TRT Training Day  -  November 2006

Item One:

  • Remember our Norms for today's meeting/training..
  • Clock Hour forms and sign in sheet are at the first table at the side of the room.
  • Parking Lot for questions we cannot get to will be on the easel up front (stickies for these questions are on your table). If it is out of my control I will get the question to someone who can answer it.

Item Two (starting at 8:00):

  • Just for Fun!
  • United Streaming
      • School Kits- if you need more hand outs let Ron know.
      • District Content One Page Handout - (Word)
      • Using Front Row to show your videos, pictures, and DVDs.
        • If you have a Mac Book or a computer that can run Front Row this can be a great way to show the videos you have on your computer on a LCD projector or a TV in your classroom.
        • To run them on a TV you must have a AV adapter for your computer (from Apple), a mini-headphone to RCA cable for sound and a video rca cable for sound to go to the TV.
        • Hints for showing video on your LCD projectors.
          • Use Front Row
          • Use 640x480, or 800x600 resolution on the projector.
          • Use Quicktime player and do "Present Movie" this will surround the movie in black and it will look better on the screen.
          • Dump Windows Media Player and install "Flip 4 Mac" this program will enable Quicktime player to play Windows media files and allow you to stream them in your browser. Windows media player is no longer supported on the Mac.


  • Googleology
  • Filtering junk mail in Entourage and Apple Mail
  • Junk mail filtering is simply identifying spam that gets through our server as junk and not just deleting it. If you properly train your mail program you will eliminate virtually all junk mail. But remember nothing is perfect and a small percentage will always get through. The wsd server stops thousands per day with about a 97% success rate.. but that 3% will always find a way in. So we need to train our folks to train their mail client to identify this junk.
  • Rules for your Mail and Entourage
  • Rules are a kind of like the junk filters but not for junk mail. You can set up criteria for your mail program to judge the mail that hits your inbox, for instance some uses would be to have your mail program color all message from your spouse red and blink, maybe LIT mail subjects go to an LIT folder automatically, another might be mail from your principal can turn a color and get filed in a principal folder, you can even have rules that "read" the mail , reply to it, file it, and you never even have to look at it.
  • NWEA MAPS
    • Myrna will explain the reporting site at NWEA for levels test results.
    • Tests reports will only be available on the NWEA site after the "PC" person in your building has uploaded the test data from a particular day, they reports are then available about 24 hours later.
    • We also looked at DesCartes which will show you what skills each RIT level should be attempting to grow over the course of the year.
    • Teachers should know how to get the class reports and access the DesCartes files on NWEA's website.
    • There is also some teacher materials to make sure the teacher and the student are ready to be successful on this type of test. They are located on the main page for nwea.org, not the reports site.
    • https://reports.nwea.org/login.asp

  • Skyward's grade book TLA
  • Strategies for speed on the Macbooks
    • More RAM is the expensive but easiest solution. Programs will run slower if you use non intel native appliations (Appleworks, Office, for example) If you use universal binary programs they will run faster.
    • Also run fewer programs at once and they will run better.
    • Clean out your cache files and preference files. One TRT had some luck with Mac Janitor.
    • If things are really bad create a new user account and transfer your documents over to it using a server or firewire drive, this will allow the programs to create new prefs and cache files and for some people this has been a dramatic help.

  • Grade posting to the grades.wsd.wednet.edu server with Easy grade pro
  • I am going to ask for pilots of a new way to post EGP grades to a central server. This server will combine all schools and it would give parents the capability to see a studen'ts full schedule with one log in, they could also see multiple students with one login.
  • To participate in the pilot you have to will willing to do the following:
      1. Give feedback on the systems use.
      2. Be willing to be the "go to" person at your building for support.
      3. Get a couple of other teachers to do this with you so we can really test it, pick the rabbits, not the turtles.
      4. Commit to use it
      5. Help build handouts or tutorials if it is a system we choose to keep.
      6. Present findings to possibly cabinet and the school board.
      7. Use the student's 7 digit ID # as listed in Skyward.
      8. If you can do these things I think you will find the system even easier than the current way we have teachers post grades.
  • Here are the sites for the system:
    1. Main Site - grades.wsd.wednet.edu
    2. Student login
    3. Parent Login
    4. Faculty Login
    5. Admin Login
    6. Using EGP to post to this grades site
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