In order to qualify for Federal funding, including E-Rate funding that significantly offsets the cost of District 21's telecommunications bills, District 21 is required to comply with the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA). One of the requirements of CIPA is that a web filter is in place to provide an additional layer of protection for students from inappropriate websites. Additionally, limited bandwidth also requires District 21 to filter streaming media as those sites would quickly overwhelm the network with traffic.

Last school year, District 21 sought and received clarification that a differentiated Internet experience for students and staff is a legally acceptable practice, and the District 21 Technology Office has worked with the District 21 Education Association, other administrators, and technical aspects of both the filter and Active Directory to make this differentiated Internet experience a reality. After putting this structure in place last Spring at Holmes Middle School, additional technical details had to be addressed.

This weekend, District 21 is rolling out this new filtering by group feature that will be almost entirely transparent to users with one exception:

(For Windows users in Thin Client, this process is completely transparent following your login to Thin Client. There are no additional steps.)

For Mac users, when the new filter is turned on, you will:

• Log in to the computer as usual with your Active Directory username and password.
• Launch Safari as one would do normally.
• When you navigate to a website outside of District 21, the browser will ask you to re-authenticate using your Active Directory username and password, again. (See the picture below.) If you also check the checkbox, you should not be asked to enter your username and password again.

As each student and staff member completes this process, as long as the user has logged in to the computer (as one should be doing regularly), Active Directory and the SmartFilter will, in concert, provide the student or staff member with the appropriate level of filtering based on their status as a student or staff member.

At times, you may be greeted with a dialog that looks like the one pictured below. When you see this, simply click the "Always Allow" button.



As a result of this change, staff members will have much greater access to a wider swath of the Internet than they have ever had previously since District 21 began filtering following the passage of CIPA a decade ago. This access includes Google Images, Flickr, and other sites for identifying instructional resources for school.

As a result of this change, older computers on Mac OS 10.3 will no longer be able to access the Internet. In truth, this is a small price to pay as these computers were not able to access most current websites over the past few years anyway.

One important reminder: with this change, prior to using a new website with students, staff members will need to test whether or not students have access to that site with their level of filtering. This can be done in this way:

• log into a student's account (even on the teacher laptop)
• launch Safari
• navigate to the website (If it's accessible from within the student's account, it's accessible to all students!)

Should staff members have any questions about this change, please check with the school's iTech teacher.

Tags: Staff MacBook, Filter, Internet

Tomorrow afternoon, Midwest Computer Products will be visiting a handful of District 21 schools to complete outstanding repairs. With their visit, the project is officially, officially complete, and we now move in to a maintenance phase. While we negotiated a five-year warranty on the Epson projectors themselves, we have a one-year warranty on parts and workmanship through Midwest Computer Products, so through next summer, Midwest Computer Products will be completing necessary repairs on our projectors. (Their work will focus on the projector, remote control, cables in the wall, and the VGA box. District 21 and Net56 staff will deal with issues related to the VGA cable and the Apple MiniDisplayPort-VGA Adapter, also known as a dongle.)

At this point, any projector-related issues should be called in to the Help Desk at 847.934.8100 (press 2).

These tickets will be assigned to the Technology Office and these tickets will be aggregated by the District's Network & Systems team. Then, depending on how many tickets there are and how severe these tickets are, they will be sent by the Network & Systems team on to Midwest Computer Products for resolution. Typically, we hope to be able to resolve projector issues within 5-7 school days.

This post was also cross-published on the CCSD21 Tech Updates Blog.

Tags: Projector

Starting with the 2011-2012 school year, when a teacher goes on leave and has a long-term substitute fulfill his or her assignment, the teacher's laptop is provided to the long-term substitute for the duration of the assignment as the laptop "stays with the students." When this occurs, the long-term substitute teacher has his or her own account and his or her own password. (For PowerTeacher, the long-term substitute does log in as as the permanent classroom teacher for attendance. For the PowerTeacher Gradebooks and Inform, the long-term substitute uses the team account.)

For the Teacher--Preparing for Leave

• Documents--Move important documents and files for the long-term substitute either to your team wiki or to a transfer folder as per the directions in the next section.
• Wiki Access--Notify the Technology Office (Send an email to: tech@ccsd21.org) if your substitute will need wiki access and send the main links of those wikis within the email by copying and pasting them from the URL address bar in the web browser in to the email.
• Media--Create a flashdrive with any music, movies, or pictures that the substitute will need. The flashdrive can be brought to the Tech Office with your laptop, cords, and dongle when you turn in those items to the Tech Office for the Long-Term Substitute.
• PowerTeacher Homeroom Password--If you are an elementary school core classroom teacher who takes daily attendance, reset the password for your PowerTeacher account to be sure that it is a password that you are comfortable sharing with your Long-Term Substitute. (The Long-Term Substitute should not be given your Active Directory password!)
• PowerTeacher Team Gradebook Password--The Long-Term Substitute will need to use the team's Gradebook password to access PowerTeacher Gradebook. If the team needs to change this for each Gradebook account, the team should do so.

Sharing Documents Between Teacher & Long-Term Substitute--
A Critical Preparation Detail
As a result of each teacher having his or her own account on the laptop, while the permanent teacher's files are on the same device that the long-term substitute is using, the substitute does not have access to those files in the other account. To address this, there are two options that the permanent teachers can choose from:

Option 1-Upload documents to a specific page on the Team Wiki

• Permanent teacher uploads necessary files to a specific page on the grade-level team wiki
• The long-term substitute should have access to this wiki after receiving the laptop from the Tech Office. If, after working with teammates, to access the wiki, the long-term substitute cannot access it, he or she should contact the school's iTech teacher or email tech@ccsd21.org.
• During the course of the assignment, the long-term substitute posts new or modified documents to the same page on the wiki for the permanent teacher to access upon his or her return.
• At the end of the assignment, upon turning the laptop back in, the long-term substitute will be removed from having access to the team wiki.

Option 2-File Transfer

• As the permanent teacher prepares for his or her leave, he or she should create a folder within the Documents folder on his or her computer entitled, "Transfer." Then, as he or she moves through his or her final weeks before the Leave, documents that will be needed by the long-term substitute can be moved in to that folder.
• Then, when the teacher drops off the laptop prior to his or her leave with the Tech Office at the Ad Center, he or she will tell the Tech Office that there is a "Transfer" folder that needs to be moved to the long-term substitute's account. This folder will be moved to a flashdrive at this time.
• When the long-term substitute arrives at the Tech Office to claim the laptop, following his or her login to the new machine, a new folder entitled, "Transfer" will be created on his or her Desktop. The items from the permanent teacher's "Transfer" folder will be moved in to the long-term substitute's "Transfer" folder.
• During the course of the assignment, the long-term substitute places new or modified documents in to the "Transfer" folder.
• At the end of the assignment, the "Transfer" folder will be moved back from the long-term substitute to the permanent teacher.

Laptop Drop-Off (Teacher) & Pick-Up (Substitute)
The following items should be dropped off to the Technology Office prior to your Leave:

• Laptop computer
• Power brick, extension cord, and slide-on plug for brick
• Mini-DisplayPort Adapter (Dongle)

The Long-Term Substitute teacher should be directed by you to contact the Technology Office (847.520.2834 or tech@ccsd21.org) to set-up a time to come in and pick it up. Long-Term Substitutes should have already completed one of the mandatory Staff Laptop trainings prior to receiving the laptop.


End of Leave Transitions
At the end of the Leave period, the Long-Term Substitute should bring all of the above items to the Technology Office. Upon his or her return, the permanent teacher who had been on leave should contact the Tech Office (847.520.2834 or tech@ccsd21.org) to set-up a time to come in and pick-up the laptop, which will entail logging in to the laptop, transferring documents back to the teacher's account, if necessary, etc.

Tags: Staff MacBook, Long-Term Sub, Leave of Absence

Checking comments that have been submitted and viewing recent changes to wikis and blogs on CCSD21's wiki and blog servers (wiki.ccsd21.org & teams.ccsd21.org) is easy to do! Of course, this also makes easy work of checking comments for modification as well as supervising publicly displayed student work on wikis and blogs that you are responsible for as a teacher.

Viewing Changes to Student Wikis & Blogs and Parent Communication Blogs

Navigate to wiki.ccsd21.org in your web browser (or click the link embedded in this bullet!) (You can bookmark this site in Safari.) In the "My Page" section, click on "Log In" as pictured below.




After you've logged in, you will be re-directed to a long list of wikis and blogs that have been updated recently. Click on the "My Pages" link as pictured below.




Now, let's say you wanted to view Yasmin's blog. You can see (pictured below) that her last change was to her "Animal Report". The website shows you that she has made two changes and has one new comment. It also tells you that that the last change was at 10.54 AM today. To view the comments and changes that have been made, click on the blue bubble on the right-hand side.




Once you have clicked on the blue bubble on the right-hand side to view the specific changes, you can view the recent comments made or click on the link to view updates.




Viewing Changes to Team/Staff Wikis
If you want to view changes on our "private" wiki server, teams.ccsd21.org, navigate to that site in your browser (or click the link here) and follow the same directions that are listed above.

Tags: Wikis, Blogs

Due to technical limitations that include hard drive space, physical location, and bandwidth allocation, on our wiki and blog servers, like most major websites, we cannot embed video and audio clips directly within a wiki or a blog. Rather, we post the audio or video clips to a different server, and then, we link to those clips within the wiki and blog.

Video and audio clips include any podcasts, sound files, video clips, and MP3s/MP4s.

Due to current bandwidth limitations, we also cannot stream audio and videos via links in our wikis and blogs.

To add a video or audio clip to a wiki or blog with a link, the first step is to send audio or video files to the iTech teacher in your buildings. The audio or video files you send will be placed on our media server, which is designed to hold and distribute these files.

After the file has been uploaded to the media server, the iTech teacher will be send you the link to the file (which is sitting on our media server) to place on your wiki or blog. Then students can interact with the audio and video files right through the wiki or blog, at home or at school.

You can also link audio and video files on the Internet on your wiki or blog. If you choose this option, please make sure it is noted on the wiki or blog that the files can only be played from outside of the school district.

When you, as a teacher, want to share a video or audio clip with your students, you should play it directly from your Staff MacBook, having put the actual clip on the Staff MacBook prior to class. Due to bandwidth limitations, you cannot simply click on audio and video links and stream those across the Internet. Information, for example, on downloading clips from YouTube can be found here.

Tags: Media, Wikis, Blogs

Email contact groups can now be created in Outlook 2011 on the Mac. Unfortunately, the groups you create in Outlook 2011 will only exist on your actual MacBook in Outlook 2011. They will not appear in Webmail nor will they sync to the server. This is simply a limitation of using the Mac to connect to Exchange 2010 at this time.

Important Background Information
To create groups locally on your computer, the ‘On My Computer’ option needs to be visible. Once you complete the steps in the directions below, you will see two storage spaces for email, which can be confusing. You will always need to be clicked on your account's email storage space, which is titled with your name. The other, ‘On My Computer’ should never be highlighted. If it is highlighted, you may think your email is gone, when all of your email is still there, just under the account titled with your name.



How-To Create Contact Groups in Outlook 2011
Now that you understand which account to use for ensuring that your email works on an ongoing basis, please click on the link from Microsoft's Office for Mac help website below and follow the instructions to set-up Contact Groups.

> Create a contact group (Microsoft Office: mac)

One more tip: When you are on the above website, for the applicable directions, please make sure the flag is opened under the ‘If Contact Group is Not Available’ link and follow those directions (as pictured with the red circle in the image below).

Tags: Exchange, Outlook 2011

In Inform, we annually upload multiple measures for NWEA's Measures of Academic Progress in Reading and in Mathematics. These annual measures are:

• MAP-Read-05--This represents the fifth grade (represented by the "05") Reading RIT score. This is a Spring assessment entered once annually in late May. These scores are displayed in Inform using the ISBE Performance Levels Proficiency Profile (Exceeds Standards, Meets Standards, Below Standards, and Academic Warning). At the time of this posting, the level at which each score appears is determined by the NWEA Illinois Alignment Study from 2011.
• MAP-MTRdg-05--This score is whether or not the student has met his or her Target Growth in Reading from 4th grade to 5th grade. Again, the "05" represents fifth grade. "MT" stands for "Met Target." This assessment is uploaded in the Spring following Spring MAP testing and based on the most recent year-to-year growth. If a student has met his or her Target Growth from the previous Spring, the score will be a 1. If he/she has not met Target Growth, the score will be a 0. Only students in third grade or higher who participated in the previous Spring's NWEA MAP assessment will be included in this query.
• MAP-PTRdg-05--This assessment is loaded in the Fall of the new school year after the previous Spring's MAP assessment. This score is the student's predicted score at the end of the current school year. In other words, this score is derived from the student's RIT score from last Spring with the addition of the student's predicted Target Growth from NWEA. (Previous RIT + Target Growth = Predicted Target RIT Score) The proficiency profile for this assessment is the same one that is used in the Spring, so teachers can begin looking at where students are likely to end the year (though, hopefully, with targeted differentiated lessons within engaging, authentic units, students will surpass these predictions).

So, how do you determine how much growth the student is actually predicted to make by NWEA if you want that information in addition to the student's RIT score from last Spring and the student's predicted RIT score for the MAP assessments that will be administered later this school year?

You can easily access all of these pieces of information by creating the following query in Inform. (You will have to repeat this procedure separately for reading and for math.)



The above query is written for "current" sixth graders (current in the 2010-2011 school year). Key selections include:

• Select "" Years
• Then, select the previous Spring's MAP RIT score (2009-2010--The year prior to 2010-2011)
• Finally, select the current Fall's MAP Predicted Target RIT score (PT) (2010-2011, the "current" school year)

Now, click the "Create Report" button. The resulting graph will display.



When the graph appears, click on either bar for the current school year's Predicted Target Growth assessment. Mouse over "Students in >" and select "All categories".

This will display a table with student information (pictured below). Each student will appear in two consecutive rows.



The scores are on the right side. All you need to do to compute their target growth amount for this year is subtract last year's RIT score (in the rectangle above) from this year's Predicted Target RIT score (in the oval above). The difference is the amount of growth that the student is predicted to show for the current year.

Tags: Inform, NWEA

During the course of 2011, in an effort to implement significant changes more quickly and to compete with the fast-growing Chrome browser from Google, Mozilla, the organization that develops Firefox, has made major changes to how Firefox updates.



In the past, a new version of Firefox was released approximately every 1-2 years. Now, Firefox has transferred to a "rapid-release cycle," with new versions coming out approximately every six weeks. We will now take the unusual step in an enterprise computing environment to setting Firefox to auto-update. (As a user, you will not have to do anything for this to take effect.)

To change Firefox's behavior to auto-updating, we need to deploy the newest version of Firefox with this setting marked. When we do that, it will delete any bookmarks that you had previously in Firefox and those will need to be re-created. Those should not need to be recreated in the future again, unless Mozilla makes a change that causes this.

The new version of Firefox will be deployed to Staff MacBooks beginning on Monday, October 17th. If you have any bookmarks you want to save that are only in Firefox, please note those URLs (website addresses) prior to October 17th.

Most importantly, Safari remains District 21's supported web browser on your Apple computers. Your bookmarks in Safari will not be impacted by this change. Firefox is simply included on Staff MacBooks as a secondary browser in case a website performs better in Firefox than in Safari, which is rare in 2011. Likewise, for PowerSchool Administrator users who do frequent exports, like office staff members, Firefox is often preferred for those tasks.

Tags: Staff MacBook, Firefox

While most staff members move from one school to another during the summer, staff members do change their names throughout the year and, at times, change schools during the school year. In both cases, there are implications for the staff member's computer and Active Directory account.

When staff members have a name change or change schools, we will need to do work over a three-day period on their computer. We will need the computer in order to:

• Create these changes on both the servers and on the staff member’s computer, resetting the school and/or the account name
• Make the appropriate changes in our Active Directory system
• Complete any necessary changes in email
• Move all of your documents from your home directory back on to your computer

Staff members should contact the CCSD21 Technology Office by email (tech@ccsd21.org) at least 48 hours in advance of the Macbook service session and to sign-up for one of the following sessions:

October:
October 25 - Drop-off: 7.30-9.00 AM
October 27 - Pick-up: 12.00-4.30 PM

December:
December 5 - Drop-off: 7.30-9.00 AM
December 7 - Pick-up: 12.00-4.30 PM

January:
January 11 - Drop-off: 7.30-9.00 AM
January 13 - Pick-up: 12.00-4.00 PM

February:
February 22 - Drop-off: 7.30-9.00 AM
February 24 - Pick-up: 12.00-4.30 PM

April:
April 9 - Drop-off: 7.30-9.00 AM
April 11 - Pick-up: 12.00-4.30 PM

May:
May 9 - Drop-off: 7.30-9.00 AM
May 11 - Pick-up: 12.00-4.30 PM


To sign-up for your date and time, email: tech@ccsd21.org

Then, on your assigned date, please drop your computer off with a member of the Technology Team in the Administration Building.

Tags: Staff MacBook

As part of our ongoing efforts to improve our work with each individual student in District 21, building leaders and teachers are meeting throughout this year to examine the growth of students with IEPs. For the moment, this analysis is being based on ISAT results because: (a) that is how the State assesses the District's performance and (b) ISAT data is well-understood and can help us become competent and efficient with this process. Of course, ISAT assessments are not an appropriate assessment for our students learning English, but their results are necessarily included in this analysis.

Moving forward, we look forward to using this same process with multiple meaningful assessments for all students.

Logging In to Inform
To analyze growth over time, we are going to use Inform. Teachers will login as members of their team, as they do to enter Core Academic and Core Learner Quality data in the PowerTeacher Gradebook.

• Elementary school teachers should log in as the fifth grade team's Mathematics teacher.
• Middle school teachers should log in using either the team's Self-Directed Learner or Quality Producer teacher.

Necessary Information before Analyzing
This analysis can only be performed for fifth through eighth grade students because students need at least two years' worth of ISAT data points in order to compute their growth.

To analyze this data, you will also need the ISAT Growth Expectations Chart. This chart, using the Meets cut scores that have been established by ISBE, provides information on what percentage growth a student will show from one grade to the next on ISAT. This chart includes three different definitions of growth:

• ISBE Growth (e.g., from the meets cut score in fourth grade to the meets cut score in fifth grade)
• Growth Plus Realistic (e.g., the above growth score + 25% additional growth)
• Growth Plus Ambitious (e.g., the above growth score + 50% additional growth)

The ISAT Growth Expectations Chart is a 3-page PDF that contains the following information:

• Page 1 includes data on 1-years' growth (e.g., from 3rd grade ISATs to 4th grade ISATs for current 5th graders)
• Page 2 includes data on 2-years' growth (e.g., from 3rd grade ISATs to 5th grade ISATs for current 6th graders)
• Page 3 includes data on 3-years' growth (e.g., from 3rd grade ISATs to 6th grade ISATs for current 7th graders)

On each page, in the three columns furthest to the right, you can see the values for each grade level of: ISBE Growth, Growth Plus Realistic, and Growth Plus Ambitious.

Setting up the Growth Query in Inform
For nearly all groups of students, we are going to focus our analysis on the Growth Plus Ambitious targets. Using a group of current sixth graders as an example, we are going to look at their performance over the past two years, from their 3rd grade ISAT scores to their 5th grade ISAT scores.

Use the picture below and the steps in-text that follow it to perform the growth query.

1. Choose the Student Performance Gains query (11) from the pull-down menu.
2. Choose either Reading or Mathematics.
3. Choose "All" from the Year pull-down menu. (To show growth, we need to look at ISAT scores from multiple years.)
4. Choose "IEP" from the Target Group pull-down.
5. Click the "Get Assessments" button.
6. Choose the Base Test for the analysis based on the students' current grade level and the number of years of growth you want to measure. Use the information on the ISAT Growth Expectations Chart as a guide for this.
7. Choose the Target Test based on the same factors as above.
8. Using the ISAT Growth Expectations Chart, enter the Tolerance Threshold percent from the Growth Plus Ambitious column.

Click the "Create Report" button, and analyze your data!

Tags: Inform

One of the major goals of moving District 21 staff to Exchange for email, calendar, contacts, and tasks has been to create new efficiencies for professional work. Time saved on such tasks can be devoted back in to improving the creation of new and/or better learning opportunities for students.

Efficiencies can be gained, for example, by scheduling meetings when everyone is available as identified through the Scheduling Assistant and then by sending out a meeting invite to allow all attendees to automatically populate the event in their personal calendars.

The directions below provide another step in that direction. By following these steps, you can view the ABCDE Days and the more general District 21 calendar directly in your own calendar!!!

(For users of Outlook on Windows, these calendars are also accessible to you, but you can contact the Help Desk for assistance in pulling these calendars in to your own calendar.

First, begin by launching Outlook (the yellow "O" near the top of your Dock).

Then, from the list of Outlook modules, click on "Calendar" to select it.


In Calendar view, select the "Tools" tab from in between the two rows of buttons, and then click the "Public Folders" button from the bottom button row.


Once you have clicked the "Public Folders" button, a new dialog box will appear. Select the calendars you would like to include within your own calendar by clicking on the calendar title to highlight it, and then, click the "Subscribe" button. The available calendar options for the 2011-2012 school year are the ABCDE Schedule Calendar and the General Calendar containing special dates (non-attendance days, Institute Days, holidays, and other important dates).

Tags: Outlook 2011, Calendar

With the start of the 2011-2012 school year on August 22, 2011, staff members throughout District 21 will begin a year-long professional development process related to instruction and the new classroom projectors. This series of professional learning opportunities for staff are being provided in each building by school principals, learning coaches, instructional technology teachers, and LMC specialists.

Following successful completion of the first session, teachers will receive a projector remote and a VGA cable to connect the computer to the VGA port on the wall, and at that time, they can begin using the projector.

The projectors that have been installed are the PowerLite 450w (Below-Top) and the PowerLite 410w (Bottom-Below). The 410w was used in classrooms in which the height of the ceiling was too low to allow for the use of the 450w.




At the time of this writing, there are still a handful of classrooms in District 21 that require additional work, but 97% of classrooms are ready-to-go! (This is a particularly amazing statistic when one considers that this project should have been given about five months to complete. In fact, it has been almost entirely completed in less than 10 weeks!)

Some important points for teachers to remember as they begin to use these new tools to support student learning:

• Classroom Lighting--Most classrooms in District 21 have two light switches, with one serving as a dimmer. When using the projector, it is recommended to have one light switch on and one light switch off.
• Boards & Screens--As stated in a Modern Pen post earlier this summer, classrooms with dry erase boards are using those dry erase board as the screen. Classrooms with chalkboards have screens mounted in them.
• Overhead Projectors--If you plan to continue to use your overhead projector, it is recommended that you display the image in the same location that your projector displays (dry erase board, screen). Do keep in mind that District 21 will no longer be spending money or time repairing or replacing broken/old overhead projectors. District 21 also does not plan to replace spent overhead projector bulbs.
• VCRs--Each school will have a few carts with TVs and VHS VCRs until those TVs and/or VCRs stop working. There are no plans to even begin considering whether or not District 21 will be able to digitize old VHS cassettes until Summer 2012. In the meantime, those carts can be used to access old VHS cassettes, new DVD versions of those titles can be purchased through building funds, and/or teams can begin to identify newer resources to support student learning.

Finally, and most importantly, remember to use Connect21 to gather ideas about authentic learning opportunities you can create for students and to post information for other teachers in District 21 about authentic activities that you have created.

Tags: Projector

One feature of Inform that teachers began to discover during the 2010-2011 school year was the "Student Profile." Based on the elements of Inform that District 21 currently uses, this has two main components:

• Historical Grades, which are imported from PowerSchool after grades are stored at the end of a trimester
• Assessment Overview, which provides a snapshot in the form of a table and in the form of a graph (default)

At first glance, this seems like a great tool to quickly view a student's performance, but there are some important caveats for one to consider when examining the Individual Student Profile.



First, the good news... From this two-pane presentation, you can answer the following questions:

• On the whole, does the student meet standards, not meet the standards, or have a significant mix of meeting and not meeting standards?
• Does the student's performance according to her/his teachers match what is presented by the assessments? In other words, does a student who primarily earns As and 4s on report cards also typically meet standards on the range of assessments used throughout District 21?

Now, the caveats of which one must be aware when examining this display:

• Each assessment is presented as being of equal scope and importance. This is, of course, not true. Some assessments are one-minute reading fluency assessments while other assessments (NWEA, ISAT, ACCESS) are lengthy, comprehensive assessments taking 40 minutes to 1 hour.
• The assessments represent a mix across assessment areas--reading, writing and mathematics assessments are all included and, in the future, additional assessment areas are likely to be included as well. As a result, this provides a very general view of the student on-the-whole, rather than a more actionable, specific view.
• The line graphs connecting the "average" points do not mean anything. While the "average" points do represent the average on each assessment, there is no relationship between those average points across assessments. They should not be connected. A line graph suggests changes over time. These assessments are not given in a consistent manner over time that would be represented in a such a way at any time.

So, what should you do to take advantage of this individual student performance display without making bad assumptions about what the data actually says.

• Get an overview of the student's performance on assessments during his/her career in District 21. Does she/he mostly show green or red? Are the assessments very far from (very high or very low) the top of the yellow shaded "above/below" rectangle in the background of the graph?
• Switch from graph view to table view. Sort the assessments by clicking on the column headers. Do you draw the same conclusions about student performance that you found when looking at the graph?
• Look at the grades pane on the right. How does the student perform based on his/her grades?
• If the student is in middle school, how is his/her Learner Quality performance? How do Learner Quality and academic performance compare? (Similar? DIfferent?)

The Individual Student Profile is another interesting and potentially useful way to capture a snapshot over time and across assessments and assessment areas to describe a student. Use this tool to gauge a simple overview of a student, in general, but do so cautiously.

Tags: Inform, Data Analysis

As you return to your classrooms for the 2011-2012 school year, in over 400 rooms throughout District 21, you will see projectors that were not there just a few weeks ago. These projectors are still in the process of being installed and are not yet ready-to-use.

Following required professional development that will take place at the beginning of this year, staff members will receive their remotes and VGA cables and be able to use their projectors. Until that time, staff members should not interact with our new projectors.

We are very excited that another Tech Plan project has come to fruition with the support of the Board of Education and the hard work of partner vendors and District 21 staff alike. We are also excited about the collaborative planning that is being done with principals, learning coaches, iTech teachers, and LMC specialists, who will be leading this professional development.

Tags: Projector

As staff members prepare for the start of the 2011-2012 school year, we have some very important tips that should make your transition from working outside CCSD21 to back in your school buildings even more smooth.

Over the past two summers, we have learned that there is some common ailments that impact staff members and their laptops during the summer. These (along with the solutions!) are described in previous Modern Pen posts. Additionally, we know that by following the steps listed below, you can resolve many issues on your own and enable yourself to have a smooth transition with your computer back in to the CCSD21 network.

When you come back in to District 21 with your laptop for the first time for the 2011-2012 school year, please follow these steps:

• Prior to coming in to the District, please shut down your laptop.
• When you arrive at school, please plug your computer in to an Ethernet port.
• Start up/power on your computer.
• Wait one minute prior to logging in.
• Login. Allow your computer to fully login to your account. (This will take at least a few minutes as you've been gone!)
• Restart your computer. (Go to the Apple symbol in the upper left corner of the white menu bar and choose Restart from the menu.)
• Log in, again.

This process will wipe out all of the printers on your laptop and re-create the school printers (with the exception of special education printers). This is necessary due to changes that we have made to our network over the summer.

Individual printers will need to be re-added to your computer. Special education printers can be added by iTech teachers (and can only be added on special education staff computers). You will need to re-add home printers on your own. (You can use these directions from The Modern Pen.) (The benefit of this is that we have updated the drivers on your laptops with the OS updates done this summer and more new printers will work with your laptops.)

If you continue to have problems after following these directions, please call the Help Desk at 847.934.8100 (press 2).

Tags: Staff MacBook

As we prepare for the start of the coming school year, we have already rolled PowerSchool up to 2011-2012 (from 2010-2011) and done the same with Inform. As a result of this, the year will now default to 11-12. So, how do you analyze last year's information now?

It's quite easy, and with two steps, you can still analyze the performance of your students from last year--including those who have moved on to middle school or high school for the 2011-2012 school year. These two minor modifications will take place in the left pane of a regular Student Performance Summary query as pictured below.



After logging in to Inform and launching a new query, choose the Subject Area as you normally would.

The next two steps are pictured below and marked with red ovals. Both are noted in text below the image here.



Change the "Year" from the current year (11-12) to last year (10-11).

Change the pull-down for "Enrolled As Of" from "Today (i.e. Currently Enrolled)" to "Test Date (i.e. All Tested)".

Make the rest of the selections for your query. Click on the "Create Report" button, and you will see your results from last year.

Tags: Inform

We have had some recent reports of a new error popping up for users when launching Outlook 2011. (We have been using and testing Outlook 2011 since last fall, and we have not seen or experienced this error until this past week-and-a-half.) The error that some users have received is pictured below.




While this is annoying, this is actually an error that you can fix yourself when you see it pop up. It is simply a matter of finding the correct "fake file" and deleting it.

First, begin by going to your home directory in the finder. (Pictured below)



Then, from there, you will navigate over to the "Library" folder in your home directory. (Ordinarily, this is not a folder that you need to go in.)



If you are getting this error, inside your "Library" folder, you will see what appears to be a file called "Caches" with a little arrow in the lower left corner. This is not actually a file. It is an alias, a "fake file".



Drag it to the trash (or right-click on it and select "Move to Trash"). Empty your trash.

Now, if you re-launch Outlook 2011, it should open for you without any trouble. Additionally, for the staff members who have applied this solution up until this point, we have not yet seen this problem re-occur.

Tags: Staff MacBook, Outlook 2011

It's the second summer that District 21 staff members have had District laptops, and while they are being pulled back for a few weeks to complete some major updates, staff members will have their laptops with them through most of the summer. As a result, here are some links to some articles for frequently asked questions from last summer.

General Troubleshooting Tips

It's Summer: Got a Problem--Here's What to Do

My computer won't connect to the Internet any more or my computer's date and time are all messed up or my computer no longer has its dock!

Remember, when calling the Help Desk (847.934.8100--press 2), using iChat can allow the Help Desk to screenshare even when you are not in District 21. At the same time, remember, we cannot (and would not even within District 21) access your computer remotely without notifying you first.

Like during the school year, the best way to most quickly and successfully resolve your issue is to call the Help Desk!

Tags: Staff MacBook

Changing schools for 2011-2012? Changing your name? If either of these pertain to you, there are a variety of computer-related implications, particularly for certified staff members with a staff laptop.

When staff members have a name change or change schools, we will need to do work over a two-day period on their computer. We will need their computer in order to:

• Create these changes on our servers and on the staff member’s computer, resetting the school and/ or the account name
• Make the appropriate changes in our Active Directory system
• Complete any necessary changes in email
• Move all of your documents from your home directory back on to your computer

As described in this post, Staff MacBooks are being updated this summer. We will not complete any name or school changes until after the update has been complete on the staff member's machine. So, please check the dates for your 2010-2011 school. Then, you can select a drop-off and pick-up date for your name and/or school change that follows the completion of your computer's update.

Staff members should contact the CCSD21 Technology Office by email (tech@ccsd21.org) at least 48 hours in advance of the Name/School Change Session you have chosen in order to sign-up. Then, you can drop off your machine on the designated day and time:

Group 1: Cooper, Kilmer, Poe, Longfellow Only - UPDATED DATES

• July 19th-Drop-off: 7.30-9.30 AM
• July 21st-Pick-up: 11 AM-3.30 PM   

 
Group 2: Field, Hawthorne, London, Riley, Tarkington (AND Group 1)

• August 1st-Drop-off: 7.30-9.30 AM
• August 3rd-Pick-up: 11 AM-3.30 PM  

 
Group 3:  Frost, Homes, Twain, Whitman (AND Groups 1 & 2)

• August 15th-Drop-off: 7.30-9.30 AM
• August 17th-Pick-up: 11 AM-4.30 PM

 
All Groups:

• September 13th-Drop-off: 7.30 AM-4.30 PM
• September 16th: Pick-up: 12-4.30PM

To sign-up for your date and time, email: tech@ccsd21.org

 

Tags: Staff MacBook

When laptops were distributed to certified staff members during Spring 2010, staff members were told that, because the machines were new, they would not be collected at all during the Summer of 2010. Staff members were also told at that time that in 2011, staff laptops would likely be re-collected for major updating.

Even with the initial success of using Casper Suite to remotely deploy software and update machines, this Summer does require that all staff laptops are collected for updating. We will be collecting the laptops for the shortest time possible given our resources.

During the updates, staff laptops will:

• Be updated from OS 10.6.5 to 10.6.7 (or possibly 10.6.8 with its impending release)
• Be updated with Mac OS X software and security updates
• Be updated with Microsoft Office 2011 replacing Microsoft Office 2008 (This includes the replacement of Entourage 2008 with Outlook 2011 as the primary email, calendar, contact, and tasks client application.)
• Be updated with iLife 11 from iLife 09
• Be renamed with a name that includes the abbreviation of the school at which the laptop is primarily located (and which will continue to include the asset tag number)

All updates will take place at London Middle School in the Library Media Center. That is typically where staff members will drop off and pick up their machines.

To facilitate this process of updating over 600 laptops, each school is going to be assigned a specific drop-off and pick-up day.


Important Details

• 2010-2011 Schools--If you are moving schools for 2011-2012, your computer is to be dropped off on the date for your 2010-2011 school.
• Drop-Off Conflicts--If you cannot attend a drop-off day, you can drop off your computer at the CCSD21 Technology Office prior to that day during normal summer business hours.
• Pick-Up Conflicts--If you cannot pick up your computer on a scheduled pick-up day, you will have to wait to until the next pick-up day to gather your computer.
• Only Computers--Technology Office staff members will only be accepting computers (no power cords, dongles, or other accessories).
• No Cases--Computers should not be dropped off or left in cases of any kind. District 21 is not able to take responsibility for cases dropped off with the computers.
• Computer Skins--District 21 will not remove skins on computers but also is not able to take responsibility that these skins will not be damaged while they are in the care of the District for updating.
• Summer School--If you are teaching in a District 21 Summer School program and are scheduled to drop off your computer during that program according to your 2010-2011 school's date, you will be able to drop off your computer following Summer School on a special July 6 drop-off day.
• Physical Damage/Warranty Issues--If Technology Office staff members note physical damage or warranty issues while performing the upgrades, the computers will be sent out for repair during the summer, and the staff member will be contacted with an update on the status and timeframe for fixing the computer.
• Personal Delivery--All staff members are responsible for personally dropping off and picking up the laptop at the Administration Center/London Middle School. Other individuals, including staff members and family members, cannot come and pick-up your laptop for you.

Computer Drop-Off/Pick-Up Days
June 13 - Drop-Off Day for Cooper, Kilmer, Longfellow, Poe (7.30 AM - 3.30 PM)

June 23 - Drop-Off Day for London, Hawthorne, Field, Riley, Tarkington (7.30 AM - 3.30 PM)

June 28 - Pick-Up Day for Cooper, Kilmer, Longfellow, Poe (7.30 AM - 3.30 PM)

July 6 - Drop-Off Day for Summer School Teachers who worked at Cooper, Kilmer, Longfellow, Poe, London, Hawthorne, Field, Riley, and Tarkington during the regular 2010-2011 school year. (7.30 AM - 3.30 PM)

July 12 - Drop-Off Day for Holmes, Frost, Twain, Whitman (7.30 AM - 3.30 PM)

*UPDATED DATE* July 14 - Pick-Up Day for London, Hawthorne, Field, Riley, and Tarkington and teachers from the first group who were unable to pick up their computer on June 28th (7.30 AM - 3.30 PM)

August 3 - Pick-Up Day for Holmes, Frost, Twain, Whitman (7.30 AM - 3.30 PM)

August 8 - Pick-Up Day for All Schools (@Ad Center-Technology Office) (7.30 AM - 3.30 PM)

August 15 - Pick-Up Day for All Schools (@Ad Center-Technology Office) (7.30 AM - 3.30 PM)

August 22 - Pick-Up Day for All Schools (@Ad Center-Technology Office) (1.40 - 4.30 PM)

Tags: Staff MacBook

Over the past couple of weeks, the use of server storage space has increased dramatically--over 100 GB of additional space have been swallowed up weekly! This increase has been caused by the number of movie, music, and picture files traveling across the network from the Portable Home Directories on individual computers to the home directories on the school file servers.

During the training in which staff members participated when they received their laptops, it was explained that movies, music, and pictures needed to be kept in the correct folders in their home directories (the movies, music, and pictures folders respectively). At that time, it was also explained that these folders would not sync to the server.

To protect bandwidth on the network and space on the servers, we will begin blocking movies, music, and picture file types from syncing to the server at all, regardless of the folder in which they are placed.

Please remember to ensure that your movie, music, and picture files are placed in those folders. Also, please remember that these files do not sync back to the server. As a result, staff members are responsible for backing them up on their own if they choose to have these files backed up.

This change should have no impact on the files on your computer. This is simply a more comprehensive implementation of the policy that has been in place since the distribution of staff laptops began in March 2010.



One final technical tip: If you are using iMovie, iTunes, or iPhoto all of these programs will, by default, store your movies, music, and pictures in those folders within your home directory.

Tags: Staff MacBook

As CCSD21 begins the official district-wide roll out of Inform, our data analysis tool that works in conjunction with PowerSchool, it is also critical to provide comprehensive support, particularly on days when schools across the District will be involved in high levels of Inform use, such as Institute Days and when School Improvement Teams meet during the summer.



On days like Institute Days, beginning with the May 27th (2011) Institute Day for Data Analysis and Reflection, we will ask individuals in schools to access support with Inform by following these steps:

• If you have a question about Inform or a problem with it, first be sure that you have carefully re-checked your steps against any directions (including screenshots) that you may have been provided.
• If you still have questions, please contact a member of the school's instructional leadership team who was involved in planning the Institute Day or SIP Team event.
• Then, if the school leader is unable to answer the question or resolve the issue, he or she will contact the Central Office Inform Support Team via a special email address.
• Once your email has been sent, please open iChat. Be sure that the volume on your computer is open part of the way.

• We will respond to the emails in the order that they are received, and we will respond back either via iChat or email. Using iChat, we may need to screenshare, and if we do, we will also be able to communicate via the built-in microphone and speakers in the MacBook.

At other times during the year, when you have questions related to Inform, please direct those via email or phone to: Tracy Crowley, Janelle Hockett, Jason Klein, and/or Sue Werneske.

Tags: Inform, Support, Data Analysis

Changing your password for either an individual user account for someone with school-wide or district-wide access (i.e., jason.klein) or for a team account from PowerSchool (i.e., 6asci) is easy to do in Inform. As a matter of fact, you can do it before you even go IN to Inform!

On the login screen to Inform (as pictured below), there is a link in the lower right corner of the login dialog titled, "Change Password". (Circled in red below)



Click on that link, and it will take you to a page that looks like the picture below.



Simply enter your username in the top row. Follow that by entering your default password in to the Old Password text box. Then, enter the new password once in each of the next two text boxes.

Click the "Change" button, and your password has been changed. Login to Inform with your new password, and you are all set and ready-to-go!

Tags: Inform

Much of the underlying data in Inform is pulled from PowerSchool. This includes demographic, course, and academic grade information for students. Along with this information, the teacher of record for each course is pulled from PowerSchool. Unfortunately, the teacher's password does not automatically pull from PowerSchool and PowerTeacher Gradebook. (We hope this feature will appear in a future update of Inform!)



As a result of how the teacher information is pulled in to Inform, we still have to set-up each teacher from PowerSchool in Inform.

To use Inform, teachers will login with the following PowerTeacher Gradebook accounts.

Elementary Schools:

• Team Math Teacher (who views all students on the grade level team)
• Team Communications Teacher (who views all English proficient students on the grade level team)
• Team ESL Teacher (who views all English language learners on the grade level team)

Middle Schools:

• Team Self-Directed Learner Teacher (who views all students on the team)
• Team Math Teacher (who views all students on the team with the exception of students who are in the Double Accelerated Mathematics program)

• Team Communications Teacher (who views all English proficient students on the team with the exception of the students who are in the Accelerated Communications program)
• Team ESL Teacher (who views all English language learners on the team)

Staff members who are not assigned to teach a course in PowerSchool (such as the Principal, Learning Coach, and School Psychologist) have access with a specifically created individual user account.

As a reminder, all staff members and teams are expected to change their Inform passwords and to keep them confidential in accordance with the CCSD21 Staff Internet and Technology Acceptable Use Policy.

Tags: Inform

After your move from Entourage to Outlook 2011, you may want to add a signature to your email account. There are a couple of easy steps to follow to complete this process.

First, launch Outlook 2011 from your dock.


From the white menu bar at the top of the screen, click on Outlook and then choose Preferences.


Under the Email heading, choose Signatures.


Now, check the checkbox next to Standard and add your information into the box below the two dashes. Do not delete the dashes, simply add your signature below.

Tags: Outlook 2011, Email

Did you know that your MacBook can be used to input in multiple languages all with the same English-language keyboard? There is nothing new that needs to be installed, just some features that need to be turned on with a few simple steps in System Preferences.

First, open System Preferences by going to the Apple logo in the upper-left corner of the display and choosing System Preferences from the pull-down menu.



Once you select System Preferences, choose "Language & Text" as pictured below.


Once in the Language & Text preference pane, choose the "Input Sources" tab. Within that tab:

• Check the box for the Keyboard & Character Viewer in the window in the left half of the preference pane.
• Check the boxes for any languages you would like to have displayed from the list of languages in the window in the left half of the preference pane.
• Check the box (at the bottom) for "Show input menu in menu bar"

Once that is complete, you will now have a flag appear in your menu bar in the upper-right portion of your monitor. When you click on the flag, a pull-down menu will appear with your options.



Remember, also, for typing en Español, there are also key commands that you can use to type in Spanish while still using the regular English settings. Those are also posted on The Modern Pen.

Tags: Staff MacBook, ELL, Bilingual

As educators, we are using the Internet more and more to do our work, our own learning, and to engage students in their learning. An important part of learning and working online is effective searching. Effective searching can help us more efficiently organize our lives--work, school, family, friends, obligations, finances, travel plans, and more.

Most people could be using search engines differently to yield better search results. Those who are media literate know the top results in a search are not the most accurate or credible. How we enter key words and information in to search engines can drastically alter our search results.

To learn to more efficiently search the web and learn more about media literacy, see the following links:

A Beginner’s Guide to Going Online

How to Search the Web

Evaluating Web Sites: Criteria and Tools

Kathy Schrock’s Guide for Educators

As described on The Modern Pen in this post, like everything else with technology, search does continue to change and evolve.

Tags: Search, Media Literacy

When we introduced Staff MacBooks, nearly a year ago, and along with them, Portable Home Directories, one of the key points we tried to stress was the importance of logging in and logging out. Logging in and logging out correctly is the best thing that individual users can do in order to ensure that their documents sync correctly to and from the file server.

Guidelines for logging in and logging out are:

• Arrival in CCSD21--Log In: When you arrive in District 21 from home, the coffee shop, or elsewhere, you should be logged out of your computer (or it can be shut down). Then, when you open your machine within District 21 and on the District 21 network, you log in. This does mean the before you will have left your previous location, such as home, you need to have shut down the computer or logged out of it.
• Leave CCSD21--Log Out: Prior to leaving District 21, you should always log out and/or shut down.

These simple steps will greatly ensure the successful syncing of your Portable Home Directory.

Tags: Staff MacBook, Portable Home Directory

Sometimes, particularly during the summer, District 21 and Help Desk staff members will use iChat to provide support remotely to an individual computer user. First, as a point of clarification, let's be clear that, using iChat, technical support team members cannot access your computer, including screensharing and video chat with your webcam, without you accepting the request.

When a technical support team member seeks to connect with your computer using screensharing through iChat, you will see a box pop up on your screen that looks like that pictured below.



When this box pops up, you will need to move your mouse over this dialog and click on it.

After you have clicked on the box, it will morph in to a dialog like the one pictured below:



After clicking Accept, the screenshare will begin, and audio will be live between both participants. (You can hear one another!)

Tags: iChat, Staff MacBook

Recently, we've had a rash of complaints from certified staff members whose Internet Service Provider is Comcast about their inability to access their District 21 email via Entourage 2008 on their Staff MacBook. Typically, these staff members have received a message like that pictured below:


We know that this error is real and is taking place, but we have been unable to consistently replicate. Nothing has changed on our end in regard to our District 21 Exchange server, firewall configuration, or other technical structure that should be causing this. We believe that the issue is on Comcast's end, but in order to help resolve this, staff members are asked to do the following when they see this dialog box while working at home with a Comcast connection:

• Record the specific date and time that this took place
• Open Safari and try to navigate to http://webmail.ccsd21.org
• Email helpdesk@net56.com and tell them exactly when this took place and whether or not you were able to access Exchange Webmail at http://webmail.ccsd21.org
• If you were unable to access Exchange Webmail, too, you might also choose to call Comcast and report the issue to them.

Thank you for your assistance in collecting data to track down this problem.

Tags: Exchange, Entourage 2008, Staff MacBook

Today, District 21 staff members receive very little spam despite the fact that over 90% of all email is spam. For us, nearly all of that spam is blocked by our spam filter. The spam emails that we have recently seen sneak through our filter typically from random and changing domains from around the world. (A domain is what follows the "@" symbol in an email address.) Sometimes, though, more menacing spam can appear that seems to be from a more trusted source.

How can spammers send email from a friend or colleague's work or personal account? This is able to happen because the account is compromised as the spam creators somehow obtain the username and password information of the email address's rightful owner in order to send from this account. This serves as a good opportunity for us to understand how this can take place and what all of us can do to try and prevent this.

How do the spam creators get the username and password information? There are two typical methods: (1) The use of software that will automatically try to enter millions of different passwords for each username until it finds one that works or (2) the user will simply give his or her username and password combination to the spammers without realizing it.

When this happens to a company or if it would happen to us, the entire company (or School District 21) would be at-risk. If our domain (@ccsd21.org) is used to send out spam, it will be blocked by other servers' spam filters, and we'll be unable to send emails to other organizations that block our emails.

So, what can you do to prevent this?
First, staff members should use rigorous passwords that do not use regular words or names. Our minimum password requirements assist with this. Organizations can and, often times, also do require users to frequently change passwords, too (i.e., every 90 days), and this further improves security.

Second, you should never give your password out--and definitely never via email. In District 21, we will not ever request password information in an email. If we did, it would only be on the phone or in-person or, possibly, via our own iChat services. Even in those cases, our preferred method for solving most problems is to temporarily change your password and then ask you to change it back when the problem has been resolved. Either way, please do not email your confidential information to anyone.


Our Internet-based safety is like our real world safety in that a "neighborhood watch" is probably the best approach to keeping all of us safe. In so many ways, it's a very different world in 2011, and we appreciate all of your efforts to keep us collectively safe and to provide instruction to our students that prepares them to be successful with these major shifts in society.

Tags: Exchange, Active Directory

"Nope, sorry. We can't do that."

"We don't have enough bandwidth."

"We're looking at increasing our bandwidth to make that possible."

"Yep. We understand that you can do that at home. Here at school we don't have enough bandwidth."

"We do all have to share this small amount of bandwidth, unfortunately."

The quotes listed above are what staff members throughout School District 21 regularly hear said to them by members of District 21's Technology Team. As frustrating as these responses are to hear for teachers who want to try something new, they are equally frustrating for Tech Team members to have to say. Here, we want to provide a brief explanation as to what bandwidth actually is.

Simply put, bandwidth is the maximum amount of information that can be transferred in a given amount of time. Bandwidth is usually measured in bits per second. Bits are tiny little chunks of data, or information. Today's high-speed bandwidth connections allow millions of bits per second to be moved across high-speed data lines. This rate is called megabits per second (abbreviation: Mb/s). This is not to be confused with Megabytes--a measure used to define the capacity of memory. As the need for greater bandwidth increases, connections now also reach Gigabit speeds, allowing data to move even more quickly.

Do you remember when the Internet was referred to as The Information Superhighway in the mid-1990s? If so, that metaphor was true at the time and is still true today. Just like on the road, how network traffic moves is determined by how fast the road can allow traffic to move (speed limit--roads; bandwidth--network connections) and by how much traffic there actually is (roads & network connections). When there's too much traffic, it is not possible to go the speed limit (roads & network connections).

Within our internal local area networks (within a school), we have Gigabit connections in place. Our elementary schools have connections of a minimum of 5 Mb/s, and our middle schools have connections of a minimum of 10 Mb/s. Of course, as in the traffic analogy described above, there are all kinds of factors that impact real-life performance. At home, many people have much faster bandwidth connections. DSL subscribers typically have about the same performance as one of our entire schools, and cable subscribers might have up to twice as much bandwidth as one of our schools! At school, that bandwidth is likely to be share by anywhere from 90 to 150 computers. At home, it might be share by as many as 5 or 6 Internet-connected devices. This is why we have to be very careful about how we use our limited bandwidth at school. There's just not as much to go around.

The charts below show these differences.

On a Sunday night at home, when traffic is high on a shared cable connection in the neighborhood, one still can get very high bandwidth speeds as pictured below. 19.11 Mb/s--Almost twice as much as any of our middle schools can get at this time.



At that same time at school, when traffic was very low (because the buildings were empty), we can see the speeds listed below for Cooper (first) and then for Poe (second).

Cooper--A decent 8.53 Mb/s connection at that time.



Poe--A very poor 1.42 Mb/s connection at that time.



While these numbers at school are dismal compared to the numbers at home, only 16 months ago, the entire District shared a connection of only 6 Mb/s--less than Cooper had by itself on this Sunday night. So, bandwidth underwent a dramatic increase in 2009-2010--by a factor of about 12!!!

We are currently beginning the E-Rate funding process for the 2011-2012 school year, and we are seeking to dramatically increase bandwidth again. E-Rate funding provides District 21 with reimbursements of approximately 60% on our telecommunications expenses, a significant number that cannot be underestimated in allowing us, financially, to make these changes. Like other organizations, including area school districts, we also understand that regular increases in bandwidth (i.e., faster roads) will be a necessary and regular upgrade to our infrastructure.

Tags: Network, Media

Beginning on November 10, 2010, new Océ copiers are being delivered out to each school. These new copiers, which are much smaller physically than the old copiers, are high-quality machines that integrate fantastically with our computers and Active Directory. While it will be a little while until we can roll out printing for all of our Staff MacBooks, we have tested all of the major features, and everything is already working on the first of the Océ machines to be delivered.



One of the most exciting features is Scan-to-Email. During the Summer of 2009, we did, for a period of time, get this feature working on our old copiers. At the time, it required us to use our voicemail numbers, and eventually, it stopped working. No such problems now! :) To learn how to scan to email, see these PDF directions.

Tags: Oce, Copier, Printing, Email, Scan

You’ve found a great instructional video online on YouTube or TeacherTube, and you want to show it to your students. Yet, YouTube is blocked at school, so you cannot simply stream this content. Well, nearly all streaming media sites are blocked at school due to bandwidth limitations, but you can access these videos to share with your students where they will benefit instruction when they are on sites that do not block the ability to download the videos (such as YouTube).

So, how do I download the video that I want in that case? First, you need to make sure that the video can be used. Outstanding guidelines for Fair Use can be found from The Center for Social Media as well as in a simplified form in this blog post from Edutopia.

Once you’ve established that the video does not violate Copyright laws, you can download it by...


(Unfortunately, because of our bandwidth limitations, this does need to be done outside of CCSD21 for the time being.)

In Safari, go to the YouTube video you want to download.




Now, in the white menu bar for Safari at the top of the screen, go to Windows > Activity and click.



Now, and this part will make you feel like a computer programmer, go ahead in the Activity window/dialog and find the largest file in the list of all of the files. (It will usually be a certain number of MB rather than bytes or KB.) (MB are bigger than KB or bytes!) Simply, double-click on the link to the left of the file size of that largest file. You can do this while the video is playing.



Your video will start downloading directly to your computer (either your Desktop or your Downloads folder) as a Flash file.



When your video is done downloading, you can open it using either Quicktime Player or VLC, both of which are on your Staff MacBook. If you right-click on the file’s icon, you can select Open With... and have the option to choose between either Quicktime Player or VLC.


In either, you can expand the video to full screen, though the quality will vary depending on the quality of the video that you downloaded.

Finally, if you do plan to show video to students from your computer, do be sure to test sound and light quality with speakers and the projector beforehand!

Tags: Staff MacBook, Media Download, Media

Entourage mail program keeps a list of recent e-mail addresses from people you have corresponded with. While this can save time typing out the full address, it’s annoying when the recently used address turns out to be wrong.

If you want to remove that incorrect entry from the recently used list in Entourage 2008:

• Create a new message and start typing the address you want to remove.
• When the pop-up menu of suggested addresses appears, select the incorrect one.
• Hold down the Control key and click on the address.
• Choose the Add to Address Book from the menu to create a new contact. (Yes! You’re actually going to create an incorrect address first!)

Now that you’ve created a contact file with the incorrect address:

• Select the incorrect contact from your Contacts list, go to the Edit menu, and choose Delete Contact.
• Once you delete the contact and discard the blank message you created, the entry should disappear from the Recent Addresses list.

If you want to wipe out all the addresses on the entire Recent Addresses list,

• Go to the Entourage menu and choose Preferences.
• On the left side of the Preferences box, under the Mail & News Preferences, click on the Compose line.
• On the right side of the Preferences box, in the Recent Addresses area, click on the Clear List button.

Tags: Exchange, Entourage 2008

Technology refers to tools that humans (and other primates!) use to get jobs done. As a result of the very spirit of human beings, this has always meant that technology is in a constant of evolution. Today, that evolution takes place at a very, very rapid pace. In the past, individuals would learn and adopt a new technology and use it for centuries, such as the plow. Of course, during that time, there were improvements to it, but those improvements were gradual and marginal, and they did not result in a plow that was completely different than previous plows. Over time, the pace and significance of changes in technology has grown more and more rapid. Such that today, technology that is more than five years old, and sometimes as little as a year-old, is truly out-of-date.

What does this mean for teachers and students? Simply that we need to continually adapt and learn how to use new technology as it changes.

Software manufacturers continue to update their software on a regular basis (i.e., every 1-4 years), and sometimes these updates result in very different ways in which to use the software. Both Microsoft and Apple, for example, regularly make such changes. When this happens, as end users, whether we like it or not, we need to also change.

For example, while in a furious rush to produce professional development video for staff members throughout School District 21, we came across our first real need to use iMovie 09. Like iMovie 08, it had completely abandoned the timeline editing of “production” movie editing suites. Yet, it was still likely the best and fastest tool for us to use to edit web video. So, after some frustration and attempts at trying the new software, what did we do???

We accessed the Help Menu (pictured below) built right in to the iMovie application (and all Mac OS X applications) in the white menu bar at the top of the screen.



By selecting the Help Menu, we were able to go directly to video tutorials on Apple’s website. (This work was being done outside the District...) As pictured below, you can see that there was a long list of videos on the website.



We needed to learn how to trim clips first, and we went straight to that video, watched, learned, and then, were able to do!

No single person, no matter how geeky or techy, knows all technology. Nevertheless, just like with The Modern Pen, individuals and organizations put the information out there on the web. Much of the time, finding one’s answer is simply a few clicks away!

Tags: Staff MacBook, iMovie, Help

When I am plugging in the power cord from my MacBook in to the outlet in the wall, it sparks! Is that normal? Is it bad? Will I get hurt? Will the computer get hurt? It is normal. You probably won’t be hurt, but let’s not risk it. It may not be good for the computer. So, what do we do?



The solution is really simple. If you use the following steps, you will not have this problem.

1. Plug the power cord in to the wall.
2. Plug the magsafe adapter end of the power cord in to the computer.

That’s it! (This same process should be used with all laptops, regardless of the manufacturer or type of adapter.)

Tags: Staff MacBook

We cannot see your password. We can reset it, though. Actually, you can just call the Help Desk (847.934.8100-press 2), and they can reset it for you.

...BUT... Your next step then is to go to a school Computer Lab, LMC Lab, or one of the silver teacher workroom iMacs, and log-in with your username (firstname.lastname) and the default password that the Help Desk will give you when your password has been reset. When you do that, you will have to create a new password, which meets the following requirements:

• Minimum of 8 characters
• At least 3 of the 4 following types of characters: uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers, and/or punctuation

From there, using your new password, at home, school, or anywhere, you can use a web browser to access your email, calendar, and contacts at:
http://webmail.ccsd21.org

Likewise, this password can be used to access your home directory by simply logging in to an up-to-date/modern computer at school as well as for any wikis for which you are a member.

Tags: Webmail, Exchange, Home Directory, Wikis

“Our servers should be younger than our Kindergarteners.”

This adage is one that school districts aspire to achieve and maintain.

In our quest to provide the best possible tools for students and staff members within our existing resources, we have moved to the Enterprise-class Microsoft Exchange email, calendar, contacts productivity server. Rather than move everyone in a single, sweeping, over-the-weekend transition is as often-the-case with such a change, we have taken a different approach. We have slowly moved groups of people over during the course of the last three years. On Friday, August 27th, the last current CommuniGate user will be moved to Exchange (and celebrations will ensue throughout District 21)!!!

The CommuniGate server will be shutdown this coming Sunday evening, August 29th, after 7.00 PM. After that time, messages on CommuniGate will no longer be available to be retrieved. Most staff have had at least three months to clear these messages from the CommuniGate server in the event that they wanted to retain the messages.




From Listservs to Groups
With this move, we are also in the process of enabling the groups in Active Directory as Mail Groups. These function a little differently than listservs.

First, Active Directory is designed to control most functions within our school district related to computers for each student and staff member. It provides a map for each individual’s electronic life in CCSD21, connecting you with your files, your email, etc. When someone is hired, she is put in to Active Directory, and when she leaves CCSD21, she is taken out, and all of those permissions vanish with her!

Another feature of Active Directory is that we can make groups, and then, we can use that same group for multiple purposes. For example, each school has a Staff group, and that group has permissions on the school-wide staff wiki on the teams.ccsd21.org server and that group will now also be the school’s staff email group.

So, what do you need to know in order to use the new email groups?

• Composing an email--To send an email to the entire staff, just do what you’ve done in the past--send an email to the group. For example, in the screenshot below, I am sending an email to the iTech and Principals groups. If I wanted to send one to the staff at London, I would enter london_staff in the TO line of my email. Then, everyone in the London Staff group in Active Directory would receive the email.
• Replying to an email--This is one of the biggest changes from a listserv. Now, when you hit reply to a message that was sent to the entire group, it will only be received by the original sender of the email, not by the whole group. The benefit is that this eliminates the possibility of accidentally sending an unintended response to everyone, as so often happens! If you want everyone to see your response, you simply hit “Reply to All” instead of “Reply”.

With this change, all of the new teachers, who were only included in Exchange and never entered in to CommuniGate will start receiving school staff emails. So, beginning next week, the staff email group (Remember, it’s not a listserv anymore!) for each school should be complete.

Finally, as with all of the users in Active Directory, the group names are searchable in Entourage 2008, Outlook 2007 and 2010, and Outlook Web App, so you can look up a group if you don’t know its name. To make this transition as easy as possible, nearly all group names match those that were previously used in CommuniGate!

Tags: Staff MacBook, CommuniGate, Exchange, Entourage 2008, Webmail

Staff members can and should begin the troubleshooting process by first doing some basics:

• Restarting the computer, if possible
• Ensuring that the computer is plugged in to power
• Ensuring that the computer is connected to a network (Ethernet is ideal. If you’re having problems with a wireless network at home or elsewhere, the issue could be with that network, not the computer. Are other computers working on the same network? Will your computer work on another network?)

If all of those basic items are working, continue troubleshooting by seeking out information from the following sources:

• Atomic Learning
• The Modern Pen
• Your Computer’s Built-In Help in the Menu Bar

If, after doing that, you are still having difficulty or if you are prompted for an administrator password, please call the Help Desk (847.934.8100--press 2).

Some might ask, can I simply take the computer to The Apple Store? The short answer is “No”. The long answer is that Apple is one corporation, but they are one giant corporation. They are a corporation that, while increasingly focused on the enterprise market (large organizations--like CCSD21), continues to be primarily structured for consumer sales and support. While we are all familiar with The Apple Store and The Genius Bar, these are not tools that are designed to support School District 21 computers for a variety of reasons. Additionally, CCSD21 is also a large organization and part of the government. As a result, we have made specific decisions about the hardware that is deployed and how it is deployed. The Apple Store is unaware of those decisions.

We have worked with our Government/Education Apple representatives and the small business associates in local Apple Stores to support us on certain small hardware purchases. Those rare instances are handled directly by the District 21 Technology Office.

Otherwise, as a rule, District 21 Apple computers are not purchased from or taken to the Apple Store by District employees. Rather, sales are handled through the CCSD21 Technology Office and Apple Education. Troubleshooting and maintenance should be addressed by the individual staff member through the Help Desk (847.934.8100-press 2). From there, when a computer is under AppleCare and needs repair from Apple, we initiate that via the internal processes that we have in place and that Apple has set-up for enterprise customers like CCSD21.

Tags: Staff MacBook

What happens if you are at home and notice that the time and date on your District 21 laptop is wrong???

First, you have to understand that the date and time on computers in an enterprise environment, like District 21, is much different than the importance of the date and time on our personal computers in our homes. The date and time are the basis for everything from logging in with your Active Directory username and password to ensuring that your files sync accurately.

When you are away from the District, your time should be accurate, matching the time of computers within the District. For example, this passage is being written outside of the District, and the time on this computer exactly matches the time on computers throughout District 21 right now. When this time is off, the solution is simple (though not necessarily convenient), and one that you can implement yourself.

To correct your time, simply:

• Be sure that the computer is shut down the next time you go into a District 21 school (any District 21 school)
• Once in the school, boot up the computer and login
• Your time will automatically sync with the District time servers!
• If that still doesn’t work. Log-out. Try to log-in one more time. If the time still doesn’t correct, call the Help Desk at 847.934.8100 and press 2.

After your time is correct, you may receive more syncing errors than you have typically received. If you have only been using your staff laptop to do your schoolwork, select the mobile/portable version as the key version that you want to retain on the server!

Tags: Staff MacBook, System Preferences

As staff members throughout School District 21 begin preparing for the coming school year, lots of time is spent in calendars marking down important events for students, parents, and ourselves.

Of course, all staff members benefit from using your Exchange calendar. Staff members with laptop or desktop computers assigned to them individually can benefit from using Entourage or Outlook as their Exchange applications, and all staff members can also access their Exchange accounts via webmail.ccsd21.org. These calendars are great for sharing with one another and creating meetings in efficient ways that the majority of participants can attend because their schedules have been pre-checked for availability. To learn more about the specific features of the calendars in Outlook 2007 and Entourage 2008

While the calendars in Entourage and Outlook are great for productivity and keeping organized as a professional, these calendars are not designed for specific publication in newsletters or for distribution to parents and students.

So, how do I create a calendar for students and parents?

Microsoft Office 2008 comes with pre-created templates built right-in, and these are a great way to get started in a variety of projects. Included among these are templates for building calendars as pictured below.

Tags: Excel

Like being a star athlete, a great singer, or a super-effective classroom teacher, there are very important fundamentals that must be followed in order for one to be successful in any of these fields. Often times, these fundamentals are completely transparent to observers, except for the most expert. The same is actually true of the use of spreadsheets. While PC Mag has acknowledged that mastering Microsoft Excel can take years, some very basic fundamentals make an enormous difference in what can be accomplished with a spreadsheet.

Some important rules for successful spreadsheet use include:

Working Environment

• Spreadsheets on Screen--Spreadsheets are designed to be used on a computer. It’s not to say that we never print spreadsheets because we do at times, but 99% of the time, we work with a spreadsheet in the most efficient manner on the computer rather than for how it will look for printing.
• Normal View--Always use Normal View (View > Normal) for data entry and manipulation.
• Toolbars--Select View > Toolbars > Standard & View > Toolbars > Formatting. Most importantly, also select View > Formula Bar, which will show you exactly what is really in each cell as you select it.
• Workbooks & Worksheets--Don’t be afraid to use multiple worksheets within a single workbook. Label them carefully.

Layout

• Columns & Rows--Columns are for data fields/variables. Rows are for records.
• Header Row--Row 1 should always be used as a header row. Headers should be short and descriptive. Each column should have a header.Depending on the spreadsheet’s purpose and audience, headers may be free of spaces.
• Align Data within Columns--Whether it is left-aligned, centered, or right-aligned, depends on the data in the column, but all data within a column should be aligned.
• Separate Distinct Data--It’s not difficult to split data in to separate columns from a single column (i.e., split “last, first” to two columns--“last name” and “first name”), but it’s even easier to push data together from separate columns in to a single column (i.e., from “last name” and “first name” to “last, first”.) So, keep separate data separate from the start.

Content

• Grab Starting Data from Elsewhere--Teachers, support staff, and administrators all have the ability to export data from PowerSchool. Get your IDs, Names, etc. from there!
• Student IDs--ALWAYS use student id numbers for each student when collecting data on students. Typically ID numbers will fill Column A or Column B.
• Use Columns/Fields for Categorizing, Not Colors--People like to organize their spreadsheets by color. This is fine. Do not only organize by color. Rather than represent a category within a spreadsheet by color-coding cells, use a new column, create the proper field, and categorize that. Data can then be sorted, counted, analyzed using that.

Tips

• Use a Mouse and/or Tab and/or Return--When doing significant and/or extended work in Excel use a wired mouse plugged in to your laptop to make work more efficient. Better yet, for data entry, use the Tab key to move to the next cell to the right in a row and the Return key to move the next cell down in a column.
• Right-Click--When you “right-click” in Excel a contextual menu will pop up with a number of options that you can apply to the selected cell, column, or row.
• Plan Ahead--Before beginning to work in your spreadsheet, consider what fields you are going to use, how your records are going to be used, etc. This will help you visualize how your schedule ought to be laid out and will make your organization of rows and columns much easier.

Tags: Excel

Even with great tools, such as the PowerTeacher Gradebook and Inform, spreadsheets remain the most critical of tools for success in collecting and analyzing student data. Whether we are collecting data before uploading it to Inform or we are exporting it from the Gradebook to graph, spreadsheets are used to systematically collect, sort, manipulate, and analyze data. Currently, School District 21 does utilize Microsoft Office. Staff members who are using Windows PCs are typically using Office 2007 as we begin our transition to the new Office 2010. Staff members who are using Macs are using Office 2008.

AtomicLearning.com (which requires a username and password) features great tutorials on Excel 2008. These tutorials are broken up in to three different sections of tutorials:

• Intro (76 tutorials)
• Intermediate (86 tutorials)
• Advanced (85 tutorials)

That’s right! There are a total of 247 tutorials on AtomicLearning.com about Microsoft Excel 2008 alone!

In addition to all of the resources in AtomicLearning.com, there is also built-in support available right in the application itself. Microsoft, like Apple, has included a lot of information to provide help and support to end users right on the desktop from within the application itself. Simply select Help from the Menu Bar at the top of the screen as pictured below.



Either enter your search terms in the Search text field or select Excel Help from the menu and then search for more information.

“But wait, there’s more!” The Microsoft Office for Mac website also has great resources for learning more about how to use Office products, include Excel 2008.
Microsoft.com/Mac Office 2008 How-To Courses

Tags: Excel, AtomicLearning

One of the most powerful, easy-to-use tools for newcomers and advanced users to Microsoft Excel is the AutoFilter. The AutoFilter allows you to quickly and easily sort and or select certain data from either a pull-down menu or by custom defining your search criteria. Enabling the AutoFilter is as simple as clicking on AutoFilter in the Data > Filter > AutoFilter menu command from the Menu Bar as pictured above. Once the AutoFilter is enabled, you will see arrows in the header row of each column on the right side of the column as pictured below.



By simply clicking on the arrow, it will open up a new menu as pictured below.



Choosing from this menu, will allow you to only see the rows, or records, that you have selected. Choosing the Custom Filter option will allow you to specify exactly what data you would like to see. For example, you could choose to see all students who scored a 90 or higher on a particular assessment. While your other data will appear missing, it will really still be there. It is just hidden--or filtered out.

When you have filtered a column, the arrows in that columns header will appear blue. To unfilter, simply choose the Select All option from the pull-down at the top of that column, and all of your data will re-appear.

Simply by following our steps for entering data using Excel best practices and by using the AutoFilter, you can uncover all kinds of very important information about your students!

Tags: Excel

So, The Modern Pen looks strange in comparison to how it has looked? What happened?

An update to the software used to compose and publish The Modern Pen left the entry for each header too small to read, and correcting it in code was not having any impact in any of the three browsers tested. So, an alternative theme has been chosen.

While the new theme may satisfy the tastes of some and leave others desiring an improvement, we hope it serves to allow users to access the content until we can find a more permanent, and completely web-based, solution for posting to The Modern Pen.

Thanks for reading!

Tags: Modern Pen, Design

Previously, we had anticipated being able to begin allowing CCSD21 staff members to access Exchange via their personal smartphones as early as today. Unfortunately, our current mix of staffing and other ongoing summer projects is going to cause us to delay this. As we move through our summer projects, we are continuing to re-evaluate how best to accomplish all of them in an efficient and timely manner while continuing to provide training and resources to staff in order to accomplish these projects. As soon as we are ready and able to begin scheduling appointments with staff regarding signing up to access your District 21 email, calendar, and contacts on a personal smartphone, we will communicate that to all staff via email. Again, we thank you for your patience.

Tags: Staff MacBook, Exchange, SmartPhones

What do I do if my computer isn’t working right and it’s summer?

First, you need to call the Help Desk. They will try to help you over the phone, but if that doesn’t work, the next step will be that the user will have to bring the computer in to the District. Especially during the summer, if the computer is operational, it is critical that the user logs in and logs out of the computer inside of the District 21 network to ensure that another home sync takes place, thereby securing their Documents and Desktop folders. This may also resolve the issue. In the event that the computer is still not working, the computer will need to be left in the Technology Office along with some Summer Contact Information for the user. The ticket will be reviewed by one of our field engineers. They’ll check with AppleCare and the Support Forums to see if there are any OS-related fixes that they can apply first (and/or firmware updates). If there’s not and they believe it that it’s an isolated hardware issue, then the ticket will be transferred to our Operations team, and they will send the machine to AppleCare. When we receive it back from AppleCare, depending on what was done to the machine, we may need to do the pre-set-up (Binding, Place in Group in OD/WGM, etc.) again. We will ask the user to arrange a time with us to come in. Then, we will have the user log-in before we do the rest of the set-up—Entourage, iChat, Office Default Save Locations, Deletion of Safari and Firefox Bookmarks, etc. After that, the user can take it home. (The user will be in the office for about 10-15 minutes at this point if a field engineer is available.) So, first, call the issue in to the Help Desk—847.934.8100 and press 2.

Finally, please do remember that summer is actually the busiest time of year as we try to take care of projects when students (mostly) and teachers (mostly) are not around as much, so our field engineers are not sitting and waiting for individuals to come in and address tickets. Rather, the projects alone keep us very busy. As a result, typically, one should not expect to be seen when the computer is brought in the first time by a field engineer. Rather, the user should plan on coming in to the District, logging in to the computer, and checking to see if the problem is still there after the log in is complete.

Tags: Staff MacBook

During the last two weeks of July 2009, we installed 30 new Apple Xserves, and we completely re-configured the relationship between users (people), clients (regular computers you use), and servers (servers!). At this time, we also set-up two dedicated wiki and blog servers--one that is designed to serve the public (teacher blogs for parents, classroom projects with students, etc.) and one that is designed to be used collaboratively by teams (to support teaming).

When we installed the servers, the operating system was at 10.5.7. Shortly after the school year started, we upgraded all thirty servers to 10.5.8. Then, Apple released 10.6, Snow Leopard. This type of update was too significant to perform over a weekend. (It is taking us nearly three weeks to do during the summer!) In the past, we’ve typically left servers running with whatever operating system it was using when it was originally set-up. Now, with new servers in place along with lots of new clients, we have upgraded the servers to Snow Leopard. Specifically, each of our Mac servers will be running OS 10.6.4 by the end of this week.

We’re excited that by the end of this week, all of our open directory and file servers will have been upgraded. We have already upgraded the iChat, wiki, and teams servers, yet there is additional work that has been required on each of these before we can be fully up and running. So, here’s the run down on exactly where these servers are at right now:

iChat
After an extensive period of tweaking settings and testing, we are pleased to officially announce that iChat is back open. It seems to be working just fine with both text and video chats working. iChat is open right now as this is written, so chat away!

Teams
The teams.ccsd21.org wiki server that is used by teams is also working, but we’re needing to go through and reset permissions for each group. We had worked extensively with Apple prior to this upgrade in order to determine what type of issues we may have with blogs and wikis. Even from inside Apple, we heard very different reports on how this update might go. Overall, this update went well, but we are having to reset permissions on each of the approximately 200 wikis that we have in use for teams in District 21. We hope to have this work done later this month. Once this work is done, we will ask iTech teachers to go in to Active Directory and update which staff members are in which groups. When this work is done, everyone will be able to be a part of whatever teams they are a part of for the 2010-2011 school year! We do thank teachers for their patience as we work through this process for the first time.

Wikis
The wiki.ccsd21.org wiki and blog server has seen the same issues as the teams.ccsd21.org server. Here, though, there will be additional testing that we are undertaking as we look to potentially utilize Active Directory to manage the users on the wiki server. (Prior to now, we have had to enter each user individually on this server. We have done so in order to meet our web page policy that requires us not to post the first and last names of students.) Individual wikis and blogs will come back online as we can (with sites in which only staff post being up first), and we will let the individuals running those sites know when they are up.

Tags: Staff MacBook, iChat, Wikis, Teams, Blogs

One thing you can do to personalize your desktop is use a picture to make it more personal. To do this, you do not need to open any System Preferences. If you already have the picture or graphic on your computer, it is very simple.

First, navigate to the location on your computer that the picture is sitting. It is easiest if it is just on the Desktop, like in the picture below. Right-click on the picture (see Managing Your Trackpad for more information on learning how to right-click on your MacBook), and choose Set Desktop Picture. See the picture below.



One potential problem that may occur is that the picture may become pixilated (showing all of the little squares/pixels that make up the picture). The best way to avoid this is to use pictures of high resolution, such as a full-size picture from a modern digital camera.

If you would like to use a picture that is stored online, that, too, is simple. First, you can only use a picture if the copyright allows you to do so--either because it is open source under something like Creative Commons or a picture that is now in the public domain. Then, go to the online site that hosts the picture that you would like to use. Next, you will typically be on a page that displays thumbnail images, smaller versions (lower resolution) of each picture. So, click on the picture you want to use in order to enlarge it to its highest resolution (to avoid or minimize pixilation).

Next you will right-click on the picture, and you will choose Use Image as Desktop Picture.




At that point, your picture will be set on the Desktop. Depending on the size of the original photo, you may only see a portion of the photo on your Desktop.

Tags: Staff MacBook, System Preferences, Display

How do I check my Exchange email when I don’t have my Staff MacBook with me?

If you are without your laptop and want to check your email, calendar, and contacts, simply go to Outlook Web App (OWA), also known as Exchange Webmail. This is linked on the left sidebar on the Staff homepage, and can be found at:

webmail.ccsd21.org

There is also a PDF document that is available to help you navigate using OWA. To access this document, which is on the CCSD21 Exchange Support page, you will need to enter your Active Directory Username and Password.

Tags: Staff MacBook, Webmail, Exchange

On Thursday, May 20, 2010, the new CCSD21 wireless network will be up and running. Over the following week and a half, there will still be additional testing, surveying, and troubleshooting.

For those computers that are Staff MacBooks, the computers will just automatically see and connect to the CCSD21 network (as pictured in the image below).

For existing laptops, such as student laptops and administrator laptops, the Tech Office will need to connect your laptop to this new network. We will be doing that over the coming weeks to all student and administrator laptops. In the meantime, to use a wireless connection, student laptops and administrator laptops need to connect to CCSD21_Temp (pictured below). This network does not require a password. In June, this network will be eliminated.

Tags: Wireless, Network

Can the Technology Office access staff laptops remotely?

Inside, the CCSD21 network (in any of our 14 buildings), we do have the ability to access your computer. We will only do this after either specifically announcing that we will be accessing your machine or after asking for your permission. This is a great advantage for everyone as we can provide remote support immediately upon your initial phone call in many cases.

The only ways that the Technology Office can access your computer outside the District is with the IP address of your computer and knowing that the appropriate ports are open in your firewall or through an iChat conversation. In either case, you would have to provide information or accept the iChat invitation, and we will not access your computer remotely without your permission unless some type of investigation or process required us to do so.

Tags: Staff MacBook

When at school most of the schools computers have been automatically added to your printer list. However, if there is a computer missing, or if you need to add a printer for a different school, the process to add a printer is very simple. The first thing you want to do, is open System Preferences, which is found in the menu underneath the Apple icon in the upper left corner of your screen on the left side of the Menu Bar (the white bar that runs across the top of the screen).


Next, from among the buttons in System Preferences, choose Print and Fax.


Once this Print & Fax preference pane opens up, you will see the already configured printers for your school. Under that, you will see the + button. It is important to note, that although the lock is shut, you do not need to unlock it, nor use the computer’s administrator password to add these printers.


At this point, the “Add Printer” dialog appears. There are three important steps you need to do in this dialog. First, choose the IP icon. Then, choose HP Jet Direct for the Protocol field if the printer you are adding is an HP printer. If the printer is from any other brand, chose Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) from the pull-down menu.


At this point, you will need to put in the ip address of the school printer you want to add. You may find this number posted on the printer or perhaps your iTech teacher has made a school-wide list for your school. Otherwise, ask your school’s Itech teacher, who has all of this information. You also want to “name” this printer so that you can remember which printer is which when you go to actually print. Then, press the Add button.


Once this process is complete, you will notice that your printer has been added to the list of printers for the computer.

Now, you can go ahead and use this printer just like any of the school printers that appeared on the list already. Just remember, you must select the correct printer to which you want to print before printing!

Tags: Staff MacBook, Printing, System Preferences

How do I set-up right-clicking with my trackpad and learn more about what gestures I can use?

The trackpad below your keyboard on your staff MacBook is made out of glass and is similar to the screen of an iPhone or iPod Touch, supporting a variety of different hand movements as types of computer inputs. Additionally, there is no easily identifiable and separate button. As you’ve learned by now, the entire trackpad (particularly the bottom half) is the button.

To learn more about what your trackpad can do and to set specific preferences yourself, first, go to System Preferences by choosing it from under the Apple icon in the white menu bar at the top of the screen.


Select the Trackpad button by clicking on it.


Once you are in there, you can select the options you want to enable and watch the videos built-in to the System Preferences dialog to understand what these options really do!


Try some different options, and please do not be afraid to experiment with these settings!

Tags: Staff MacBook, Mouse, Trackpad, System Preferences

If I receive a prompt to upgrade software, should I allow it or not?

You should not allow it, but even if you did, you do not have the technological permissions to do software upgrades. You should not actually see dialogs asking you about updating software, though.

All software upgrades will typically be performed remotely and on a schedule to all computers in a school and/or across the District at the same time after we have tested the software upgrade to be certain that it does not create and/or cause new problems with our staff laptops.

During the summer of 2010, a software system will be installed to allow us to perform these upgrades en masse. More information will follow as we run such updates.

Tags: Staff MacBook

Bookmarking a frequently visited website is easy! If you find a website that you would like to go back and visit and would like to bookmark it, when in Safari, simply go to the Bookmarks Menu option in the white Menu Bar at the top of the screen.


Choose Add Bookmark...


When you add your bookmark, you can either put it in the Bookmarks Menu like the one that appears below...


...Or if you think you’ll use your bookmark frequently, you can add it to the Bookmarks Toolbar in the browser, which is pictured below.


To add a bookmark to the Bookmarks Toolbar, when you add your bookmark after selecting Add Bookmark..., you will see a new dialog box pop up. It looks like the one pictured below. Before you click the Add button, choose where you want to put the bookmark from the pull-down menu.


If you want it out of the way and listed in the Bookmarks Menu, choose that. If you want it in the Bookmarks Toolbar, select that. You can even put it in to your Top Sites view.


Once you have lots of bookmarks, you can even organize them, by organizing your bookmarks. In Safari, doing this is as simple as clicking on the Bookmarks Button in the Bookmarks Toolbar on the far left side.


Once there, you can organize with folders, re-order bookmarks, and/or delete bookmarks.

Tags: Staff MacBook, Safari

Due to technical and legal (i.e., licensing) reasons and our current level of manpower, we cannot install software individually on individual computers. The software provided in the base image for the MacBooks provides the vast majority of software for nearly everything that they need to do, yet we realize that some teachers have very specialized needs in terms of specific software.

Beginning during Fall 2010, we will be able to plan projects with schools or central office departments to install needed software for which we have licensing on specific groups of computers. Even once begun, this process will not be quick and easy. We will need to:

• identify exactly which computers need the software
• determine whether or not we own the licensing or if it needs to be purchased
• test the software on test MacBooks to make sure it does not conflict with other software on the machines and works within our larger deployment
• schedule and prepare to install software on multiple laptops

Once we’ve done all of that, we’ll be able to actually install the software.

More information on this process will be made available during the Fall 2010. In the meantime, staff members can and should continue to use their specialized software on the existing computers on which they have been using it.

Tags: Staff MacBook, Software

Over the past few years, staff members have been strongly encouraged to consider the role that podcasting might play in their classroom. Audio podcasts can be made very quickly with little production time, allowing students to create fantastic, authentic products that are available to the whole world via the Internet and our media server. With tools like USB microphones, iPods with voice recording capabilities, and Garage Band, students can create a podcast in no time, and instead of spending lots of time working on the computer producing, they can move on to learning new concepts and content and skills.

Producing video rather than audio typically requires a much greater investment in time working on the computers. In spite of this, there are many times and reasons why teachers will want to use video in the classroom. From capturing video on new iPod Nanos to Flip cameras to more traditional Canon, Panasonic, and JVC video cameras, there are lots of different types of video cameras available for schools to purchase and use with our MacBooks.

One of the changes that has taken place in the video cameras in recent years has been the shift from recording on tape to recording on hard drives (not so good for a school environment) or flash memory (ideal for tapeless cameras). While hard drives and flash memory can offer lots of storage, there are more complications in terms of compatibility with different operating systems and software depending on how the video is being encoded. To be sure that a compatible camera is being purchased for use with iMovie 09 on the Staff MacBooks, visit Apple’s guide to compatible cameras.

Tags: Staff MacBook, Video, iMovie

The one topic that has been hit-or-miss in terms of coverage during opening trainings with Staff MacBooks has been iChat. iChat is a program installed on the Mac that allows users to conduct text and video chats as well as do screensharing. As part of our server work during the Summer of 2009, we set-up an iChat server in the District, and with that, we are launching iChat as a service to support our Professional Learning Community Goals as we distribute the Staff MacBooks.

iChat uses a chat service called Jabber, much like AOL’s Instant Messenger (AIM). iChat is completely housed on a District server. This allows all chats to be logged (for legal and safety reasons), just like District email. While iChat has a video chat component (as well as screensharing), this cannot be used inside the District before or during the school day due to bandwidth concerns. Video chat can be used when both (or all three!) individuals are outside of District 21.

To use iChat, simply launch iChat and enter your Active Directory password when prompted. iChat is already configured for each user when the laptop is deployed. If you want to add colleagues to your iChat “Jabber List,” you can do so by clicking the “+” button at the bottom of the iChat Jabber List window.


In the next dialog that pops up, enter the following information:

• Account Name = Active Directory Username + “@district21odr.d21.k12.il.us”
• First Name = Enter the First Name as you want it to appear in your Jabber List
• Last Name = Enter the Last Name as you want it to appear in your Jabber List

See the example below...


After you click “Add,” a message will be sent to your Buddy the next time she or he opens iChat asking if they want to accept your request. If they currently have iChat open, they will receive your request almost immediately.

When a request is pending (such as Debbie Willing or Sue Werneske in the image below), the user’s name will be grayed out until they accept (or deny) that request. Other users who appear grayed out are individuals (like Tracy Crowley in the image below) who are Buddies in your Jabber List but are not currently online.


Online Buddies appear in the top portion of your Jabber List with their current status. If they are marked with a “red dot” status, they can contact you, but you cannot contact them, such as Sofia Klein and zzzsxk in the image below.


To change your status, you can simply choose from the pull-down menu that appears beneath your name at the very top of the Jabber List window.



What are some uses of iChat?
iChat is super-useful when doing “individual deskwork” for getting help or quick questions answered. Rather than having another email queue in your Inbox, if your teammate or colleague is also online, you can throw the question or comment to them via iChat, and they can respond. Following the exchange, both individuals can get right back to work. In our iTech team, we find that this is a great way to stay in touch across buildings and to get quick questions answered “on the fly”. It has significantly enhanced our ability to provide the information needed to one another to increase the productivity of staff members around us and to enhance student learning.


Can I use iChat with non-District 21 employees?
You can set up other Jabber or AIM accounts in iChat, but we are not able to provide support for doing so. Additionally, for personal chats, there are lots of free, online text and video chat services that can be used. For conversing via video, audio, or text chat with and between our students and other students, authors, or experts in the field, we currently are using Skype. We have dedicated Windows computers to handle this as we also need to, again, control the amount of bandwidth. If you are interested in doing a project such as this, please contact the Tech Office well in advance of your project, and we will be really excited to support you and your students in this. In the future, we hope to people to, through additional testing, ensure that District 21 staff members can connect via their District 21 iChat account with users of Google Talk. As we solve our need for ever-increasing bandwidth, we also hope to possibly add Skype to Staff MacBooks when they are re-imaged during Summer 2011.


As you use iChat, we would love to hear your specific examples of how it is improving instruction through enhanced collaboration and teaming. Please email those stories to us at tech *AT* ccsd21.org!

Tags: Staff MacBook, iChat

AtomicLearning.com is a great resource for staff members to learn countless details for effectively using Office 2008. Featuring short, specific How-To videos, staff members can be well-versed in learning the features that they want and need to learn when they want and need to learn them. (Remember, AtomicLearning.com does require a District 21 username and password for students and staff to access it. If you do not know this, please contact your school’s iTech teacher or the Technology Office.

In addition to AtomicLearning.com, there is another great resource for learning more about Office 2008, the Mac Business Unit at Microsoft. The Mac Business Unit has put together a number of great videos with additional information about Office 2008 and the software contained within it. View these additional Microsoft Office 2008 Help and How-To Videos!

Tags: Staff MacBook, Office 2008

When home, the process to add a printer is very simple. If your printer uses a USB cable to connect to the computer, the first thing you want to do, is plug in your printer to one of the two USB ports on the left side of your MacBook. If your printer is wireless, you want to make sure that both the printer and the computer are on the same wireless network and that they both can “see” the network with no apparent problem. (To test this, be sure that an already existing computer can print to the printer and be sure that the computer can get on the Internet.)

Then open System Preferences, which is found in the menu underneath the Apple icon in the upper left corner of your screen on the left side of the Menu Bar.


Next, from among the buttons in System Preferences, choose Print and Fax.


Once this Print & Fax preference pane opens up, you will see the already configured printers for your school. Under that, you will see the + button. It is important to note, that although the lock is shut, you do not need to unlock it, nor use the computer’s administrator password to add these printers.


At this point, your printer should be recognized and pop up in a new window. Click on the printer you would like to add. Then, click on the Add button.


Now, you will see the computer “thinking” and determining if/what options should be installed. Many printer drivers come packaged with Snow Leopard (this Mac Operating System on your computer at the time we distributed the machines, which is also known as 10.6), so it is often unnecessary to add drivers. This is the step in which the Operating System is installing the options necessary for your printer to function with the computer and the applications installed on your computer.


Once this process is complete, you will notice that your printer has been added to the list of printers for the computer.

Now, you can go ahead and use this printer just like any of the school printers that appear on the list. Just remember, you must select the correct printer to which you want to print before printing!

Tags: Staff MacBook, Printing

As per the CCSD21 Staff Laptop Policy, you can house Movies, Music, and Pictures on your laptop, and this does include Movies, Music, and Pictures that have been purchased. Remember, that due to bandwidth and server space limitations, these items do not sync to the server, so they should be backed up separately, using DVDs or CDs or an external hard drive. It is important that Movie files are kept in the home directory’s Movies folder, and the same is true for Music and Photos respectively. These items should never be stored in the Documents or Desktop folders. If these items are purchased for school use, and the staff member is reimbursed by the District, these are property of the School District, and a copy should be made to left with the appropriate individuals--i.e., the LMC Specialist, the iTech teacher, etc.

Purchases can be made through Amazon and through iTunes. Purchases may also be made through other online or brick-mortar-retailers as long as no software needs to be installed to import the purchase. (For example, no software is needed to import the contents of a physical audio CD that has been purchased as this feature is built-in to iTunes. Accounts are needed for each of these vendors.

Tags: Staff MacBook, Music, Movies, Media

With over 600 white Apple MacBooks being distributed to certified staff in School District 21, staff members continue to ask what they can do to tell their laptop apart from others. First, remember that regardless which company’s laptop was chosen to be the District 21 laptop, they would all look the same. This is also true in other school districts as well as in the corporate world. Typically, organizations will deploy similar or identical laptops to all staff, and the same question/issue would be true in those cases.

First, when you are logged in, you will know your laptop is your laptop because you will see your Desktop and your Documents. Additionally, under the Apple in the upper left-hand corner, you will see your name at the bottom of that menu (pictured below).


Second, you should know your laptop’s number, which is located on the bottom of the laptop on the CCSD21 Inventory Tag. (This is a five-digit number, and this is also the name of your computer.) This is on the bottom of your laptop.


Finally, no matter what you do, please do not use any adhesives on your computer, power pack, or Mini-Display Port adaptor. Likewise, do not use a Sharpie or similar marker to mark the surface of these objects.

Tags: Staff MacBook

As we move all District 21 staff members over to Exchange 2010 from CommuniGate during the closing months of the 2009-2010 school year, many staff members are interested in being able to access their email, calendar, and contacts on their personal smartphones. With certain parameters, District 21 is going to allow staff members to gain access to ActiveSync and their Exchange data beginning during the Summer of 2010. (Unfortunately, the CCSD21 Technology Office will not be able to devote time to supporting this until July 2010.)

Initially, we will only be able to support the iPhone/iPod Touch, and users will need to be running iPhone OS 3.0 or newer. From there, as described in the policy form, we hope to add Android OS 2.1 or newer to our supported devices. Then, in the Fall, when Windows Phone is released, we intend to add that OS, as well.

Beginning July 12, 2010, staff members can begin to contact the Tech Office to make an appointment (approximately 15 minutes) to get their phone enabled in the iPhone Management Software. For details on the policy, read it now!

UPDATED-12 July 2010

Tags: Exchange, SmartPhones

How do I have students use the Staff MacBook as the classroom computer?

One of the key components of the Staff MacBook deployment was that the Staff MacBook would also serve as the primary classroom computer. This decision was made initially and later affirmed by District 21 teachers through the Tech Plan process in 2008 and again in 2009. Based on this, the use of the Staff MacBook as the primary classroom computer was part of what was presented to the Board.

Of course, we do not want students (or other staff members) to be able to access an individual’s email nor files that are not being shared collaboratively via a team wiki or email. So, how do multiple users share the same computer without being able to access an individual’s private files?

Both Windows and Mac computers allow for the creation of multiple user accounts on a single computer. The MacBooks deployed to staff take advantage of this. As a staff member, you log-in and log-out of your account on the computer. Assuming you do not share that password with anyone, only you can access that email and those files.

When you want students to use your computer, to share their documents from the server, to create a new document, or to use the Internet, you first need to log-out of the computer. A student should never be on a staff laptop while the staff member is logged in!

Option 1--Use Generic Student Account
Each staff laptop contains a generic Student account. The username for this account is Student. The password for this account is student. Students can log-in to this account. From there, they can use the Internet. They can access their home directories on the server, and use files already saved or save new files. From this account, if the student needs to access the server, the student should use the Go > Connect to Server option from the menu bar.


Then, you will need to enter the address of your school’s file server. Just replace “field” with the name of your school. Then, hit enter.


Now, the student will enter his/her username and password and can access existing files or save new files.

This option is ideal when a number of different students will be accessing the staff laptop in a relatively short amount of time.


Option 2--Students Log-In with AD Username
The other option is that students can simply log-in with their own username and password, just like they do in the Labs/LMC. This will require the computer to be connected to the network, which will be no problem once the wireless network is up and running in May 2010. When the student logs-in like this on the staff laptop computer, the student’s home directory will pull down from the server. This will take just a few minutes for most students. Then, the student will work on the computer, and the work will sync back to the server every 10 minutes. It is important that the student logs out at the end of the work time.

This option is ideal when a single student will be working extensively on the staff laptop.


There are pluses and minuses to each of these options. Choose whichever seems to make the most sense at the time for you, and don’t be afraid to choose different options in different situations.

Tags: Staff MacBook, Classroom Instruction, Students

Converting Appleworks Documents

Many staff members continue to have files that were created in Appleworks. The file format for Appleworks has the extension .cwk at the end of the title of the document/file. This is a file format that has not been supported since 2002. As a result, Appleworks is no longer included on any current computers in District 21--the Mac Minis, the Staff iMacs, the new iMacs in the Labs, or the Staff MacBooks. So, it is necessary for users to transfer their documents to file formats that will continue to work well in to the future. We recommend using the default formats for Microsoft Office.

While there is a single file format for Appleworks documents (.cwk), Appleworks included the following types of applications and files:

• Word processor
• Spreadsheet
• Drawing
• Database

Fortunately, the word processor and spreadsheet files can still be opened using either Microsoft Word or Apple’s Pages.

Converting a Single .cwk File
When you want to open one of these files, first you need to click the document so that it is highlighted in your Documents folder (or the folder within your Documents folder in which the file resides). For example, the file fractions.cwk has been highlighted in the picture below by clicking on it one time.


At this point, it is very helpful to know if this is a word processing or spreadsheet file. (How would you know this? You’d know it because you created it, and you’d remember it or know from context clues, like the folder it is in.)

Now, you will right-click on the file name. When you do, you will choose Open with from the contextual menu that pops up.


If the file is a spreadsheet, click on Numbers.app. If the file is a word processing document, click on Pages.app.

Once you have the file open in Numbers or Pages, you can re-save it as an Excel file (.xls) for spreadsheets or a Word file (.doc) for word processing documents. You can do this by choosing File>Export.


Then, you can open the new file in Word or Excel. Do a Save As, and you are ready to use your new file well in to the future. In many cases, some components of the formatting will be lost, and unfortunately, in the case of database or drawing documents, entirely new documents do need to be created.

A Potential Shortcut for ALL .cwk Files
If ALL of your old Appleworks files (.cwk files) are of the same type (i.e., all word processing documents), then, you can take the following shortcut.

Again, highlight the .cwk file. Once you highlight the file, either press Command + I at the same time or right-click on the file and choose Get Info from the contextual menu that pops up. The following dialogue box will appear.


The important part of this dialogue box is the section labeled “open with”. Here you will notice a pull-down menu. This pulldown menu gives you the option to choose an alternate application (usually Microsoft Word and/or Pages) to open the document. Then, click the “Change All...” button to make that the default application. The computer will now automatically open all files of that format with the chosen application in the future.

Tags: Appleworks, Staff MacBook

What can I do to prolong the life of my laptop battery?

The Staff MacBooks that are being distributed during Spring 2010 are rated for 7-8 hours of battery life. Often times, this will mean that the laptop can be used throughout an entire school day by teachers and students. Nevertheless, to ensure this, there are some settings that can be changed that can maximize battery life. Staff members are encouraged to set these settings in this way, and then change them only when necessary. Changing them back when done with the need for that setting.

Turn off Bluetooth radio
As we have stated during initial trainings, staff members should not bring wireless devices, such as a Bluetooth mouse, to school. There are just too many wireless devices that we want to minimize the amount of interference. We have left the Bluetooth radio in the computer open to use, though, so staff members can take advantage of it when they are outside the District or if it should be needed in the future for a specific accessory at school. When your Bluetooth setting is on, which it is by default, the computer is constantly using power to search for other Bluetooth devices that might be in range to connect to. This is an unnecessary use of power if you are not going to use those devices. So, to save power and extend battery life, just turn off the Bluetooth radio.

Turn off the Bluetooth radio, by clicking on the Bluetooth icon in the white Menu Bar at the top of the screen and choosing “Turn Bluetooth Off” from the menu.


Once the Bluetooth is off, the Bluetooth icon will be grayed out in the white Menu Bar at the top of the screen.


If you should need the Bluetooth at some point in the future, just go back to this menu and turn it back on.


Dim your screen
Your laptop comes with a bright and glossy monitor. It looks beautiful, but your computer’s monitor uses tons of the machine’s power. To conserve energy and prolong battery life, you can dim the screen. In most lighting conditions, particularly inside our school buildings, you can easily use your monitor at the lowest brightness setting. This will save lots of energy and can significantly prolong battery life.

To dim your screen, simply use the decrease brightness key on the top row of the keyboard.



Keep as few applications as possible running
On a Mac or PC, you can have multiple applications (also known as programs or software) running at the same time. For example, when doing “desk work,” we typically leave Entourage and iChat open no matter what else we are doing (i.e., using Word, Keynote, or Excel). While it can increase productivity to have multiple applications running at the same time, you should also only have applications open that you need open. Running applications unnecessarily requires your computer to work harder, running more processes in the background, and this uses more energy, decreasing battery life.

You can easily tell which applications are open by which ones include a white dot to the right of the application icon on the dock. (See the picture below, which shows that Microsoft Word is open.)


To close applications, be sure to quit the application when you are done with it. Do not simply click the red dot in the upper left corner of the application window.


Rather, quit applications by:

• - Holding down “Command” + “Q” on your keyboard as the Quit keyboard shortcut
• - Choosing Quit from the application’s main entry on the menu bar

-Holding down the mouse over the application’s icon on the Dock and selecting Quit from the contextual menu that will pop up after a moment


These tricks will help your battery last even longer when you are not plugged in!

Tags: Staff MacBook, Energy Settings, Battery, System Preferences

Do I need to contact my insurance company to let them know that I now have a District 21 laptop?

We would not discourage any staff member from contacting her or his insurance company. The language used in the Staff Laptop Policy is consistent with past practice in District 21 regarding laptop checkout. It is also consistent with the language used in numerous other area school districts. While we have only had a small amount of experience with lost or stolen laptops up until this point, we have seen personal homeowners/renters insurance used to reimburse the value of the laptop. Finally, in the event that a staff member does need to utilize her or his insurance to provide reimbursement for the laptop, the District will provide a proof of the model and value of the laptop assigned to the staff member.

Tags: Staff MacBook

In your Documents folder in your Home Directory, there is a folder called “MIcrosoft User Data”. This folder is auto-created by Microsoft Office and holds important user data related to the applications in Office 2008.



While typically your Documents folders is a place that you should put what you want, move items around, etc., the Microsoft User Data folder should never be touched if you want your Office applications to most consistently work!

Tags: Staff MacBook, Office 2008

What is syncing?
Syncing is the process that allows users to save files locally on their computer’s hard drive, while also syncing those same files to the server when the computer is inside District 21. The most recent version of the file is the one that is saved. This allows the items to continuously be backed up. If something happens to the user’s computer, they can sync their files to the new computer from the server.

Syncing versus Saving
Syncing does allow the user’s files to be saved locally on the computer as well as on District servers. Syncing goes a step further than saving by cross checking with the server to see what changes have occurred. Then, a sync finds the most recent file and is sure that is saved in both locations.

Sync Errors
A sync error occurs when the computer finds two versions of the same file, one older and one newer. However, it does not know which one should be saved. When this happens, you will see a dialogue box asking which file is the one you would like to be saved. Sync errors can be avoided by only being logged into one computer at a time and by using your laptop as much as possible.

Logging In and Out
Every time a user logs in or out, a sync is performed. Also, a background sync is happening every ten minutes (the user can tell a background sync is being performed when the two houses at the top of the screen are alternating black and grey).



The best thing to do to keep files syncing smoothly is to log out before entering or leaving the District network. For example, log out at the end of the school day before going home, and again right after entering the District in the morning. If you forget to log out before leaving the district, the computer will be looking for the District server once you open your computer at home, and it will not be able to find it. Then, it will save locally to your computer. You may notice some sync errors when you log out, so it is best to get in the habit of logging out at the end of the day--each and every day!

Tags: Staff MacBook, Portable Home Directory, Sync

Should we ever use the option “Sync Home Now” under the Portable Home Directory icon in the menu bar?



If you look in the upper-right-hand corner of the menu bar, and click on the Portable Home Directory icon, you will see an option labeled “Sync Home Now”.


There is really no reason to choose this option, because the computers are set to automatically sync every 10 minutes during your work session. However, underneath this same option, you can ease your mind and verify this fact because it will tell you the time of the last home sync.

Tags: Staff MacBook, Sync, Portable Home Directory

Do we have to check in the computers at the end of the year or can we keep them through the summer?

Since the initial Staff MacBooks are being distributed late in the 2009-2010 school year, you will keep them through the summer of 2010. However, in future years, we will most likely require the computers to be brought back for short windows of time (i.e., three weeks) during the summer in order to do updates and maintenance. Once that task is completed, teachers will be able to pick up the computers and continue to use them during the summer.

Tags: Staff MacBook

Downloading Pictures to iPhoto
As soon as you connect a camera to your computer, iPhoto will pop up. You will see the pictures in iPhoto that are on your camera. Next, you will be asked if you would like to Import All of the photos or only Import Selected photos. If you only want to import certain pictures, first highlight the pictures and then choose Import Selected. If you would like all of the pictures to be saved into iPhoto, choose Select All. Now your photos are saved in iPhoto and you may remove the connection to your device by clicking the eject icon next to where your camera is listed in the left column of iPhoto.



Saving and Moving Photos to iPhoto Pictures Folder
If you already have photos in your Documents or on your Desktop, you can--and should--move these photos to iPhoto by simply dragging the picture over the iPhoto icon in the dock (pictured below). Even if iPhoto is closed, it will start opening and automatically import the photos in to iPhoto.


All photos stored in photo are also housed in the Pictures folder in your home directory.

Tags: Staff MacBook, Photos, iPhoto, Pictures

Should CCSD21 staff use flashdrives?

If you are using your staff laptop as intended, there really should be no reason to use flashdrives. Remember, all of your data is portable and can move to and from school with you on your laptop. All files in your Documents folder are automatically synced (backed up) on your school’s file server. Therefore, the use of flashdrives is really not necessary, and using flashdrives poses security risks as they are easily lost. If you do find yourself needing to transfer or archive data (perhaps movies, music, or pictures), your best option is to burn these onto disks, such as CD or DVD. The computer is equipped with a CD/DVD burner, so this process is very simple. (See Apple’s support article for more information.)

Tags: Staff MacBook

Changing Default Font
In Entourage 2008, you can change your default font and font size, however, you cannot change the default color. The default color will always remain black.

To change the default font style, first open Entourage, and then, under Entourage in the menu bar at the top of the screen, choose Preferences.


Then, in Preferences, choose Fonts from the column on the left side.


On the right-hand side, you can choose how to set different parts of your message to different font sizes and styles by using the drop-down menus. Once you are done, hit OK.


Manually Changing Fonts for Individual Emails
You can change the color, size, and style of the font for individual emails manually. To do so, first open a new email in Entourage and enter in the usual information (recipient, subject, etc..) for composing an email. Then, select the new font color, size, and style you would like to use from the menus, just like you would in a word processing document.

Once you begin typing you will see how the new font looks. When you are done with the content of the message, hit Send. Your next email will go back to your default settings.


When choosing fonts, colors, and styles, please remember that your text communicates voice and tone in an email, so when choosing to use bold characters, all uppercase letters, and/or specific colors, you are communicating non-verbal cues via email. Choose carefully!

Tags: Staff MacBook, Entourage 2008, Exchange

Which printers can I use at school with my Staff MacBook?

Before distributing the computers to teachers, the District 21 Technology Office worked with each school’s iTech teacher to make an accurate list of printers throughout the school that teachers would need for printing on a regular basis. These printers were all added on a district-wide server. From there, we can quickly and easily add a printer to all computers in a school’s Staff MacBook group.

However, there may be situations that a classroom printer is not included in the list, most likely because it is not in a common area, and/or will not be used by many teachers. If you find that you need a printer that is not included in the list, you can add it yourself by following the directions labeled Adding a District Printer (to be published shortly and linked here!). These instructions will work anywhere within the District, so if you go to a different building within the District and would like to add the printer, you can, and it will stick in your list of preferred printers on your Staff MacBook.

Tags: Printing, Staff MacBook

If you are using Entourage 2008 from home, when you begin to enter an email address, Entourage 2008 will remember the email addresses of people you’ve recently emailed or who have recently emailed you as well as the users that will pop up from Active Directory. Of course, if you’d like, you could add anyone in as a contact (See Atomic Learning). Then it will be stored in Entourage 2008 and on your computer, and it will sync to your Exchange account. Remember, though, that once everyone is switched to Exchange/Entourage, everyone’s default email address will be firstname.lastname@ccsd21.org.

If/when you use Outlook Web App (OWA/Exchange Webmail) feature through your web browser, only the users that you’ve written to before will be stored.

Tags: Entourage 2008, Exchange

What is the Home Directory?
Each user has a home directory. It is represented by the house icon and the user’s username as pictured below. Until the deployment of MacBooks to staff, these home directories have really only existed on the school server. Now, with the MacBooks, they will exist on the laptop, and that home directory will sync to the server when the user is in the District.


Inside your home directory, you have a series of folders that are automatically created as part of the home directory. (These are pictured below.)


Everyone’s home directory should look just like this—with these same folders in the same order (alphabetical).

There should not be any other files or folders laying out at this level in the home directory. In many cases, staff and students do have files and folders sitting here. These should be moved, typically to the Documents folder. (The Desktop folder will also sync, but we recommend having as few files on your Desktop as possible.)

Until now, these home directories have only existed on the server. For staff members who are assigned an individual computer for their use, such as a Staff MacBook, this home directory will automatically sync from the server to your computer when the Technology Office team sets up your computer. Thus, it is critical that all of your files are correctly organized in this folder prior to your school’s MacBook Set-Up Day.

So, get your Home Directory in order ASAP!!!

Tags: Home Directory, Staff MacBook, Server

Beginning in March 2010 and continuing through May 2010, new Apple MacBooks will be distributed to all non-administrative, certified staff members. During this same period, all District 21 staff members will be moved from the CommuniGate email server to Microsoft’s Exchange 2010 server.

Certified staff members will utilize Entourage 2008 with Exchange Web Services as their primary application for accessing their Exchange 2010 email, calendar, contacts, tasks, and notes. Entourage 2008 is installed on individual Staff MacBooks. Initial training with Entourage 2008 will take place when staff members receive their laptops. From there, staff members will be able to access the wealth of resources available on AtomicLearning.com to learn more about Entourage 2008.

Non-Certified staff members, such as assistants and custodians among others, will access their Exchange 2010 accounts through the web browser using Outlook Web Access. These individuals receive their initial training from District Technology Office staff or building iTech teachers.

(Central Office staff in the Business Office, Human Resources, and Operations will use Outlook 2007 as the client through which they will use to access their Exchange 2010 email, calendar, contacts, tasks, and notes. Training for these individuals, where necessary will come from District Technology Office staff and via AtomicLearning.com.)

Some important information about the move from CommuniGate to Exchange:

• Email from CommuniGate will not be transferred to Exchange. When you are first moved in to Exchange, you will have an empty Exchange 2010 Inbox.
• You will have continual access to your CommuniGate Inbox until June 2010. No new emails will come in to that Inbox, but it can serve as an archive during the transition to Exchange. On a daily basis, it will only be necessary to check this email daily.
• If you would like to do so, you can forward your CommuniGate messages to yourself, but this is not recommended. You will not be able to reply to the original sender of those messages. Rather, it is recommended that if you would like to archive certain emails, you should do so by saving them as PDFs and filing them as documents in your home directory. You can do this by using the Print dialog box on a Mac and choosing Save as PDF from the lower left corner of that Print dialog box.

• In Late June 2010, the CommuniGate email server will be permanently disconnected and will no longer be accessible.

Finally, the day before staff members receive their MacBooks, users will cease to receive new emails in their CommuniGate Inboxes. They can log in to CommuniGate and send emails during the interim period, but no new emails will arrive there. Users will be able to view new emails once they have logged in to their Exchange client, Entourage 2008 or Outlook Web Access (OWA).

Tags: CommuniGate, Exchange, Staff MacBook

This summer, new servers have been installed throughout School District 21 schools. With these new servers, we are also instituting a very exciting, completely new infrastructure. Through this infrastructure, we will more tightly be able to control the user experience in different ways for different users--so teachers have the tools that they need and so that elementary school and middle school students have the tools that they need. Additionally, we will be able to provide far better support as users’ work is centralized on the servers.

Coming this year will be even more changes. With the addition of staff laptops and the move of all staff members over to the Exchange Email, Calendar, Contacts, and Tasks Productivity Server, we are instituting a new consistent username standard that will minimize the number of conflicts between District 21 students and staff members who have similar (or the same) names. This new firstname.lastname format is already in effect for current Exchange users and is now in effect for all individuals to access their server folders.

During the two weeks prior to the start of the year, iTech teachers are available in schools to help users access their new server home directories and to ensure that users are best prepared to use those home directories effectively. (For teachers, once laptops are deployed later this year, your data will sync to and from the server when you are in the district, providing a safe back-up! Thus, using your home directory effectively now is critical.)

Please note: Assuming you were not already in Active Directory* at the end of the 2008-2009 school year**, the first time you login to the new server, you will need to do so from a computer running OS 10.4 or 10.5 that has already been connected to Active Directory. These computers include the Mac Minis in the computer labs and the aluminum 20” iMacs for staff use.

The Technology Office has prepared some documents to help individuals log-in to their new server folders.

• Directions for logging in to the server from OS 10.4/10.5 computers (including initial login) and OS 10.3 computers
• Logging in to OS 10.4/10.5 computers (Mac Minis/Teacher iMacs) video
• Logging in to OS 10.3 (Classroom) computers video

*Active Directory is an underlying system for managing student and staff users.

**With only a few exceptions, like Business Office staff members, the individuals who were already in Active Directory at the end of the 08-09 school year, were the same individuals who were using Exchange. These individuals included: Administrators, Tech Office staff and iTech teachers, Support Services staff, Psychologists, Social Workers, and Speech Pathologists.

When working with lists on a computer, including in PowerSchool and the PowerTeacher Web Gradebook, you may want to select multiple items from that list at one time. If so, there are two ways to do so that will typically work.


Selecting multiple items in a row

Click on the first item that you want to select, such as Algebra below.


Then, go down to the last item in the column that you want selected. Hold down the shift key, and while holding down the shift key, click.


Voila! All of the items that you want selected are now highlighted.


Selecting multiple items that do not appear consecutively

This time, click first on any item that you want to select. (It does not matter where it falls in the order of the list.)


Now, if you are using a Mac, hold down the command (apple) key to the left or right of the spacebar. If you are using a Windows or Linux computer, hold down the control key.

While holding down either the command (Mac) or control (Windows/Linux) key, click on the other items you want selected.


Voila! Now, just the items you want selected are selected.

This little trick works in lots of different software and on lots of websites, so take advantage of it.

Throughout history, scam artists have used the culture and technology of the day to do their work, and the 21st Century is no different. Today, email is often used, and much of the world’s problem with viruses and identity theft is the result, not of computer or technological issues, but of us actually clicking on something that we should not.

Yesterday, at least two District 21 staff members received a phishing scam email that was more well done than is typical. In spite of this being more professional than most spam, it is still pretty easy to detect that there is nothing to worry about and that the email should simply be deleted. The email is pictured here with some tips for identifying a phishing email below.




Ways to detect a phishing scam…
• What is the actual email address, rather than the name, in the “From:” line?
In this example, which is fairly rare, it is tickets@nwa.com. Normally, it is some form of “mumbo-
jumbo” that changes daily. If it is not from the organization’s actual URL (after the @), it is not real.

• Is there a company logo, a privacy statement, or anything of the kind?
If not, it’s probably not real.

• Watch for inappropriate grammar or use of English
In this example, the “t” in “ticket” is not capitalized. In the last full sentence the word “printer” is written
as “printed”.

• Is it written like a real e-mail given the organization and purpose?
Airline ticket reservation emails do not begin with “Hello!”.

• Finally, if you are really unsure about something, call and talk with an actual
representative of the organization.

Over the past year, on multiple occasions, we have offered a workshop helping CCSD21 staff members develop more effective presentations than those traditionally that have been developed, particularly professional presentations given to other adults, such as for a workshop or a Curriculum Night. Many of the important tips, which are also captured in this Modern Pen post, are also well defined by these two older blog posts that were identified on the web by Longfellow Learning Coach Catherine Joy and Tarkington Learning Coach Tracy Crowley. For more information on a good presentation that is not overwhelmed by the wrong colors on your slides or the use of too many different words visit:

- Learning from Bill Gates & Steve Jobs

- Gates, Jobs, & the Zen aesthetic

These directions are Mac-specific. Some differences for the PC are noted in italics.

Setting up Thin Client in Full Screen mode:

1. Full screen > You have to quit out of Remote Desktop Connection for these actions to take full effect, so go ahead and quit now.
2. Re-launch Remote Desktop Connection but do not connect to the remote computer yet.
3. In the menu bar at the upper left of the screen, go to RDC > Preferences. On the PC, click the Options button in the RDC Connect dialog box.
4. In Preferences, go to Displays. In Options, go to Displays.
5. Select Full Screen in the pull-down menu in that dialog.
6. Next time, you connect, you will go into full screen.

Notes:

• While in Full Screen, you CAN still see your Mac’s dock and menu bar by dragging your mouse all the way to that part of the screen and holding it there. The dock/menu bar will pop out after a moment’s pause.
• Also, to toggle between Thin Client and some software on your Mac, like Firefox or Safari, go ahead and use the key command, “command” + “H”. This hides most Mac programs. They are still open, but they are running in the background. Go back to it by clicking on the icon, the RDC icon in this case, on the dock. In full screen on the PC, you will see a little bar at the top of the screen that features a minimize (_), maximize, and close (X) buttons. To go back to other elements (applications, documents, etc.) of your local PC, just minimize RDC from that bar at the top of the screen.

So, you have sat down at one of the shiny new iMacs to log on to use PowerTeacher and the PowerTeacher Web Gradebook. You type in your user name and password, click submit, and--Boom! A new page pops up in your Browser that says, “Bad Request.”

While we are, and have been for months, investigating this issue with Apple, Mozilla, and PowerSchool, here is the quick fix thanks to Kevin at Poe:



Hit the refresh button, and you will be sent straight to your PowerSchool start page!

If you are a District 21 employee who is on the Microsoft Exchange e-mail, calendaring, contacts server, you also can, and should be using Thin Client, via Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Connection. Printing in Thin Client has stymied many in the past, but District 21 has begun using Thin Client technology at just the right time because printing is easy.

First, whatever machine you are using needs to be set-up to print to a printer. So, if you are on a Mac at school or a PC or a Mac at home, it needs to be set to print to a printer from its regular programs, such as a word processor or the web browser. Your computer, particularly at school, may actually be set-up to print to more than one printer. For example, as you can see below, my MacBook is set to print to printers all over School District 21. (If you go to File > Print, then, click on the pull-down menu next to where it says Printer, it will show you all of the printers to which the computer is set to print.) **To have your computer set to print to additional printers, in the case of a laptop, contact your school’s iTech teacher. For District staff, including District-wide Support Services staff, you will need to call in to the Help Desk.



Again, any computers in this list can be used to print from within Thin Client.

The next step is quite easy. In Remote Desktop Connection, you need to open the Preferences (RDC > Preferences). On a PC, you will click on the “Options” button in the main RDC dialog box.



In the preferences box, click on the printers tab. This tab is very simple. Check the box so that the remote machine can see the printers connected to your “local” machine, or the machine on which you are actually typing. (In some versions of Remote Desktop Connection as well as in some Linux remote desktop programs, there will simply be a checkbox to connect to “local” printers in the main dialog box.)



Then, when you go to print in Thin Client (File > Print), you can choose from among the same printers that are available on your local machine as you can see in the picture below.



If you look carefully at the list of printers, you will notice that they are the same printers as were available when printing “normally” on my Mac.

Did you get a smartphone this summer? If so, you may be wondering how you can access your District 21 email account on your smartphone. Unfortunately, due to the configuration of our firewall and the CommuniGate email server, you can only access it outside of School District 21 using webmail via a web browser, such as Firefox, Safari, Flock, or Internet Explorer. This means that you have to see if your smartphone’s web browser (IE mobile on a Windows Mobile phone or Safari on an iPhone) will support CommuniGate.

At the same time, please be aware that over the next year and a half, we will be migrating all of District 21’s employees to our new e-mail, calendar, and contacts server--which uses Microsoft’s Exchange server solution. As a matter of fact, by the end of the first week of the 2008-2009 school year, there will already be more than 6 dozen District 21 employees who have begun using the Exchange server. The bulk of the staff members in School District 21 will be moved to the Exchange server during the first half of the 2008-2009 school year. At that time, if your phone supports Exchange, you will be able to access your e-mail via your own smartphone, though we will not be able to actively support you personal smartphones.

Tags: SmartPhones

A great question came in yesterday from a District 21 teacher:

"I recall hearing somewhere that Appleworks will no longer be available and that staff should be moving their server files to a .doc format.

I did a search in The Modern Pen and did not find an entry on this topic. So, I have two questions for you.

Am I preparing for the future or wasting my time? If Appleworks is indeed going away, do you have an expected date that files need to be converted by?"

Way back at the beginning of the year, this was discussed during the Road Show, but only at certain venues. So, here's the full scoop. Appleworks was last updated with version 6.2.9. This version was released on January 14, 2004. Officially, the product reached its end-of-life status on August 15, 2007. What does all this mean? Well, Appleworks still works--even on OS 10.5 Leopard, but Appleworks will no longer be installed on new Apple computers in District 21 or anywhere.

So, at some point, Appleworks documents may not open on newer software.

Converting to .doc format documents, the basic format of Microsoft Word until recently will allow you to open your documents for a long time in lots of different software, including Microsoft Word on a Mac or on Windows, Apple's Pages on a Mac, OpenOffice on Linux, Mac, or Windows, or NeoOffice on a Mac, among others.

There are lots of ways to convert your documents, and in most cases, you will need to do a little fine-tuning of the new Word document. The easiest and most controlled way is often to have Word and Appleworks both open. Go in to your Appleworks document, and choose the Select All command from underneath the Edit menu bar. Then, copy. Now, go to Word, and go to Edit > Paste. Then, do your fine-tuning.

Alternatively, you could download and try the Magic Word Converter from local guy, Nick, an IT colleague in another area school district. This cool little application will convert word processing and spreadsheet documents from Appleworks to Word. It will not convert drawing documents. For those, you have a choice--re-do them or risk hanging on to them in the hopes that there will always be a machine/software that can open the documents.

So, this summer, you might consider beginning to transfer your important, old documents from Appleworks to Word. Then, as you start planning for and working on next school year, please do not use Appleworks to create new documents!

Did you know that you can "right click" on a Mac just like on a PC? When you do, a specific sub-menu will pop (which varies by software) like that pictured below.

So, how do you "right click" on a Mac? If you have a USB, two-button mouse, that can be plugged in to the Mac and used as we do throughout our schools. Then, just click on the right button and the menu will pop up. If you have a one-button mouse or are using a Mac laptop, you can hold down the control key (ctrl) and then click the mouse button. This combination also functions just like a right-click. Try it, and see what hidden menu options you discover in your most frequently used software programs.

(This entry was adapted from an e-mail sent to all District 21 staff members on August 20, 2007.)

Recently, we have once again faced an increase in the number of inquiries by District 21 staff members about the receipt of unwanted e-mails in their District 21 Inbox.

What is Spam?
While we ought not yet be convinced that Wikipedia, the Internet's communal and editable encyclopedia is the best source of students to gather information, it is the perfect place to find general technology definitions of something like spam. In a nutshell, spam is the e-mail version of junk mail. Of course, the Internet is far-less regulated than what comes through the United States Postal Service as well as being far more anonymous and far more international in scope. This combination makes the Internet fertile ground for unseemly activities. For more information on spam, see the Wikipedia encyclopedia entry or the Wikipedia dictionary entry.

The Spam Filter
In District 21, we use a very powerful and popular spam filter. This computer appliance sits in "front" of our e-mail server in relation to the Internet, and it intercepts messages before they arrive on the e-mail server. Thus, the software on the e-mail server does not make any difference--for better or worse.

The Spam Filter does work
Below you can see charts showing the activity on the spam filter. The first two graphs show the e-mails that hit the spam filter during a 24-hour period. (The first one is from August 19, 2007, and the second one is from April 21, 2008.) The second set of graphs covers a four-week period (July-August 2007 and March-April 2008). It is very similar to graphs from all seven days of the week. Notice that the filter blocks nearly all of the e-mails! (All of the red e-mails are blocked!) Only a small percentage of e-mails come through, and of course, many of these are the spam that has made it to your Inbox. Frustrating? Yes--very!

How does the Spam Filter work?
We must set the filter on a scale of more to less restrictive. This is a balancing act. If we set the filter to be too restrictive, then the e-mails we want to receive will not come through. If we set it to be too permissive, we will receive all kinds of unwanted spam. As you can see from the charts on the attachment, the filter DOES block TONS of e-mail. Nevertheless, in order to receive e-mails from parents and colleagues, we need to live with the fact that some spam e-mails will come through.

What can you do?
First, do not sign up for unnecessary services with websites using your District 21 e-mail address. The more that your e-mail address is "out there" in cyberspace, the easier it is for it to be picked up by spam services. Second, when you receive e-mails from people you do not know, delete them--particularly if there is an attachment or if the subject tells you that you've just won some money! Finally, never open an attachment unless you are expecting it. (Those with student interns this year--Encourage them NOT to send their resumé directly to a principal as an attachment. Principals won't/shouldn't open them. Hey, Principals! Don't open attachments from prospective candidates!)

Some people think that documents are not compatible on a Mac or a Windows computer if they were created on a machine that uses the other platform. Nearly every feature in a basic Microsoft Office document (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) has been compatible since Office 1997 for Windows and Office 1998 for Mac came out--a decade ago! Sometimes, though, these documents can use a little extra help being read. One thing that always helps a document open correctly on any system is the extension, the period and letters that follow the document's title that you have created. Different types of files each have their own unique extension. Some familiar extensions include: .pdf and .jpg.

Each of the three major Microsoft Office programs has its own unique extension, too. These have always been:
- .doc - Word
- .ppt - PowerPoint
- .xls - Excel

In Microsoft Office 2007 (Windows) and Office 2008 (Mac), the default file format has changed to what is known as XML. The new extensions are:
- .docx - Word
- .pptx - PowerPoint
- .xlsx - Excel
The addition of the "x" DOES make a big difference. Files with this extension will not open on Office 2003 or Office 2004 machines, the standard version of Office used in District 21.

Of course, when you are creating and saving your work, you can use the "Save As" command, and choose to save the file as a ".doc" file rather than a ".docx" file. (See the picture below for an example of where you would make this choice in the pull-down menu in the Save As dialog box.)

There are converters for both Windows and Mac computers that allow one to convert a file from the XML format (i.e., .docx) to a standard Office file (.doc). Of course, using such files can be simplified if the original creator of the files simply saves them using the standard format. So, if you are working at home on a computer with a newer version of Office or if your students are doing so, learn and teach everyone to use the standard file to make collaborating and sharing such files easier!

For more information on using word processing, spreadsheet, or presentation software, visit AtomicLearning.com or call the Help Desk (847.934.8100--press 2).

Are you one of the many teachers in District 21 who speak English and Spanish (and possibly other languages, too)? If so, you likely communicate with students and their families in both English and Spanish. Of course, when writing in Spanish, there are additional characters that do not exist in English, and while it is no problem to include accents or punctuation marks when using handwriting, it is necessary to know how to create these same symbols in the computer--especially since leaving an accent out can dramatically change the meaning of a word or sentence and negatively impact communication with parents and/or students.

On both Apple's Mac OS X and Windows, there are multiple ways to enter these characters, the fastest and easiest (once you memorize it), is to know the key command shortcuts. A shortcut is when you typically use multiple keys at more-or-less the same time to quickly accomplish a task that otherwise must be down by using the menu bar at the top of the screen.

Click here for the PDF of these key commands, print it, and keep it nearby when you are typing in Español.

Does your e-mail Inbox overwhelm you? If so, Microsoft has some tips for helping you manage your Inbox. While these are great tips, and they do really work, they also require tools that are not available currently to all District 21 staff members at this point through the CommuniGate webmail interface we use.

We have begun migrating individuals to our new e-mail/calendar/contacts server, which is called Exchange. Exchange is fully functional with Microsoft's Outlook e-mail/calendar/contacts/tasks software as well as "mostly" functional, and fully compatible, with Microsoft's Entourage 2008 for Mac, part of Microsoft's Office for Mac suite. As we move to Exchange, District 21 staff members will also be able to utilize "Thin Client," which provides access to another computer through your computer. The picture below was taken on a Mac in District 21, and it shows a full screen view of Outlook in Windows. With software such as this, everyone can use the type of tools described in the article above!

As has been clear in recent weeks with the Consumer Electronics Show and Macworld, mobility in the form of laptop computers, is king in the computer world today. With more District 21 laptops employed now than ever before, and with more and more District 21 employees owning their own laptops, they can take their work "on the go"--to the public library, a friend's house, or the local coffee shop. While using wireless connections can be really exciting and very easy-to-use, it can also include increased risks to both your computer and the data with which you are working. To keep yourself safe and secure, check out these tips from Microsoft.

Did you ever wonder how to type with appropriate punctuation in Spanish, such as accent marks and punctuation that doesn't exist in English? If so, you need the secrets afforded by the option key in Apple's OS X operating system. (The same tricks can be done in Windows, but there are different ways to do them.)

The option key can be found along the same row as the spacebar. On a full size desktop keyboard, there are two of them, one on each side of the spacebar. (The command key is between the keyboard and the option key on each side.) On an Apple laptop keyboard, it can be found just two keys to the left of the spacebar. A picture of the keyboard can be seen below, and it shows you what all of the keys will produce when holding down the option key.

While I know that this has been passed around by our iTech teachers for some time, it was recently re-distributed at Cooper Middle School. Below, you can see the handy list of keys and what each key produces when used in conjunction with the option key. You can also print the PDF version here.

So, use the option key, and type what you want to type!

(Yep. That's how the computer people actually spell it.)

The listserv is an e-mail tool that can be used for communication to a large group of recipients. Listservs are designed as e-mail sharing tools. They essentially do the same thing that one could do manually, by hand-entering lots of e-mail addresses, but putting everyone on to the listserv makes this process much easier for the user.

In their most pure form, anyone who is on the listserv CAN post to the listserv, and everyone who is on the listserv receives e-mails posted to the listserv. Often times, listservs are configured to automatically "reply to all", and while this can lead to an embarrassing accidental response to everyone, the idea is that it makes it very, very easy to share communication with everyone on the list.

Listservs can also be structured to function more like "subscription services," allowing the listserv's owner to send e-mails out to an entire group. Again, this could be done with the owner hand-entering each e-mail address. Now, though, the e-mail recipients can sign themselves up--simply by e-mailing the listserv!

Who would have a listserv in a school district? Well, over the last few years, lots of listservs have been developed in District 21 (see picture below). There are staff listservs, parent listservs, and even one student listserv!

In the case of the staff listservs, these typically function as "electronic meeting places" in which anyone on the list can post to the list. For example, on the e-mail below from Erin Schlenger to the Whitman listserv, she provides other staff members at Whitman with some web-based instructional resources that they may find useful. Rather than getting a paper memo in their mailboxes, paper and ink were saved, and more importantly, the end user (recipient of the e-mail) can just click on the links and go directly to the websites listed.

Our parent listservs have been constructed as subscription services, providing school staff members another way to communicate with parents. We have listservs in action as E-mail Subscription Services for Parents from a Kindergarten classroom to middle school teams to entire schools.

Teams can use these to remind and update parents on general information, such as the e-mail below from Team Unity. At Riley, Cooper, and London, teams (and a Kindergarten teacher) are using these tools on a regular basis.

Likewise, Riley's Learning Coach has established an electronic Parent Subscription Service for GaTE parents at Riley. Again, the use of a link in the communication allows parents to go directly to the website of the National Association for Gifted Children with just a click.

At the school level, electronic subscription services for parents are great for sending out reminders about upcoming school events as well as for getting the word out quickly about last minute changes, such as a meeting or event cancellation due to weather. In those cases, while not everyone will receive the e-mail, those that do may communicate its contents to others via word-of-mouth, thereby helping to spread the word.

Things to consider...

First, there are significant ethical issues in that not all of our families have Internet access available to them at home. In fact, many do not have such access. Thus, other than those last minute cancellations, anything that goes home in electronic format should also go out in print to ensure that all parents have access to critical information.

Second, it is important to understand that only one person can "own" the listserv, and depending on the type of listserv created, that individual may be the only one who can post to the listserv. If teammates provide useful information to share electronically, this is not a significant burden for that person, but if this person has to type every message from scratch, this may prove unwieldy.

Third, once you start to communicate to parents using such a tool, you should do so with some regularity. It does not need to be weekly or on a perfect schedule, but a pattern should present itself to end-users in order to help them know what to expect and when.

Fourth, if you begin a parent listserv, you will need to plan a "launch" and market it to parents. Encourage them to e-mail one another to sign up. It is as simple as them sending an e-mail to: whateverthelistservisnamed-on@ccsd21.org. You will not need to hand-enter all of their e-mail addresses. You will need to encourage them to sign-up, though.

Fifth, if you initiate or are part of a staff listserv, there should be clear rules communicated to everyone on the listserv about how it is to be used, and these rules do need to comply with our Acceptable Use Policy.

Finally, it is cheap and easy! Using our existing e-mail system, it only takes a few minutes to set-up and use a listserv. If you have a need that a listserv may help resolve, contact Jason Klein.

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.

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!

Recently, there have been a number of requests from people wanting to know how they can archive sent mail using the District’s CommuniGate Pro webmail system. If you want to do this, please remember that you are still limited to only 50 MB of space in all of your mailboxes (and that includes attachments). So, from time-to-time, you will still need to clean out your mailboxes.

Open the PDF instructions!

Since last night, we have been working to move the District 21 website over to a new server at the Net56 Data Center in Palatine. We will now begin the process of migrating our buildings to this server, too. This new web server will have a number of benefits, including:

Improved Back-Up Capabilities, which will increase uptime in the event of a power outage, hardware issues, or other calamity
24/7 FTP Access for Webmasters, which will likely increase the frequency of website updates--particularly for components such as this blog.

Increased Bandwidth to the Internet, which will enhance our ability to share audio and video with staff and community members beyond our school network and outside the school day.

Support for Future Website Improvements, which will allow us to enhance our websites with future components that require infrastructure and support that we are unable to provide on our own as a school district

While we will not be engaging in any type of overhaul of the District 21 website during the 2007-2008 school year, we will begin to update certain pages more frequently as well as begin the process of eliminating outdated pages. Likewise, this blog will be regularly updated with tips for District 21 staff members, who should check back frequently. As a matter of fact, there will likely be a number of posts in the coming week as items are added that have been held in anticipation of this server move!

AtomicLearning.com is a great resource for students and staff members in District 21. It is a subscription service that is available at low cost to the District, and 24 hours-a-day and 7-days-per-week, their topical videos on demand showing how to do a wide variety of tips and tricks! The videos actually show the computer screen, and as one watches, the mouse moves around while the narrator describes exactly what is happening and why!