Tonight, we are proudly launching the debut of our first comprehensive online course. As I have mentioned publicly and personally to 3rd through 8th grade teachers, future online courses will likely look slightly different as this one as approximately 450 students enrolled, including all 3rd through 8th grade teachers, administrators, Learning Coaches, and iTech teachers. The number of students makes personal feedback from and contact with the teacher difficult to guarantee. Nevertheless, we hope that this is a great resource for supporting our effors with instruction, assessment, and the Web Gradebook as well as for learning about online courses for professional development.

This course is completely voluntary. Some important tips:

1. The online course is available all of the time.

2. Lessons and Tasks can be read and watched over and over again by teachers.

3. For this class, Lessons and Tasks can be completed in any order. Task 1 within a Lesson is not a prerequisite for Task 2. This allows teachers to cherry pick in order to meet his/her needs.

For our online courseware, we have evaluated a variety of products. We have set-up our very own Moodle server, but for now, we are moving forward with a local education technology start-up called SchoolTown.net. We have been working closely with SchoolTown’s leadership team since last spring, and they have made significant changes to their product as a result of our conversations and suggestions—right up through today. We look forward to continuing to shape this product through our experiences. (More information about SchoolTown, written by us, follows below.)

Again, we encourage you to take advantage of this course! Thank you for your great work in ensuring that our instruction is most effective to meet the needs of our students!!!

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SchoolTown.net is a new web-based service for schools and other groups to use. They are a local company, and despite its "start-up" status, they are developing significant connections within the educational community nation-wide.

Since they are a local company, we've been lucky enough to be working with SchoolTown.net since the spring of 2008. During that time, they have been very open to the feedback that we have provided, and they have continually made significant modifications to the structure of their products as well as to its features. We look forward to continuing to grow together in this area.

Originally conceived as a tool focused on student needs, we have also articulated how modifications to SchoolTown.net can serve us very well as a tool for online professional development. It is here that we begin our work with SchoolTown.net. From there, in the future, we look forward to also tackling the challenges of implementing SchoolTown.net as a tool that is used with students and parents.

Today, I received an e-mail from a fifth grade team, preparing for their upcoming conferences. Here it is below:

Mid-terms went home some time ago now and my conferences are not until next week. (Too big of a lag, mid-terms no longer a true picture of progress.)

Is there a way to print all of a student's core grades on one report? (As of now, I can only print a student's math on one page, reading on another and so on.) That's a tremendous waste of paper. We spent a chunk of time trying it to to figure it out without getting anywhere. Any ideas?


I responded:

You want to run the Student Multi-Section Report. It will give you everything for all of the student's classes. (FYI--I know that your school’s music teacher has entered some assignments. Those will appear, too.) This report is none too pretty to look at, and it will be confusing for some parents. At this time, there is no way for us to modify this report, though there will be for next year.

While this will print a multi-page report for each student, if you simply go in the Math class, and run this report for all of the kids, you should only have two minutes of work while the computer and the printer do all of the worker as you do other things!

(When they're done printing, you will probably need to staple them, and you may want to sort them by homeroom--or whatever groups you are meeting with for conferences.)

With Election Day looming, there are a couple of great websites that can be used with students as you consider what may occur on Election Day. The Electoral College and polling data both feature in these polls from CNN and The New York Times.

- CNN.com Electoral College Calculator

- The New York Times Electoral Map--Key States


*Special thanks to retired District 21 staff member Hugh Brady for pointing us in the direction of these websites.

In School District 21, approximately 70% of our families have Internet access at home and 30% do not. When breaking this number down further, even more interesting and important information is revealed. On the one end of the spectrum, a couple of schools have populations in which 95% of families do have Internet access. On the flip side, in another District 21 school, only 20% of families have Internet access. Approximately half of our English language learners have Internet access at home. We even know that Internet access is only related in a minor way to income--meaning that there are many low income families that have Internet access as well as families not classified as low income that do not have Internet access. Unfortunately, we do not know more about the nature of the Internet access in the homes of District 21 families. For example, we do not know who has dial-up connections to the Internet versus who has high-speed connections over cable or DSL. Nevertheless, the Internet is not yet completely commonplace in our community.

What is becoming increasingly clear is that the mobile telephone is establishing itself as the basic tool for connecting people around the world. It is now predicted that by 2012 nearly every adult in the world (and many adolescents) will have his or her own mobile phone, which, of course, will also include some form of Internet access.

For more information on this, read the article from The Guardian. Also, consider what this new technology means for the idea of knowledge? What does it mean for classroom instruction?

Tags: SmartPhones

Are you missing a student in your Web Gradebook? Is a student in the Web Gradebook who should not be? Is a student in one gradebook, (e.g., mathematics) but not in another gradebook (e.g., reading), if so, read on!

First, remember that not all students are enrolled in all of the same classes depending on their English language proficiency. Students who are classified as Tier A or B based on their reading, writing, listening, and speaking proficiencies in English and are enrolled in a Bilingual program (Spanish, Russian, or Polish) are enrolled in L1 Reading & Language Arts and ESL Reading & Language Arts in place of Reading and Writing/Language Arts. Students who are in a Bilingual program and are classified as Tier C or ESL program students are enrolled in ESL Reading & Language Arts in place of Reading and Writing/Language Arts. Of course, all students are enrolled in Math, Science, Social Science, and the Learner Qualities.

If, after determining that a student really should or should not be on your list, you are certain that the student should or should not appear on your list, then you need to speak with the individuals in your school office. In an elementary school, speak with the principal or secretary. In the middle schools, you should speak with your principal, assistant principal, or dean. All of these individuals with administrative access to PowerSchool can re-schedule the student correctly. As soon as they have performed these scheduling functions, the students will appear or disappear from your gradebook or gradebooks.

You can use the Web Gradebook on a Mac, a PC (Windows), or even on a Linux computer. You simply need the following:

- A web browser (Firefox, Safari, Opera, Flock, Internet Explorer, etc.)
- Java 1.5 or higher*
- An active Internet connection

*To have Java 1.5 requires that you have:
- A Mac running OS 10.4 (Tiger) or 10.5 (Leopard)
- A PC running Windows XP or Vista
- An up-to-date distribution of Linux

(I have run the Web Gradebook on all three of these operating systems this year.)


So, how do you know if you have a computer that meets these requirements?

On a Mac, go to the Apple symbol in the upper left corner of the screen. Click on it and go to “About this Mac”.



The Operating System is listed in the About this Mac dialog box (see the rectangle in the picture below).




On a PC (Windows), go to “System” under the “Control Panel”.



In the System dialog box, the operating system version is listed right near the top (see the rectangle below).




So, which computers at school can I use?

Each school has a lab that is complete with 30 Mac Minis, which look like those below.



All of our schools have iMacs like those pictured below (though the new iMacs are a glossy aluminum (silver) color.



In addition, in the elementary schools, there are about 10 iBook G4 laptop computers that can be used with the Web Gradebook. In the middle schools, the PCs in the Tech Lab can also be used if the correct version of Java is loaded on to to them (like those below).




So, now you can go access the Web Gradebook!