Learnia is a free app that engages students in a game like environment.  Learnia's world consists of a number of islands, each with a distinct feel. Each island contains one grade year of spelling or math. A path meanders from island to island giving kids a sense of progress as they learn. This path is blocked by skill stones. When kids master a skill stone it steps aside and the next segment of the path opens up.  There is a new browser version.  When you click the link I included you will see "Launch" on the page that opens.
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​I am sharing a video that gives you a better idea of what Learnia can offer your students.  This is also a great site to share with parents.  

Fair Use is something educators must know about and appropriately model if we are to inspire our students to become good digital citizens.  Are you a good digital citizen?  Do you follow fair use in the materials you use and present to your students?  A review is always good because over time we can all forget the rules of Fair Use.    This week I am sharing some easy to read reviews of Fair Use for Educations.  Are you current, check these out to see if there's something you may have forgotten.  Click here for a quick cheat sheet called  Copy Right and Fair Use for Teachers.  This second link is a short article that covers the 4 facts of Fair Use.  Click here to read more about the 4 factors of Fair Use.

Checkout this free site where students can work with Scratch 3.0 to learn about coding.  Some of the features of the site are the tutorials.  There are numerous tutorials to help jump start learning for students interested in coding.  Click Here to see them and then click tutorial on the left top of the screen.   In addition, there are projects to explore (click on the explore tab on the home page). Last, but not least, there are getting started tutorials just click on the ideas tab on the home page to check out some of the getting started projects.

This weeks blog will provide information about updates for Schoology.  Each area has a link that will take you to a how-to and information page which will walk you through use of the updates.

Observational grading empowers classroom instructors to assess students where they are, without disrupting the learning process. It provides instructors with the ability to:

• Record student performance-based tasks without requiring students to log into Schoology and take an assessment themselves.
• Enter student results on a printed assessment back into Schoology.

Click Here for more details and how-to steps.

Mark your calendar and plan to join in this years R2R Tech Camp.  This year the Upper Adams School District will be joining us at the camp.  Tentatively the dates of June 4, 5 and 6 are scheduled for this year's camp with the hope that we don't have snow days to make up.    Requests for Presentations  (RFPs) will be put out in the near future.  If you presented last year, please consider offering a workshop again this year. The feedback on last year's presentations was very positive.  If you have some great instructional strategies and/or lessons in your classroom that you would like to share but didn't present last year, please consider presenting this year.  

I recently had a request for instructions on how to share a document securely with parents.  The security is important when you are sharing confidential information that would normally be found in a student's educational file, such as an IEP, psychological testing, etc.  Here is the information I provided regarding creating a password for various types of documents.  The first is a tutorial on how to create a password for any document in Google including a pdf that has been saved into Google drive.

Password protect a document in Word for Mac:
You can protect a sensitive or confidential document by using a password to help prevent others from changing or even opening your document.
You can help prevent unauthorized users from opening a document or from modifying a document even if they have permission to open it. You can also protect your document by specifying how or whether others can leave feedback.

Protect your document from being opened or edited:

1. Click Review > Protect Document.
2. Under Security, you can select whether to enter a password to open the document, modify the document, or both. Enter each password again to confirm.
   • Passwords are case-sensitive and can be a maximum of 15 characters long.
   • If you lose or forget your password, Word won't be able to recover it for you. Be sure to keep the a copy of the password in a safe place or create a strong password that you’ll remember.
3. Click OK.

Protect your document before sending it out for review

1. Click Review > Protect Document.
2. Under Protection, select Protect document for.
3. Do one of the following.
   To
   Do this:
   Keep Tracked Changes on.
   Click Tracked changes
   Allow people to add comments.
   Click Comments
   Prevent people from making changes.
   Click Read only
   Restrict changes to forms, so people can fill out the form without accidentally changing the form itself.
   Click Forms
4. To prevent people from changing the protection settings, type a password in the Password box.
5. Click OK when you're finished.

Note: If you share a document with other people, you can remove personal information, such as author name and company, when you save a file. To do this, under Privacy at the bottom of the Password Protect dialog box, select Remove personal information from this file on save.

This link will walk you through the steps of saving a password on a Word or Excel document in a Windows environment.  ​www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000748.htm

Lastly, if you have the Adobe Acrobat software you can follow this link for instructions on how to create a password for a pdf. ​helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/securing-pdfs-passwords.html

As you may know from my numerous shares about various blogs over the years I follow many blogs.  To start off this year I am sharing an interesting blog by Bill Gates. Click Here . Bill Gates shares insight into numerous areas of life with regard to progress and innovations.  It's interesting to know about these because as we look to the future of our own students these are issues that they will be facing and must be prepared to address.  It is our role to facilitate the development of the skills they will need to be the thinkers and problem solvers of the future.

There is a fairly new feature in Pages that now allows users to create iBooks on an iPad using the Pages App.  Previously iBooks could only be created with a MacBook.  This new capability in Pages now opens a whole new opportunity for teachers and students to create.  I am sharing resources on how this is done.

To start a new booklet:

1. Choose File > New > Document.
2. Type the Number of Pages in your field, in this case 4 for the cover, 12 for the inside pages (we'll use 2 double sided 1/2 sheets of letter).
3. Select Facing Pages—gives you left and right-hand pages in your document.
4. Choose Letter - Half 5.5 x 8.5 for you Page Size.