSchool Support Site. All of these documents are password protected because even though the Learner Qualities and Comments have been "made up," the students are real. If you do not know the User Name and Password required to enter the School District 21 PowerSchool Support Site, then please check with your school's iTech teacher. (After learning the site's password, please go ahead and write it down somewhere safe, but handy!) Click the links below to access the materials or video tutorials directly. (You will be prompted for the password the first time you click one of these links during a particular session.)

Video Tutorials
- Learner Quality & Comment Entry in PS Teacher--Elementary Core Teachers (Quicktime)
- Learner Quality Entry in PS Teacher--Elementary Specials Teachers (Quicktime)

Addendums to the Manual (Yellow Books)
- PowerSchool Teacher for Report Cards--Elementary Core Teachers (PDF)
- PowerSchool Teacher for Report Cards--Elementary Specials Teachers (PDF)

***Also, please remember that whenever you log in to PowerSchool, help is just a click away. As you can see below, there is a link at the bottom of the sign-in page that says, "District Help Resources." Click on that and you will be prompted for the site's user name and password, and then, the School District 21 PowerSchool Support Site will open in a new window.

As you may know, on Friday, October 26, 2007, Apple released its newest operating system. Some of our more tech-savvy staff members have wondered when they'll get their hands on it in the classroom. Well, in short, for a variety of reasons, School District 21 will not be rushing to be the first ones to load the new operating system on to our computers. Read more (below) to learn about why we are not making the switch now!

Tech_Tidbits_102607

Just a few reminders, as we near Report Card time in grades 3 through 8 with PowerGrade and PowerSchool...

PowerSchool
PowerSchool is web-based. (We prefer you use Firefox--Download it from the link at the bottom of the page at home if you'd like.) You can access it from up-to-date web browsers anywhere with an Internet connection; Paris, Moscow, Johannesburg, Hong Kong--It doesn't matter. All you need is to remember your User Name and Password. You use PowerSchool to:
-Complete attendance (elementary schools)
-Look up demographic information (ie, parent names, phone numbers, etc.)
-Enter Learner Qualities for Report Cards
-Enter Comments for Report Cards

PowerGrade
PowerGrade is an application that resides on actual computers. We use the Mac OS X version of PowerGrade, and it is on computers in all of our schools. Likewise, if you have a relatively new Mac, you can download PowerGrade for free through PowerSchool Teacher. (Click to see the directions.) PowerGrade must be able to "see" and "read" your data, which resides on your flashdrive, so you have to have your flashdrive with you to use PowerGrade. You also must be at a computer with PowerGrade loaded on to the machine, and you must know your password. Then, we use PowerGrade to enter academic grades on individual assignments. These automatically and continuously calculate a final grade, which will appear on the report card.

***REMEMBER, POWERGRADE "TALKS TO" THE POWERSCHOOL SERVER UPON OPENING AND CLOSING.*** (This relationship appears in the graphic below!)

Unlike third through fifth grades, which have a new report card and have made the switch to PowerGrade and PowerSchool, no changes were in store for Kindergarten through second grade report cards. Nevertheless, it has become apparent that many primary teachers feel as if they require help in order to set-up their report card databases in Appleworks. It has also become apparent that District 21 Technology staff are going to be unable to meet this need this year. So, schools continue to have the same range of options for Primary Grade report cards that they have had in the past and that everyone had assumed that they would have for the 2007-2008 school year. To support them, though, in addition to the Appleworks databases in existence at the buildings, we have also created generic Microsoft Word report card templates. These may be easier for people to modify and use due to teachers' increased comfort with word processing programs. View the Kindergarten Word template and the 1st and 2nd Grade Word template. Again, these can be modified, and this is not intended to be a permanent Primary Grade Report Card solution for District 21. Rather, that will come from a process being put in place by the Department of Curriculum and Learning.

In addition to creating these templates to provide K-2 teachers within increased technological flexibility, we have made two quick little videos that provide additional insight. The first is about the Microsoft Word templates, and the second is designed to show people who are using the existing Appleworks databases how to update them for this year.

- Tour of Microsoft Word Report Card templates

*** Taking last year's AppleWorks Report Card database and updating it for this year

1. Use an up-to-date browser--Firefox works very well on a Mac and Windows. It can be downloaded for free here.

2. Download Quicktime (Mac | Windows) and Flash. Then, keep them up-to-date.

3. If you want to have the best viewing experience possible in most District 21 schools, watch in the lab with the white Mac Minis. Of course, these machines do not offer much in the way of sound with one tiny little speaker, so bring some headphones!

4. Realize that Internet-based video is watched on the small screen and is designed to enhance your understanding of a topic, concept, or process. This is why even websites from major multimedia outlets do not stream their video full-size. Even when they do, the picture quality decreases.

5. Web-based video provides 24/7 on-demand programming! This allows us to communicate more quickly and in a manner that can be more easily digested by anyone at any time--even over and over if you'd like!

3rd through 5th Grade Core Teachers--

We have completed with scheduling students in our Bilingual and ESL programs and as a result, it is now time to run a very quick update to your flashdrive. This will only require about 3 steps to complete, and it should take under 5 minutes from start to finish. The iTech teachers have learned how to do this, but we are also providing you with a short, AtomicLearning.com-style video as well as a PDF document to walk you through the few steps it takes to complete this update. (PLEASE NOTE: The PDF document is housed on the password-protected Powerschool section of our website. If you need that password, please see you school's iTech teacher.) (The video is about 9 minutes long, which is approximately twice as long as it is likely to take you to complete this process.)

If you do a Google (or other Internet) search on "teaming" or "team" related to "teachers" or "schools," you will be disappointed to discover that you will not find countless websites filled with really useful tools for teaming. One really interesting website, which includes lots of teaming information--though not necessarily tools--and information on other important instructional topics, too, is: www.allthingsplc.info. Rick and Becky DuFour do contribute to this website to the site's blog. There is a great bibliographic list of resources as well as links to actual PDF documents.

Did you know that if you have a Mac running OS 10.3.9 or 10.4 at home, you can load PowerGrade on to that machine for free? This small, fast, and easy download actually resides in PowerSchool Teacher. Have you noticed that on the left navigation bar one of the links says, "PowerGrade"? That is where the download link is located.

Follow these directions to load PowerGrade on to your machine, and begin using it to allow you to be as efficient as possible!