This I thought was interesting to see how different cultures and age groups look at things.  I don't agree with Jackie Chan, but we do live in a different world then we grew up in, and it will continue to change. Are we helping our students to face those changes?

Science Journal is a free digital science notebook made by Google. With Science Journal you can keep your notes, photos, and
observations all in one convenient place.  Students can perform experiments using the sensors on their phone or iPad.  Science Journal app is compatible with iOS and Android devices.  Here is a list of what is possible: 
     -  Measure light, sound, acceleration, and air pressure.
    -   Take notes and photos to document your science experiments. 
    - Connect to external sensors using select Bluetooth-enabled Arduino                devices.
    - Create automated triggers for recording data and taking notes.
   -  Use sonification to hear the movement of your graphs.

"CommonLit delivers high-quality, free instructional materials to support literacy development for students in grades 3-12. Our resources are:

• Flexible;
• Research-Based;
• Aligned to the Common Core State Standards;
• Created by teachers, for teachers.

We believe in the transformative power of a great text, and a great question. That’s why we are committed to keeping CommonLit completely free, forever."
CommonLit About. (2014-2018). Retrieved March 23, 2018, from https://www.commonlit.org/about

Teachers we have just added CommonLit to Clever. This is a FREE reading tool for educators. It has articles for students from 3rd grade to 12th grade. It works with your Google Classroom, and you can assign articles to your students. It also has questions, quizzes, and discussion topics for each article. CommonLit also has a tool to read the articles for emerging readers. 

CK-12 is a google Chrome Extension that has over 5000 types of learning applications to help students and teachers. Learn more than 5000 mathematical and scientific concepts at your own pace and in your own style!

• Supports common base and government standards for consistent content (digital tutorials and concepts).
• Supports Utah Standards.
• View, learn and practice (or teach) more than 5000+ concepts using several modalities (text, videos, quizzes, cards, etc.).
• Manage your class online through groups.
• Create practice activities and assessments for students and track their progress.
• Everything on our application and website is always 100% free.

​

How to copy assignments from class to class or quarter to quarter:

Are you interested in adding more technology activities in your classroom? Coding is a great way to teach students skills in problem solving.  Check out these great opportunities for elementary and secondary teachers to add coding curriculum to your classroom. Click on one of the pictures below for more information.

TED Ed is a great resource for short entertaining videos. I have found videos for all subjects.  There are also lessons to go along with the videos. 

This is a website for math and science teachers.  It has some free features, and some that cost. 

Kaizena is a web app that helps you as a teacher give immediate and effective feedback to students.  Some of the features that make this app amazing are the voice record feature that allows you to talk to your student about their work instead of typing it.  Another is the Google Drive integration, and now the creators have just rolled out the Google Add-on feature. To access this feature just open a google doc, then in the top menu click on Add-ons, then get add-ons.  Search in the google store for Kaizena and add. Click on the videos below to learn how to us Kaizena.

When I was a social studies teacher at Roosevelt Junior High I loved and most of my students seemed to enjoy this one assignment. Create your own city. They would have to follow the features of an early Utah settlement but could put whatever they wanted into their city. I also enjoyed watching their creativity as to what they would place in their city, however, I always wanted more from this assignment. 
Sim City for iPads is a free app that teachers could use to allow students to create their own city. Tom introduced me to this game, and I have been hooked on it since then. 
In this game, you are the mayor of your city. You have city resources to manage and try to build. You have to make sure that your citizens have their needs met, like sewer, fire department, and electricity.  Taxes are collected which gives you money to build your city. Which means you need to make sure your citizens are happy, and people are moving into your city. 
I could see this being a fun way to help students learn about citizenship in a community, managing resources, you could also discuss current issues. Such as coal power plants or green energy. Overall I think this could be a fun way to teach several social studies standards either as a class or individually. ​

Collaboration is essential to students learning! Preparing students to work well with others is becoming increasingly more important in today's working society.  Having kids work together promotes cooperation, builds social-emotional skills, and gets them engaged in active learning. Group work, on the other hand, tends to come with challenges. Some students feel like they do all the work, others feel left out, motivation becomes an issue, and assignments sometimes don't come together very well.  So, what makes for better group work ? Watch the video below to get some great tips.

Digital devices put the world at our students' fingertips, whether with their own cell phones or with school-provided computers and tablets. But, along with opportunities for powerful learning come the risks -- and realities -- of distraction. So, what are the best ways to manage digital distraction in the classroom?Check out our practical tips on supporting students and modeling productive 21st Century learning

Kahoot's new challenge feature lets you assign kahoots as homework, saves time on correcting assignments and makes it easy to assess learning progress.  The new report feature makes it easy to monitor the progress your students are making.

Sharemylesson.com is a free website that gives educators access to other lesson plans and
class activities. It spans all grade levels from toddler to 12th grade and lesson plans are
well organized by subject and grade level.
This website is an amazing source for teachers of any grade to be able to use when it
comes to figuring out their lesson plans. Teachers can use this site to search/find lesson
plans that another teacher has posted, share lesson plans of their own, etc. They can
search for any lesson plan by grade, subject, topic, standards, etc. Teachers could also use
this website to look for resources by grade, subject, and topic.

https://dcsd.powerschool.com/teachers

Teachers, we are excited to announce to you some new things are coming to PowerSchool. One of those new things is that the district is no longer hosting PowerSchool. That is why last week you could not access PowerSchool Thursday and Friday. Lynn and Randall were working with PowerSchool to move our data to their servers. Now, this does mean that our web address had to change, it is now https://dcsd.powerschool.com/teachers. We are excited about this change because it will offer us some more features and greater capability to provide for your needs. Please take the time and change any bookmarks. 

This is another of those new tools coming for PowerSchool. We are wanting to roll it out to secondary teachers starting in second quarter. Along with this, we will be providing those teachers and administrators training. Again we are excited to bring you these tools. 

Teachers and staff of DCSD, I recently had a discussion with my kids that surprised me. I thought I would share part of my takeaway from that conversation. My kids were frustrated with their schooling experience, especially my son who just graduated. As I listened to them I became curious as to why they were so frustrated, so I asked them. 
My son, James, put it best to me, he said that at school they are told the mission statement of the school is to help students reach their highest potential and become lifelong learners. However, teachers repeatedly won't work with them to help them improve their grades. 

They won't let them retake tests or makeup assignments they do poorly on. 
To me, this was a very troubling statement. Now, he also said that it wasn't all teachers and that most teachers were great. If you know my son James he doesn't ever criticize anyone. So, for him to feel this way it was very surprising. I asked my other kids and they felt similar, that teachers were not always willing to help them improve. 

With all of this being said I was a teacher, and I struggled to get my grading done and in the grade book on time. I didn't always do the best that I could to help students, and there are probably a lot of kids that share a similar feeling of my son about me. So, please don't take me as an expert, or that I know anything more than you. I just want to share some information with you. 

First, standards-based grading/mastery grading, focusing on what is important, and not worrying about points makes sense to me. We need to help our students realize what they are learning and how it is important to them. I think that we all hate to hear a student say they are stupid because they didn't get an A. Grades don't show intelligence or ability. Currently, they focus more on the number of points a student has received. I even remember sitting at parent-teacher conference and only focusing on assignment and tests a student needed to make-up to get their grade up. That wasn't the conversation that needed to be had, but it was all I knew to do at the time. 
I look at standards-based grading/mastery grading now as tools that we as teachers can use to make our lives easier and help us have the real conversations we need to have with our students. 

Second, technology has improved and the district will be rolling out another tool here soon to help teachers communicate with students and parents. It is a learning management system through PowerSchool. We are excited for the capabilities that it will bring to the classroom. 

However, all of these items our administration is giving us to use are just tools, in your teacher toolbox. How well they work depends on us as a school district. We need to come together and do whatever it takes to make our schools successful. 

​http://www.fusionyearbooks.com/blog/creative-classrooms/

    iBOSS is our filtering tool. We use it to limit access to inappropriate material. We know that nothing works perfect. Additionally we know that nothing can replace the power of a teacher monitoring and helping students to avoid inappropriate material. We also accept that at times it may block teachers from valuable educational material. To help teachers resolve this issue teachers have different internet privileges than students. To access these privileges, navigate your browser to the following URL ​ib1.dcsd.org/login. To login on this site you use your first initial and last name, for example jdoe. The password is usually the password you use to log into your computer, or DCSD-Registered. After you have logged in you need to leave the window open, but you can minimize it. 

If you've ever wanted to email large files but couldn't because the file size was too large. Maybe you didn't want to sign into google drive or your email account. Give WeTransfer a try.  This tool will allow you to easily transfer any type of file up to 2GB for free. All you need is a couple of email addresses. Watch this short tutorial to get more information.

All you math teachers out there, are you looking for a way to use more of google tools in teaching math to your students?  Check out these 11 ways to use Google Drawing to teach math ! Just click on the image above.

 
100+ GREAT GOOGLE CLASSROOM RESOURCES FOR EDUCATORS
UCET Newsletter
​Microsoft Educational Technology Newsletter

Last year we pushed out Adobe Creative Cloud to you all. I know that the constant popping up asking you to login can get annoying. However, I believe that the benefit out weighs the cost.  The creativity you and your students can enjoy is marvelous. Adobe Photoshop is a part of the Creative Cloud, you also get other programs like InDesign, Dreamweaver, and Acrobat Pro to name a few.  If you want to get rid of the annoying login pop up, create an Adobe account, and login just once to resolve the pop-up issue. If you want to get help with any of the programs, Tom and I would be glad to help any of you.​