Thursday, August 13, 2020

Getting Ready – Week 00

 CN Area Elementary Teaching Team:

***Please forward to our new staff members.***

Week 00 (Aug 10 – Aug 14)

Weekly Giggles:        Q: What musical instrument is found in the bathroom?

                                    A: A tuba toothpaste.

 Zoom Attendance. As you take attendance each day, please know that you can do this easily in Zoom. There is a spot where you can download who was in attendance. The document tells you when each person arrived in the session. And, the document states when each person left the session. In order to figure out how to do that, use THIS LINK HERE.

Two screens in your classroom. VIDEO LINK HERE. When teaching from your classroom, I feel that it's delightful to have the students on one screen and teaching content on the other. Using this attached video, you can see how to move the Zoom Student Gallery view over to your Screenbeam. This will give you the opportunity to teach from your computer screen and monitor the children at the same time. Thank you to Karena Cantrell who designed this tutorial (Tech Coach for CUSD).


Weekly Planning Document. In my First Week of Distance Learning video, I modeled a sample PDF for students/families. As you provide weekly instruction, it may be helpful for families to know all the expectations of the week. As parents, day care personnel, aunt, or uncle help children with at-home learning strategies, a document of this nature would be helpful for parents. And, sometimes there are 3, 4, 5, or more children at home. LINK TO DOCUMENT


Student Passwords
. We are not recommending that any teacher go in and establish new passwords for any of the children. This process would take over an hour and a half. Normally, this is the process that some would use. However, now that we're in the distance learning scenario, we are leaving it up to the parents to set new passwords for their children.

If any family comes to your site to borrow a laptop, that is the perfect time to reset a password. The teacher would go into the portal and click the reset password button. While the child is there, that new password will get set up.

The default password looks like this:
NAME: Elizabeth Yorkshire
STUDENT ID: 80987676
DEFAULT PASSWORD: Ey80987676
        1) The E in Elizabeth becomes the first character (uppercase). 
        2) The “y” in Yorkshire becomes the second character (lowercase).
        3) And, her entire student ID number finishes that temporary password.

In your parent letter and on your website, this video will teach parents how to do this on their own.  LINK HERE

As a reminder, the steps for resetting passwords are located below in the video.
portal.cusd.com

THIS VIDEO will walk you through that process.  Start at the 7:00 mark.


Are you trying to use Speakers with Zoom?
Is it not working? Here’s the solution.  Thanks to Cody Stairs for this:

Try creating a Zoom meeting or join a test meeting here https://zoom.us/test

Join with or without video
Join with computer audio
You may see the next screenshot when joining, if not click the audio icon on the lower left


Select “Test speaker and Microphone”.

If you are hearing your computer audio over the speakers but not Zoom audio, you can choose “Same as System”. If not, try the different options available.


Seesaw videos. Seesaw has a YouTube channel.  You can see if any of these work for you: LINK HERE. I have not checked to see if any of these videos direct parents/students to login via Clever. I would recommend that our students use Clever to access Seesaw. If you wish, you can also add Seesaw to your Teacher Page in Clever (video tutorial here). Totally not necessary, but available to you, if needed.  

And, CUSD has videos as well.  SEE THIS LINK

Together, we’ve got this!

Kindly,
Melissa Culver

Monday, August 10, 2020

Distance Learning Support Tools – Institute Week

 CN Area Elementary Teaching Team:

Institute Week (Aug 10 – Aug 14)

Weekly Giggles:        Q: What kind of tree fits in your hand?

                                A: A palm tree!


Welcome back, Clovis Unified. Wahooo!!!

Introduction Letter. As you think about how you will interact with your students/families, for the first time, here is a model to consider. There are several details to share with your families. If I showed you a map of Paris, could you easily navigate the roads with skill? Maybe. Maybe not. Your website is natural to you because you made it. For others, it’s like a map of Paris: lots of information all over the place. They won’t know where to go. I recommend an intro letter. Here is a template to consider. Download. Adjust. Work your magic. Make it yours. LINK HERE

Note: Send this to parents via email. Do not put this on Google Classroom (as a first path of communication). Families do not know what your class code is yet. You can reshare this on Google Classroom. But don’t make Google Classroom the first time you share this. Your website is fine, but now do families know how to get to your website?



CUSD Online Training.
Several teachers from CUSD offered their insight into how to maneuver some of the terrain ahead. If you missed any of those sessions, they are available HERE.


Use the drop-down menu in Technology to locate exactly what you want.


For example, there’s an entire page devoted to Zoom. Attendance? HERE’S THE LINK to the teaching video that shows you how to download reports that show who was in class. No head counting or name-calling needed. That report shows when the kids entered and left.


And, here are the go-to details that may be essential to student success. Your students will have tech questions. Do you know where to direct them for answers? Parents will ask you tech questions. Do you know how to help them? This video will answer those questions for you. CLICK HERE


FCOE Online Training.
The videos will be published on the FCOE website later this week. If you missed any of those sessions, I recommend that you watch a few. To save time, you can always speed up the video content. More content in less time. LINK HERE


Curriculum Instruction & Accountability.
Debbie Para sent out a video the other day from CI&A. Did you know that resources are being constructed for you right now to support Benchmark? They are designing resources so the children can interact with online documents to support instruction you are doing in the classroom.  To find out how to locate those resources, please CLICK HERE.


As you update your website, remember that I have a host of student support content on YouTube. You can easily add those teaching videos to your website to support student learning. Parents will benefit from these as well.
    1) Reset Student Password
    2) Getting to Clever
    3) Log into Google Classroom for the first time
    4) Multiple Users on Clever
    5) Clear the Cache
    6) Benchmark on an iPad
    7) iReady on an iPad
    8) Fresno County Library – check out ebooks
    9) Unblock Flash Player


Do I need to buy a camera to record teaching sessions of myself? No. You do not. I have used my iPhone to upload video of myself directly to YouTube. It works perfectly. And, those videos are unlisted. You cannot find them. For collegiate coursework, I want my fellow students to hear my thoughts, but the whole world doesn’t need the intro to that assignment. So, you can keep that content unlisted in this pathway.

Second, you also have a camera in your computer.  Use the find tool. Type “camera” in the search box.


Choose the camera:


Select video as your option.  Then record yourself. Locate that file in your computer when done, and publish as you see fit.


Loom or Screencastify? Screencastify may want you to pay for more service. Please know that Loom (as of today) is totally free to educators. So, if you want free, head to Loom. Honestly, I really, really like Loom. There might be a tiny learning curve, but it’s easy to maneuver.


Image credits: www.loom.com

Free Loom training. CLICK HERE.


Kindly,
Melissa Culver