Technology Winter Update

By -

Swampscott Public Schools Winter Technology Update

Tech Ninjas in action. Read more below about what they have been up to lately.

 Tips & Tricks

We have been loving the TOBY tab manager, an extension for your chrome browser. This helps you to organize tabs into projects. For teachers, you might have a unit on cell biology. All of the resources you need for the unit are tabs on the internet or in your Google drive. Open every tab, then Toby will organize them into a group ie: Unit 7, Cells. You can even share your collection. Check out a short video of Toby When you go to teach the unit, months or years from now, you can choose the tab collection and open them all up to look at the resources or update them. This will increase your productivity and save you time!

Are you new to Google Forms but want to find out more? Check out our updated presentation Google Forms 101 to help you create surveys, formative assessments, and more.



SPS Tech News & Alerts

  • Plagiarism detection: Google recently released plagiarism detection called "Originality Reports". Because we are Google Enterprise for Education subscribers, we have unlimited reports (students as well). When you are inside Google Classroom and post an assignment, you can choose to turn on Originality Reports. When you turn on originality reports, you and your students can check work for authenticity. "Originality reports use Google Search to compare a student’s work against billions of webpages and millions of books. Originality reports link to the detected webpages and flag uncited text. The reports help students identify unintentional plagiarism and uncited content before submitting assignments and help teachers see where students used source material and where citations are present or missing." (Source) 

Originality reports screen option in Google Classroom
  • Clever: Clever is a Single Sign-On platform that allows students and staff to use their Google credentials (or a QR code) to scan into the Clever Platform and have all of your digital resources in one place and logged on. This will help expedite teaching and learning. It will also give us data on which programs are used to capacity so we can examine license purchasing. We can also design our Ed-tech library so staff can see which programs are being used at other schools and levels and explore new options for teaching and learning. We hope to roll this out in June to the staff. 
  • The Tech Ninjas from SHS recently presented at The Learn Launch Across Boundaries conference in Boston about the important work they do to help SPS and the Senior Center. 
  • Incident IQ: You may have noticed the portal changes. We have been listening to teacher feedback and trying to organize it better into fewer broad topics so you can quickly report your issue!
  • The Tech team presented our Capital & Technology plans for the next year at School Committee. We reviewed our technology plan and all that we have accomplished since 2017 and what we hope to accomplish until 2022. 

MCAS Updates


 Infrastructure Trials will happen at EVERY school the week of March 16-20. Devices will be signed out by each school for testing. The internet will be pushed to capacity especially on the 17th when SMS attempts to test 400 students at once! This is what a trial is all about- learning how much our network can support and then planning to improve it as technology use increases.

Passwords for PearsonAccess Next (PAN), the online test management system, expire every 180 days. If a user’s password expires, they will receive an email with a link to reset their password, or they can select the “Forgot Password” link on the PAN Sign In page. Please do not ignore the email!




Popular posts from this blog

Tech Tip Tuesday: Twitter 101, Google Gurus on Twitter, and helpful tip from Sandy Moltz

By -
Image
Twitter is an amazing resource for educators and administrators.  Basically you have limited characters to share out a message. The messages can have #hashtags on them. You can click on a # and see all the things people have posted about this topic. You can also follow people that inspire you. You can use an app on your computer called Tweet Deck to view multiple #hashtags or people into columns. There are things called Twitter Chats that happen on every subject everyday. For example, I follow a chat called #mssachat the second Tuesday of every month at 8PM. Anyone can join. This is a group of Massachusetts school administrators who tweet with the same hashtag and answer questions. For example, one question might be "What are the best practices for the first few days of school?". Principals and schools leaders will chime in and you can see what they are sharing out and learn what is happening in other schools. It takes no time at all to join, to watch, and to learn. Often
Read more

Tech Tip Tuesday: Scheduling your time for productivity

By -
How to stay productive and make the best use of your time using Technology (but not email!) 1. Using Google Forms to collect data Too often you are immersed in a project and people are constantly emailing you about things that need to get done. When you create either a google form to collect data or a google sheet that people edit, you can channel all of those concerns into one file that you can check and work on daily, when you schedule time for the project. The beauty of the Google Form is that you can have people take surveys and the data is translated automatically with the click of a button to a sheet. On the other hand, the sheet allows users to edit it and see which concerns or issues have been addressed already and lends some transparency. In Google Forms you can show your respondents the results, but the spreadsheet allows you to see everything at once. You can also insert comments & tag a person so they see a response or that you asked a question. It cuts down on emai
Read more

Tech Tip Tuesday: Internet Browser Features: The Omnibox & Pinning Tabs

By -
Image
Get More Out of Your Browser Recently I held a training and everyone said the same thing - PINNING TABS IS AWESOME! It seems like such a small feature, but because it is very popular, I wanted to share it out.  The other topic is the Omnibox, a rarely understood but very cool feature of Google Chrome.  This led me to think about how underutilized the actual Web Browser is in our life. We are so excited to get to the content online that we do not pay attention to the tool that gets us there. These two features will allow you to work smarter, not harder! Pin your tabs! The nice thing about Google Chrome is that you can customize it to do many things. My favorite feature is that if I go to the waffle to choose a new GSuite App to use, they open in a new tab. I often have 7-10 tabs open. However, that means that I sometimes close a tab by accident! 😱😬 Have no fear, Pin Tabs is here! Go up to the tab and hover over it with your mouse. Right click. A world of options opens up!
Read more