Intro:
Hello parents. I want to tell you about a great program our school district has set up for facilitating tracking of students and updates for parents. It is called “PowerSchool Premier.” This web-based program helps track students in a much more efficient manner and makes most of this tracking information available to you as parents 24/7.
The Guts:
Basically, this web-based program is designed to help parents and teachers keep track of each student’s progress at all times throughout the term. Progress reports are no longer necessary for you to keep tabs on your student’s progress prior to report cards. By simply logging on to the secure website with your personalized password, you will be able to access information such as:
• Assignment history
• Attendance record
• Any current school fees
• Lunch menus
• Grades
• Class/School Announcements
• Access 24/7
Not only does PowerSchool have these features to aid you as parents, it helps me, as a teacher, track students more quickly and accurately. This helps me keep track of strengths and weaknesses of all the students, and allows me to tailor my teaching to each student’s needs more effectively. Overall, it helps me be a better teacher and you be a more well-informed parent.
More In-Depth Understanding:
Here is a great presentation some graduate students did that details the features of PowerSchool Premier:
What I Will Do:
As you can see, this program will do a great job at streamlining my communication to you about your child’s progress. There are many features, as you saw, and I will be updating some more often than others. The information I will update at least twice a week will be:
• Grades
• Attendance (most likely daily)
Other information I will update at least twice a month will be:
• Missing Assignments
• Class/School Announcements
Through updating this information on this schedule, my hope is to help you stay informed and prevent the students from falling behind. As we all know, it can become very overwhelming for anyone when work starts piling up. This will provide an avenue for us to all tackle any past work in order to stay up to class speed.
Last, But Not Least:
This is a web-based program that will help all information flow more easily from teacher to parents and students. It makes all of our jobs much more efficient which, in the end, will help the students progress faster and more effectively. For more information, feel free to contact me or visit these links:
1. Live Webcast
2. The homepage of PowerSchool
3. Additional website about PowerSchool
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Rockets and Spreadsheets
Rockets
The project I reviewed is "Using Rockets to Prove Newton's 3rd Law of Motion." The basic idea of this lesson was to use rockets as a visible representation to facilitate student understanding of Newton's Third Law (to every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction). The basic steps of the project were as follows:
1. Build a variety of rocket models out of paper.
2. Test these models by using compressed air to launch.
3. Record distance of each rocket type.
4. Decide which rocket has greatest potential for use in final experiment.
5. Use optimum model of rocket to launch into Styrofoam, illustrating Newton's 3rd Law.
The use of spreadsheets came into play while recording the flight distances and calculating the average distance for each rocket type. By using these spreadsheets, students were quickly able to visualize which style of rocket was able to launch the farthest.
Overall this lesson was quite good. The students were able to begin with the basic information needed to understand Newton's law, but by the end of the assignment they were able to understand the law to a greater depth than would have occurred through lecture alone. The use of the spreadsheet prompted students to experiment a little more with the project. Once they compared distances and discovered what didn't work, they were able to narrow the field of options for rocket design and come up with better, more efficient designs of their own. This portion of the activity was key to changing the students understanding from strict knowledge to a deeper, more interactive process that helped them understand the concept more fully.
Adaptation
There are many different ways I would need to change the details of this lesson in order to use it as a History teacher. Obviously I wouldn't be able to use rockets (even thought that would be fun), and wouldn't have the emphasis on Newton's Third Law. However, I could still use the same pattern and structure of this lesson. Instead of focusing on Newton's law, I could teach a lesson about international relations in a specific historical time period. First, I would lay the groundwork for the students to gain a basic nuts-and-bolts understanding of diplomacy and international relations. After helping the students gain this basic knowledge, they would be given the opportunity to explore in greater depth about different famous international conferences (i.e. the Treaty of Versailles, the Potsdam Conference, the First and Second Continental Congresses, etc.). Through this research they could fill out a spreadsheet focusing on ways each conference was able to move the nations forward, and ways they held them back. Following this research stage, the students would be given the opportunity to put their knowledge to use by presenting a conference where they played similar roles to those they had read about. This would give the students the opportunity to take the knowledge they gained through their research, analyze it, and apply it to modern issues in a way unique to themselves.
While this isn't exactly the same as the project I reviewed, it takes the same process of the rockets project and modifies it to work for a History class. The same educational goals of promoting analysis and creative thought would still be met, just in a completely different field and venue to express it.
The project I reviewed is "Using Rockets to Prove Newton's 3rd Law of Motion." The basic idea of this lesson was to use rockets as a visible representation to facilitate student understanding of Newton's Third Law (to every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction). The basic steps of the project were as follows:
1. Build a variety of rocket models out of paper.
2. Test these models by using compressed air to launch.
3. Record distance of each rocket type.
4. Decide which rocket has greatest potential for use in final experiment.
5. Use optimum model of rocket to launch into Styrofoam, illustrating Newton's 3rd Law.
The use of spreadsheets came into play while recording the flight distances and calculating the average distance for each rocket type. By using these spreadsheets, students were quickly able to visualize which style of rocket was able to launch the farthest.
Overall this lesson was quite good. The students were able to begin with the basic information needed to understand Newton's law, but by the end of the assignment they were able to understand the law to a greater depth than would have occurred through lecture alone. The use of the spreadsheet prompted students to experiment a little more with the project. Once they compared distances and discovered what didn't work, they were able to narrow the field of options for rocket design and come up with better, more efficient designs of their own. This portion of the activity was key to changing the students understanding from strict knowledge to a deeper, more interactive process that helped them understand the concept more fully.
Adaptation
There are many different ways I would need to change the details of this lesson in order to use it as a History teacher. Obviously I wouldn't be able to use rockets (even thought that would be fun), and wouldn't have the emphasis on Newton's Third Law. However, I could still use the same pattern and structure of this lesson. Instead of focusing on Newton's law, I could teach a lesson about international relations in a specific historical time period. First, I would lay the groundwork for the students to gain a basic nuts-and-bolts understanding of diplomacy and international relations. After helping the students gain this basic knowledge, they would be given the opportunity to explore in greater depth about different famous international conferences (i.e. the Treaty of Versailles, the Potsdam Conference, the First and Second Continental Congresses, etc.). Through this research they could fill out a spreadsheet focusing on ways each conference was able to move the nations forward, and ways they held them back. Following this research stage, the students would be given the opportunity to put their knowledge to use by presenting a conference where they played similar roles to those they had read about. This would give the students the opportunity to take the knowledge they gained through their research, analyze it, and apply it to modern issues in a way unique to themselves.
While this isn't exactly the same as the project I reviewed, it takes the same process of the rockets project and modifies it to work for a History class. The same educational goals of promoting analysis and creative thought would still be met, just in a completely different field and venue to express it.
Saturday, November 1, 2008
Here is a game that is similar to RISK, but a little easier to grasp. The primary way I would relate this to class is to just emphasize the random outcome battles can have. In this game, there can be a fight between two unevenly matched armies, and the smaller army can win. It isn't necessarily a spot-on game when it comes to actual strategy and the thought process a military commander would go through, but I think it does a fine job at introducing strategy to the students--something that will help them grasp an event such as WWI or WWII better. This game could supplement a U.S. History class quite nicely.
Play Games at AddictingGames
Play Games at AddictingGames
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