Digital Citizenship Week

Digital Citizenship Week - Day 3 and 4

Digital Citizenship is not something that can be tackled by schools on their own. It needs to be a partnership with families and the community. Just like the schools, parents don't always know where to start in regards to talking about digital citizenship with their kids. In order to open the door to some great conversation, here are some resources that we can send home in order to create the bridge between what we are teaching in the classroom, and what is expected at home.

Common Sense Media Family Activity Worksheets

These worksheets by the amazing Common Sense Media are developed to go along with the K-12 scope and sequence curriculum. There is a worksheet for each lesson. Each worksheet contain the following sections:

Did you know?
What do you think?
Family Activity
Tech it Up
Common Sense Says...

This is a quick and easy way to continue the conversations started at school and bring the parents into the equation.

DigitalED

Another great resource for families is the Portage Public Schools DigitalED site. DigitalED is a great resource for parents and community members to learn some tips about technology and our young people. It contains past presentations done by DigitalED, hot trending apps that you may find on your child's device, device use contracts, family tip sheets, videos, and much more! If you are a teacher or administrator in PPS and would like us to come in and present to your families, we would love to get something on the calendar. These are important conversations to have and we are happy to be a part of the dialogue.

Comments

Google Docs: Fonts for Early Elementary

Sample of search results from fonts.google.com A couple weeks ago, I was sitting in a training with a bunch of my favorite lower elementary teacher friends, and several of them were lamenting the fact that it is hard to find "good" Google fonts for the little people they work with on a daily basis. Specifically, it is a challenge to find the single story lower case a and the open 4 . This conversation, of course, sent me out on a mission to remedy this for these fantastic people. So, the next day I put on my headphones, turned up the tunes on Spotify, and dived into the website fonts.google.com . This website lists all the Google fonts available. It also allows you to type in your own letters and numbers and see them in all the various fonts. For my purpose, I typed in "abckgy 1234 This is the font." From here I could see all 877 fonts, and look specifically for the a and the 4. It was quite an adventure, and I came across a lot of really awesome font

It's time to change your password!

There are several times a year when it is important to change your password. Your password will expire every 90 days. When your windows computer informs you that your password will be expiring soon, CHANGE IT THEN! It is also always a good idea to change your password before going on break so that you do not get locked out of your computer, email or gradebook. Here is how you change your password from the school windows computers. On your Windows desktop/TEC computer , press the Alt, Ctrl and Delete buttons at the same time. Click on "Change a Password" on the menu below: Enter your username, if needed, and follow the directions on screen. If you are off site or working solely on a Chromebook , you can use the VDI (Virtual Desktop) to change your password. Simply go to vdi.portageps.org. Click "VMware Horizon HTML Access." Click "Accept." Login with your portage username (leave off the @portageps.org) and password. Click "Login." Cli

Skyward Tech Tip: Unlocking a Closed Grade Period

Have you recently attempted to change a grade from last quarter only to be met with the statement “ This Grade Period is closed for Grade Entry “? This occurs because the date for the end of a marking period or quarter has past and that grading period has been locked in the Skyward Gradebook. Below you will find the process for changing term grades, assignment scores, and other information from past grading periods. Google Docs Version Go to your gradebook Let’s start with the gradebook for the class where you need to make a change. In this example, we will be adding a score to a missing assignment and removing the incomplete grade from the quarter grade. (Note: The process to open or unlock the gradebook is the same regardless the change you need to make.) This change will be made for marking period three, Q3. In that marking period column, click on the “Options” dropdown button. From the Options dropdown, choose “Grade Posting Status for Term QX”, whe

PPS Instructional Technology

Search This Blog