Digital Safety Tools and GIFs in an email – Week 33

CN Area Elementary Teaching Team:

Here are more tools to enhance your Distance Learning experience:

Week 33 (April 27 – May 1)

Weekly Giggles:                     How does the moon cut his hair?
Eclipse it.

Digital Safety Tools [Part 01]. Back when I was asked to talk about Digital Citizenship as a PD for my sites, I introduced you to several resources that you could talk to parents about: Life360, OurPact, and Circle. Earlier this week I put that content into video form so it can be shared easily. Share if you see fit. Always watch content before you share it, just like book reviews. Be sure it fits your standards and you agree with it. VIDEO LINK HERE.

Digital Safety Tools [Part 02]. That video went a bit long, so I cut the last bit out and turned the last bit into a second video. This video talks about vocabulary and scenarios. In essence, this is the why behind the what. It talks about things like VPN, proxy, using the neighbor’s Wi-Fi for free, or the neighbors using your Wi-Fi for free, and cheating on homework via text messaging. Review this content, and feel free to share if it meets your standards and you agree with it. Much of this video was designed because one of my sweet gems has done some of these things [He sure keeps me on my toes. No Perfect Parent Award for me this year (snort, giggle).]. VIDEO LINK HERE.

GIF in your email. You can actually add animated GIFs to the in-context portion of your email. Here are the step-by-step instructions on how to make that happen. VIDEO LINK HERE.

Always grace,
Melissa Culver

Benchmark on an iPad, Slide Templates, & Zoom – Week 33

CN Area Elementary Teaching Team:

Here are more tools to enhance your Distance Learning experience:

Week 33 (April 27 – May 1)

Weekly Giggles:                Why didn’t the orange win the race?

                                                It ran out of juice.

As you serve families during this transition and help your students navigate online learning, here are a few more ideas to help with your/their journey.

Zoom. You can actually use your cellphone as a document camera and use it during your Zoom session. If you have not checked out the details of how to make that happen, hop over to our Teacher Resources folder to find that PDF.  Or, click HERE for that singular PDF.

If you are curious about how the annotation tools work, check out THIS LINK for more information on how to do that.

If Whiteboard is turned on in Settings, we can turn off annotation for participants under Security. This will prevent your students from annotating on that teaching screen during your lesson.

Benchmark on an iPad. Benchmark has two different apps that are available for iPads.  One is the student user space.  The other one is just the library.  Feel free to share this out via Google Classroom or send it home to parents via Q [Mass Email]. If your families are interested in using these digital tools on a handheld device, this may be helpful. Now, it could potentially work the same for Android devices, I just don’t know.  We have Apple devices here. Video link here. 

Slides Carnival. Do you feel like your PowerPoint and Google Slides presentations look a bit stale? Slides Carnival is a great site with FREE templates.  LINK HERE.

Image credit: LINK HERE.

Student login on staff computers. Just a reminder that students are no longer allowed to log into staff computers. The Helpdesk is getting a lot of phone calls related to this inquiry. Again, children cannot log in on staff computers. Thank you for your understanding

Staff Password. If you get an email from CUSD stating that you need to change your password, rest assured that you can now change that at home.  You do not need to be on a CUSD campus to make that happen.
     * Ctrl + Alt + Delete
     * Change Password
     * Type in your old password
     * Follow the protocol in the email (password complexity and history) to form a new password

Digital Safety Tools.  I’m working on my next series of videos. I hope to have these out soon.  As your parents lean in and talk about screen time and digital tools to limit inappropriate content for their children, what do you say?  I’ve got some videos pending and hope to have them out by the end of the week.

Always Grace,
Melissa Culver