Friday Focus - March 12, 2020

Great Things I Noticed this Week:

* Our juniors showed their test-taking stamina for the ACT on Tuesday and we had almost 100% participation!

*Students rotating around the room in small groups carousel style, stopping for a student to explain how to solve the problem. Just some movement and interaction this way increased student engagement!

*Students using garage band creativity to publish songs they wrote to publish their learning in a musical format. 

*In a class conversation to remember a year since COVID hit, students were sharing all the reasons they are grateful to be in school instead of virtual. 

*Class pivots being made with the recent quarantine batch. Students shifted to their group projects in bluejeans breakout rooms so that no one was left out!

Upcoming Events:

Monday - PD Day, check your email for the agenda

Wednesday - Workout Wednesday, MS Faculty Meeting 3:00 

"Nuts & Bolts" Notes:

*We've been seen an increase in hall wandering...if students are tardy for your class please mark them as tardy. This helps from the admin level as we try to address these concerns (in addition to us sweeping the hallways). Thank you to those of you who have helped with the hall sweeping as well!

*Just in case you missed Ms. Lee's email sharing the update on Kahoot adding the feature for students to see the question on their screen: Kahoot Update.

*Change to BrainPOP:

There has been a recent change in how to log into BrainPOP for staff and students. Good news... you no longer have to remember separate login credentials! 

BrainPOP (including Jr., Espanol, and Francais) is a platform that provides animated movies, engaging learning games, and great vocabulary activities on a variety of topics. They do a great job of explaining a complicated idea in an efficient and entertaining way with most videos less than 5 minutes!

Login process for staff and students will take place through Clever. Clever is a tool that connects outside services to our district login system. This means fewer usernames and passwords for you and your students to remember! It is an app on staff and student iPads and it is also located in staff self service bookmarks on laptops. Once you open Clever, log in with your Google credentials. Once logged in, you will see what looks a bit like an app "landing page" that shows all services you can access (BrainPOP, iReady, IXL, PLTW). From this Clever "landing page" you can login to any of these tools with one click! 

You can find more information about BrainPOP on our staff resource site. 

You will find great webinars to get you started with BrainPOP in the classroom here. 

You can find information about setting up classes within BrainPOP in order to assign tasks to your students here. 

Blogs, Quotes & Tweets:

*The 3 Best Practices for Performance-Based Assessment