Terry's Tech Tips

Fall sports are in full swing, and the Activities Fair will be held soon!  Before the month is out, we will submit many of our School Sponsored International Trips for School Committee review. If you are a coach, club advisor, or trip organizer, connecting with students and parents can be time-consuming.  There are several ways to set up systems to communicate with these students and/or parents.  One option is to create a snapshot in Aspen. Why create a snapshot in Aspen for clubs, sports teams, or trips? As a teacher, you can easily communicate with students in your classes.  Communicating with students in clubs, sports teams, or trips means you need to access them under the Staff View>Student top tab with all 1300 students.  If you create a snapshot in Aspen, you can specify that snapshot as a filter and with one-click access only the students you want to communicate with.  When contacting students and/or parents, any email changes made in Aspen are automatically reflected. 

The beginning of the year is a critical time for setting up your GradeBook.  You want to be sure your choices provide the results you expect.  Once you have a lot of grades entered, you don't want to change your average mode calculation. The four Aspen Grade Average Mode options are listed below to provide you a sanity check: Total Points   The easiest to understand, select Total points if you calculate averages by dividing the total points a student earns by the total number of points possible.   You can create categories, but their value is determined by the points available from assignments in the categories. For example, a student receives a 100, 90, and 80 for assignments where each is worth 100 points. (Assign1 + Assign2 + Assign3)/Possible Points = Score (100 + 90 + 80)/300 = 90% Category Total Points Select Category total points if you want to use total points for individual assignments within a category. The weight of the category determines the fina

Google introduced a lot of updates over the summer.  As a Google for Education School, we work in the Google Suite all the time.  We create for our classroom or assess work students create. Below are some highlighted changes for Google Docs and Slides. Google Slides Present Mode: If you use Google Slides in your classroom, Google has added these capabilities while in Present mode : Resize speaker notes and slide thumbnails in the presenter view  Navigate to a specific slide with a keyboard shortcut   -   For example, 7 followed by Enter sends you to slide 7. Control video playback with keyboard shortcuts: View all available Present mode keyboard shortcuts by clicking the new “tips” button in the presentation control bar.  Read the full Google post here. New Customization Features for Google Docs Headers and Footers: Previously, Headers and Footers in Google Docs had to remain the same on every page except for page 1.  Google introduced the abilit