Volume 3, Issue 8
Use My Bookmarks
Recently I had a “duh” moment
when a teacher asked me if I had
“all those neat websites” on my
Portaportal. Well, duh – no, I
didn’t. But I more or less do now.
I have gone through emails I have
sent (and received) and previous
newsletters. I am not finished
(never will be since bookmarks
are quite dynamic), however most
bookmarks are there.
For those of you not familiar
with Portaportal (there is an icon
on computers logged into Novell).
Portaportal is a way to bookmark
pages and have access to your fa-
vorites from any computer with
Internet access. Teachers can
bookmark pages they use when
students are in the lab – no typing
except for the teacher’s guest lo-
gin. The guest login allows users
access to your bookmarks without
being able to make changes.
Teachers can also mark book-
marks as private so guests cannot
see them.
With my Portaportal you can
find pages I have sent email about
or included in newsletters without
trying to find them in Thunderbird
or a newsletter. Try
www.portaportal.com, my guest
login is mrollosson.
Inspiration Resources
I recently found templates for
Inspiration that I thought many of
you could use. (Don’t forget, we
have plenty of licenses for Inspira-
tion for middle school teachers.)
http://teachers.henrico.k12.va.u Resources by Subject and
s/fairfield/marshall_g/INSPIRATI
ON/Inspiration.htm - These are
Inspiration templates from Fair-
field Middle School in Henrico
County.
http://www.rockingham.k12.va.
us/resources/Inspiration.htm - In-
spiration templates from Rocking-
ham County.
Both websites divide the tem-
plates by subject. The Henrico
site further separates the templates
by grade level.
Summer Course
With Virginia’s new focus on
incorporating 21st Century Skills
into the classroom, this summer
the technology department is
planning to offer either one three-
credit hour course, or three single
credit hour courses covering stu-
dent use of technology to learn
SOL material. Likely topics will
include Microsoft’s MovieMaker
and Photo Story, podcasting with
Audacity, and a variety of other
tools to engage students while
learning. The bulk of the course
will be taught face-to-face with an
emphasis on student-centered ac-
tivities. Participants will spend
time creating projects for their
students to use in the coming
school years, as well as spending
time becoming comfortable with
the tools presented.
Grade
In looking for lessons to teach
long division and fractions to 3rd,
4th and 5th grade at MES, I found
resources from a Virginia school
district for each subject/grade.
Some subjects and grades have
more resources than others:
English 6 (6.3 & 6.4)
English 7 (7.4, 7.5, 7.9 and
review)
English 8 (begins with 8.4)
Math 6
Math 7 (some Interwrite
lessons already in our
page, as well as review
items)
Math 8 (mostly review
items)
Algebra I (only a few re-
view items)
Science 6
Life Science (LS2, LS3,
LS5, and review items)
Physical Science (PS1,
PS2, PS3 and PS10)
USI (lots of foldables here)
USII (only some review
items here)
Civics and Economics
(CE9 and review items)
Virus Messages and
Warnings
Over the last few months ACPS
has been dealing with an on-
slaught of viruses and spyware.
Numerous teachers have had to
have laptops re-imaged, techs
have spent hours trying to fix
problems. One of the more com-
mon causes is a message will ap-
pear saying you have a virus along
with instructions to go to a certain
website or click a link to fix the
problem. These messages are bo-
gus.
Before distribution the techs
create an “image” with all the pro-
grams and settings needed – this is
then cloned to all the laptops (they
also create images for the lab
computers). The image for our
laptops includes Symantec Antivi-
rus Client. This includes real-time
protection for which updates are
automatic as long as you log into
Novell. When the real-time pro-
tection detects a virus a message
will appear with the name of the
virus, the name of the file and
what Symantec has done. It will
not direct you to do anything.
Any message that appears direct-
ing you to click or purchase is bo-
gus. Do not even close the mes-
sage as that often begins the
download of the virus. The best
thing you can do when one of
these messages appears is power
off your laptop, manually if you
must (hold the power button until
the laptop shuts off).
Tools for Reading, Writing,
and Thinking
http://web000.greece.k12.ny.us/i
nstruction/ela/6-
12/Tools/Index.htm
Tools for Reading, Writing, and
Thinking are in-depth graphic or-
ganizers designed “to help stu-
dents engage in rigorous thinking,
organize complex ideas, and scaf-
fold their interactions with texts.
They should not be used simply as
worksheets or activities for their
own sake.”
These tools include an “aca-
demic organizer” – a note-taking
page with helpful reminders in the
margin that help students to de-
fine, summarize, serialize, classi-
fy, compare, and analyze ideas
and concepts. There are organiz-
ers for cause and effect, com-
pare/contrast, fact/opinion, charac-
ters, inference and more. All the
tools are in PDF format to make
them easy to download and/or
print.
Interactives
http://www.learner.org/interacti
ves/
"Interactives" provides educa-
tors and students with strategies,
content, and activities that can en-
hance and improve students' skills
in a variety of curricular areas.
Math interactives include
“Geometry 3D Shapes”, “Math in
Daily Life”, “Metric Conver-
sions”, and “Statistics”.
Science interactives include
“Amusement Park Physics”,
“DNA”, “Dynamic Earth”, “Gar-
bage”, “The Periodic Table”, and
“Weather”.
There is a United States History
Map – “Become a geography whiz
as you learn how the United States
was settled. Discover how the con-
tinent was irrevocably changed by
European colonization, the events
that caused the wholesale dis-
placement and decimation of the
land's original inhabitants, and
how the 50 states came to be
formed.”
Language interactives include
“Elements of a Story”, “Historical
and Cultural Contexts”, “Litera-
ture” and “Spelling Bee” (listen to
a story and then spell words from
the story).
Sexting and Teens
From NetSmartz:
Sexting is an emerging trend
among young people involving
sharing of sexual images and texts
via cell phones. Due to the wide-
spread availability of mobile tech-
nology, the sky-high hormone le-
vels of young people, and the dif-
ficulty that they can have under-
standing the consequences of their
decisions, not-
so-innocent text
messages are
being sent from
cell phones all
over America.
The following is
available in PDF
format by clicking the title:
Tips to Prevent Sexting:
THINK ABOUT THE CONSE-
QUENCES of taking, sending, or
forwarding a sexual picture of
someone underage, even if it’s of
you. You could get kicked off of
sports teams, face humiliation,
lose educational opportunities, and
even get in trouble with the law.
NEVER TAKE images of your-
self that you wouldn’t want every-
one - your classmates, your teach-
ers, your family, or your employ-
ers - to see.
BEFORE HITTING SEND, re-
member that you can’t control
where this image may travel. What
you send to a boyfriend or
girlfriend could easily end up with
their friends, and their friends, and
their friends…
IF YOU FORWARD a sexual
picture of someone underage, you
are as responsible for this image as
the original sender. You could
face child pornography charges,
go to jail, and have to register as a
sex offender.
REPORT any nude pictures you
receive on your cell phone to an
adult you trust. Do not delete the
message. Instead, get your parents
or guardians, teachers, and school
counselors involved immediately.
 Email:
Before You Forward
Please, before you forward an
email that tells you to send it to
everyone you know, verify the
truth. Snopes is the foremost ur-
ban legend debunker so people
now include an “I checked it out
on Snopes” statement. Don’t rely
on an email telling you it is true (it
probably isn’t); check it out for
yourself (http://snopes.com/).
It is rare that these email warn-
ings are true. It is even rarer that
whatever child needs you to for-
ward that email for some life or
death situation (or class project)
really exists.
No one is giving away free lap-
tops, cell phones, Apple-
bee’s/Ruby Tuesdays/insert-
business-name-here gift cards, etc.
just by forwarding an email.
Learn to spot fakes.
Also remember that you expose
all your friends to whom you for-
ward that email to even more
spam. I recently received an email
that had been forwarded nine
times. There were well over 100
email addresses in that list. If I
were unscrupulous I could take as
many of those as I wanted and en-
ter those for “contests” and other
dubious things.
If you feel you must forward an
email to your friends, learn to use
Bcc (instead of To or Cc) – this
will simply display as “undis-
closed recipients” and you protect
your friends from spam and other
email garbage.
Xtranormal
http://www.xtranormal.com/
Xtranormal is an interesting site
– “if you can type, you can make
movies”. Choose between one or
two actors, pick your scene, type
your script, add actions and
sounds – then publish and share.
All for free. You don’t even need
to create an account unless you
want to save your movie. This is a
great project for students - rein-
terpret a scene from a novel, re-
enact a period of history, discuss
the steps to a math problem, carry
on a conversation about a topic in
civics (or science, or art, or music,
or – you get the idea).
Selecting a character who
speaks another language heavily
accents the words spoken.
Larry
Blodgett
(high school
ITRT)
created a related deaths. Here is an update
movie for
teachers
about using Xtranormal, you can
view it on his ClassJump page:
http://classjump.com/sample/index
.php?section=classes&class_id=27
667
Click below for an interview
with Jacques Cartier that Melodi
Power (elementary ITRT) created:
http://www.xtranormal.com/watch
?e=20090325153612815
New TurningPoints
There are now new Turning-
Points for math and science SOL
review on the resource web pages.
Each one can be found in the SOL
review section of the web page.
TurningPoints have been
created from 2008 TAKS released
items. Math has been separated
by grade level. There is one
science TurningPoint covering all
three grades. These TurningPoints
have SOLs attached via Turning-
Point so you can generate reports
showing SOL strengths and weak-
nesses.
Sorry, English teachers, so few
of English questions will format
well as TurningPoint questions.
Every TAKS 2008 released
English item (reading and writing)
required some type of a passage to
answer the question.
New iSafe Newsletter
The new iSafe newsletter can
be downloaded from this link:
http://www.isafe.org/imgs/pdf/ne
wsletter/2009/i-educator-0304-
09.pdf. The newsletter includes:
Understanding Web 2.0:
Have you heard the term and are
unfamiliar with how the Web has
evolved from flat and static to in-
teractive?
Online Pharmacies Update –
information about online issues
with pharmaceutical drugs and the
letting you know what congress
has done!
You Sent What? – A closer
look at sexting and the associated
ramifications.
Cyberbullying Resource
The Qwest Foundation has
created a cyberbullying curricu-
lum entitled “How to Prevent Cy-
berbullying: from Home to the
Homeroom.” The link to down-
load the free PDF guide is
http://www.incredibleinternet.com
/user_files/cyberbullying_full.pdf.
The guide is an 8-page PDF with
information about cyberbullying
and how to teach your students.
This link has more information:
http://www.incredibleinternet.com
/online-safety/cyberbullying.
Small Wonder Video
Cameras
Each of the ITRTs has four
Small Wonder video cameras for
teacher checkout. Several middle
school teachers already make use
of the ones I have. This Power-
Point, shared on Google Docs, has
ideas for those of you who aren’t
sure how to make use of them:
http://docs.google.com/Present?do
cid=dhn2vcv5_6tv55j7g9&pli=1