The 21st Century Educator

Landstown Elementary School will be a VBCPS Vanguard Technology school again this year. We are proud of our state of the art schoolhouse with a Promethean Board with document camera in every classroom. In addition, we have 13 laptop labs of 24 computers as well as our computer lab and 40 IPads.  I will be adding to this blog throughout the year to discuss important developments in our instructional technology.  This year, ALL Standard of Learning tests will be administered on the computer. 

Many students in grades two, three, four and five grade are learning to access their blogs and Share Point storage accounts. This post is intended to help parents, help their student to use these technologies. SharePoint is a cloud technology that allows students to save their work and access it worldwide.

Blogs: All of our blogs are at www.kidblog.org . The login and password is known to each student who is blogging. Students should be RESPONDING to questions posed by the teacher only. Blogs are topical in nature, and its important to model this to our children.

SharePoint: To access a student SharePoint account, go to our website and pick STUDENT PORTAL, about halfway down the page you will see a yellow area and the words STUDENT PORTAL again. Click here and the student will be asked to login. LOGIN: vbstudents\student lunch number PASSWORD: students should know their password. Remember that it starts with a capital letter, the rest is lower case and ends with a numbers.

 If you have problems, the following recommendations may help. Internet Explorer 7 or greater is recommended for Windows Computers. Mac users will probably want to download Firefox, that will work better with SharePoint than Safari. You can go to TOOLS, INTERNET OPTIONS, SECURITY TAB, and add the following as trusted sites: schools.vbcps.com, portal.vbschools.com. AOL Users, login, then minimize AOL and use your Internet Explorer browser. SharePoint works great with Microsoft Office 2010 which is available at a discount through the school system to all students (www.journeyed.com ) or you can download the free Open Office (www.openoffice.org) which will also read all Microsoft Office files. If you have older children in middle or high school, they should be very familiar with SharePoint and may be able to help you as well.

Good luck and feel free to email me any questions at kevin.johnson@vbschools.com . Its a great time to be a kid! KJ

Landstown Elementary School will be a VBCPS Vanguard Technology school this year.  We are proud of our state of the art schoolhouse with a Promethean Board with document camera in every classroom.  In addition, we have 10 laptop laps of 24 computers as well as our computer lab.  I will be adding to this blog throughout the year to discuss important developments in our instructional technology.

Many students  in grades two,  three, four and five grade are learning to access their blogs and Share Point storage accounts. This post is intended to help parents, help their student to use these technologies. SharePoint is a cloud technology that allows students to save their work and access it worldwide. 

Blogs:
All of our blogs are at www.kidblog.org . The login and password is known to each student who is blogging. Students should be RESPONDING to questions posed by the teacher only.  Blogs are topical in nature, and its important to model this to our children.

SharePoint:
To access a student SharePoint account, go to our website and pick STUDENT PORTAL, about halfway down the page you will see a yellow area and the words STUDENT PORTAL again. Click here and the student will be asked to login.

LOGIN: vbstudents\student lunch number
PASSWORD: students should know their password. Remember that it starts with a capital letter, the rest is lower case and ends with a numbers.

If you have problems, the following recommendations may help.

• Internet Explorer 7 or greater is recommended for Windows Computers.
• Mac users will probably want to download Firefox, that will work better with SharePoint than Safari.
• You can go to TOOLS, INTERNET OPTIONS, SECURITY TAB, and add the following as trusted sites: schools.vbcps.com, portal.vbschools.com.
• AOL Users, login, then minimize AOL and use your Internet Explorer browser.

SharePoint works great with Microsoft Office 2010 which is available at a discount through the school system to all students (www.journeyed.com ) or you can download the free Open Office (www.openoffice.org) which will also read all Microsoft Office files.

If you have older children in middle or high school, they should be very familiar with SharePoint and may be able to help you as well. Good luck and feel free to email me any questions at kevin.johnson@vbschools.com .

Its a great time to be a kid!

KJ

Students in third, fourth and fifth grade are learning to access their blogs and Share Point storage accounts.  This post is intended to help parents, help their student to use these technologies.

Blogs:
All of our blogs are at www.edmodo.com .  The login is their lunch number and the password is known to each student.  Students should be RESPONDING to questions posed by the teacher only.

SharePoint:
To access a student SharePoint account, go to our website and pick STUDENT PORTAL, about halfway down the page you will see a yellow area and the words STUDENT PORTAL again.  Click here and the student will be asked to login. 

LOGIN:  vbstudents\student lunch number
PASSWORD:  students should know their password.  Remember that it starts with a capital letter, the rest is lower case and ends with 4 numbers.

If you have problems, the following recommendations may help.

• Internet Explorer 7 or greater is recommended for Windows Computers.
• Mac users will probably want to download Internet Explorer, that will work better with SharePoint than Safari.
• You can go to TOOLS, INTERNET OPTIONS, SECURITY TAB, and add the following as trusted sites:  schools.vbcps.com, portal.vbschools.com. 
• AOL Users, login, then minimize AOL and use your Internet Explorer browser.

SharePoint works great with Microsoft Office 2007 which is available at a discount through the school system to all students (www.journeyed.com ) or you can download the free Open Office (www.openoffice.org) which will also read all Microsoft Office files.

If you have older children in middle or high school, they should be very familiar with SharePoint and may be able to help you as well.  Good luck and feel free to email me any questions at kevin.johnson@vbschools.com .

Its a great time to be a kid!

KJ

Traditional media is quickly becoming a thing of the past.  As it does, the importance of the Blog is increasing more and more rapidly.  While the medium may change, there is little doubt that the writing and important achievements of this generation will be on the web.  It is therefore, of vital importance, to teach them how to use these mediums in safe ways and to make good decisions from a very young age.

Fortunately, blog engines for kids are increasing in both quantity and quality.  This year, I am quite proud of the fact that we have over 380 3rd, 4th and 5th graders who have entered the ranks of bloggers through an extremely child friendly blogging engine called EDMODO.  Edmodo is a totally closed system meaning that ONLY other Landstown Elementary students can see what is posted.  

The Virginia Beach School Board is pushing hard behind their Compass 2015 Strategic Plan.  These blogs are an important tool for students to use in adopting 21st Century learning techniques in the classroom. 

Its a great time to be a kid!

KJ

The Virginia Beach School Board has adopted a new strategic plan: “Compass to 2015.”   As part of this initiative to make sure students achieve 21^st century skills, students will be using an increasing amount of state-of-the-art instructional tools in daily instruction. 

1.  Students in grades three, four and five will be getting their own SharePoint Portal accounts.  This will allow them storage space that can be used to bring documents from home to school and to keep their own electronic calendar.  SharePoint is an important collaboration tool in the business world as well as in VBCPS middle and high schools that will now be used in the elementary schools.
2.  Students in many third, fourth and fifth grade classes will be doing writing online in a format known as a blog. According to the Wikipedia,    

A blog (short for web log) is a user-generated website where entries are made in journal style and displayed in a reverse chronological order.

Blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject, such as food, politics, or local news; some function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of most early blogs.

These student blogs will be hosted by www.edmodo.com.  This educational blog site was designed by an instructional technologist exclusively for school use and is a totally closed site to the outside world. 

1.  Many students will be working with WIKIs, these are simple websites that allow multiple students to edit a single page or topic.
2.  In accordance with Virginia law, internet safety is stressed throughout these activities.

We believe these experiences will allow students to become better writers while teaching them about an exciting new technology that is increasingly important in our society.  If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.

I recently attended the VSTE (Virginia Society for Technology in Education) and came away convinced that we continue to live in an age that is changing at an incredibly quick pace.  To keep the interest of the kids in this highly connected, multitasking world, we have to constantly have new tricks (teaching methods) up our sleaves. 

Tonight, I will once again be teaching a group of educators how to use Blogs and Wikis to assist in the teaching of creative writing.  This is the writing medium of the current generation and will continue to grow.  Tonight, I challenge yet another group of educators to take this technology and turn it into a wonderful learning tool in their classroom.

Its a wonderful time to be a kid, in a true 21st Century Classroom!

KCJ

I am quite excited that Landstown Elementary School has been picked as one of 10 sites to field test SOL Online Testing for Virginia Beach City Public Schools.  Besides the obvious advantage of preparing the students for online testing in middle and high school, this gives students a number of advantages:

• No more mis-bubbling an answer sheeet-each answer is done on the actual problem page.
• Graphics and Text are on the same page as the question, eliminating flipping through a booklet.
• This year our 5th graders will be taking their Social Studies and Science tests online.  In addition, some students will be taking reading and math on the computer.

These results will get back to us very quickly and save more than a few trees in the process (hum…testing is going green!).  I am very confident that our fifth graders will have a great experience with SOL online testing. 

KJ

This post is at the request of one of my third grade teachers.  Students often complete some really neat projects at home and more and more I am seeing them done in a technology rich format.  Recently, many third graders did slideshows at home and did an incredible job.  However, some were missing a tool to do the project that allowed them to bring them to a different computer and have them work properly.

Many students did their projects using Microsoft PowerPoint and since we own licenses for Microsoft Office for all of our machines, we were easily able to view these anywhere in the building.  However, many students do not have Microsoft Office and we dont necessarily own every possible piece of software that parents may own in order to view them on this end.

A great solution to this problem is the plethora of free Office Suite programs that are available.  Although there are many, the most common is probably Open Office which is available free at http://www.openoffice.org/.  The Impress Program is a basic slideshow editor and allows you to save the file in a format that is easily read by Microsoft PowerPoint.  The program is available for Mac as well (and even Linux).  This post is in no way an endorsement of the product, rather it is meant to give parents a free option to use for these types of projects. 

Another option for parents is to buy Microsoft Office through a special arrangement with the school system for a big discount.  Parents wishing this option can go to http://www.vbschools.com/administration/discount_software.asp . 

Whichever option you decide is best for you, have a great time!

KJ

All students (1st-5th) this week participated in the National Youth Initiative Mock Election.  It was fun to watch the kids get excited about the idea of expressing their opinion on who they thought should be our next President.  NYI, part of the University of Virginia, did a great job making this an easy but official looking process.  Kids really did feel like they were part of something big! We won’t have our results until tommorow, but this is really not the point.  This week, these students learned an important lesson on civic responsibility and were able to cast their votes with many thousands of other students from around the nation. 

Somehow doing on the computer in this case made it all the more “official.” This is a generation that has grown up with technologies that when I was their age, were only being imagined by people such as Arthur C. Clark or Isaac Asimov.  We have pushed hard the last few years to put 21st Century Learning into our school, as this particular use was very successful.

On a different note, if you are reading this blog, email Kevin.Johnson@vbschools.com and let me know.  Happy learning!

KJ

Several parents have called asking how they can practice podcasting with their kids.  For those who would like an easy explanation of podcasting, the impeded video below is an excellent explanation.

Common Craft-Podcasting in Plain English Read the rest of this entry »