Author: PCCS TIS

Before leaving for your well deserved summer vacation, please comply with the directions of your principal and main office to turn in or secure all classroom technology equipment such as document cameras, microphones, interactive pens, and remotes. On your last school day, please also power off projectors, interactive flat panels, sound amps, and desktop computers, etc. You may leave printers and copiers plugged in and powered on.

Please also secure or take home all District-assigned devices (laptop, Chromebook, iPad, etc.), as well as all personally-owned devices.

District-assigned devices should be brought back when you return to school in the fall OR upon separation of service from the District (retirement, resignation, lay-off, etc.) (please see this document if you are separating from service).

Thanks for your cooperation in helping safeguard district tech!

Thanks for your service! Before heading to your next chapter, please remember to return your District-issued technology equipment, including laptops, Chromebooks, iPads, Apple TVs, etc. Please complete this form and please make note of any damages or issues when you turn it in as well.

Equipment provided directly by the District should be returned to the Technology Department via the building technician. Please submit a Service Request to arrange a pickup with the building Technician. We suggest that you back-up any personal files to a personal flash drive (or upload them to a personal cloud storage account such as a personal Gmail Google Drive account or a Dropbox account), and then remove any personal data from District equipment before you return it.

Equipment purchased via overage funds, EEF grants, PTO funds, etc. should be returned to the building office secretary.

If you need to take your data with you, please follow the process outlined by Google and Google Takeout: https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout

More info and directions on Takeout: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3024190?hl=en

Lightspeed Technologies (found in our secondary schools), and Teach Logic (found in our elementary schools), the manufacturers and service providers for our audio systems provided some tips for the care of our classroom audio system over the summer.

The P-CCS Tech department urges that microphones be stored in a secure location as buildings are responsible for their replacement should they be damaged or missing.

Before leaving school for your summer break, here are a few tips for summertime care of the systems:

• Charge the microphone batteries fully (8-10 hours, remember to turn off the microphones) after the last day of use.
• Disconnect the microphones from the charger.
• You may wish to remove the batteries and store them with the microphone(s).
• You may unplug the systems from the wall power outlet to conserve electricity.
• Store systems and mics in a place where they will be safe from damage while summer projects/cleaning might take place.
• The batteries will hold a residual charge over the summer, and will only need to be charged up overnight before the first day of use.
• If there will be construction and/or renovation in a particular area or room, some type of bag or covering for the amplifier or the REDCAT will help protect the components.

At the beginning of the next school year:

• Remove any type of bag or covering for the amplifier or the REDCAT, if used.
• Plug the system back in (if it was unplugged over the summer).
• Fully charge the batteries again (8-10 hours).
• The system is now ready for use.

Do you want to learn more about the TextHelp suite of tools for teachers & students? Checkout TextHelp’s Training Portal!

TextHelp’s tools include:
Read&Write : A UDL tool for literacy
EquatIO: Make math digital
WriQ: Instantly access student writing & level
Fluency Tutor: Increase student fluency & track progress

According to Texthelp’s Training Portal:
Technology can be the spark for wonderful things, but its real value comes from empowering users – in the workplace, at school or at home. To get the most out of TextHelp products, they offer three main areas of support.

Courses – From learning the basics to integrating into instruction, their short courses bring together strategies and best practice. Each course has simple instructions, videos, and great examples to help you become experts in their software. You can gain achievements along the way!

Certification – Here is a chance to show what you know with two levels of certification: Level 1 Certified User requiring passing an assessment and Level 2 Role-Specific Practitioner requiring passing and a project. Earners receive badges and certificates.

Resources – Why recreate the wheel? They have plenty of checklists, lesson plans, strategies, help/tip sheets, presentations, and ideas to get you started and keep you going. Many are contributed by educators just like you.

Head to: https://training.texthelp.com/course/index.php

Google Books has officially been around since 2005 and has evolved over time. Despite some early controversies the service offers many digital resources in a handy user and search interface. Some new features worth checking out are highlighted in this video by Richard Byrne and his blog post.

For more about how to use Google Books, check out this Google support page.

For a few other sites with free digital resources, check out Project Gutenberg, Europeana, and the Internet Archive.

A federal court ruling announced last week reminds us all of the importance of following copyright. HISD (Houston ISD from Texas) has just been ordered to pay $9.2 million dollars ($9,200,000) due to copyright infringement. (Staff in the Houston school district took willful steps to ignore copyright and the company whose copyrighted materials they copied and circulated without permission now stands to receive millions in belated compensation/damages.)

This should serve as a reminder that we should follow copyright. Generally, we shouldn’t be posting or sharing material that we didn’t create or that we don’t know is licensed under Creative Commons.

This includes not only print, but audio and video as well.

Please remember that our district expects staff to respect copyrights.

See Richard Byrne’s posting for three lessons to learn from this, this article for more general info, Google’s Help Center on Copyright and/or this article for more on the HISD ruling.

Please note — teachers who are leaving the district, graduating seniors, and any and all other students who will not be enrolled in the district next school year — access to their district Google accounts will be permanently suspended beginning in August 2019. Teachers and staff, please help us remind our graduating seniors and outgoing staff that this is the case.

As a reminder, all district Google account holders, including students, are able to transfer copies of their documents and emails to a non-district* Google Account and/or download their data.

If you are interested in Google’s free TRANSFER service, please see this help guide.

If interested in Google’s FREE DOWNLOAD service, please see this help guide. Both of these services work via Google TakeOut and are quick and easy to initiate.

For those whose accounts will be suspended, please consider alerting important contacts with whom you may correspond, that your email address will no longer work later this summer and provide them with whatever might be your new email address as soon as possible to avoid lapses in communication. If you need any additional assistance with this, please contact your building tech integration specialist richard.coughlin@pccsk12.com OR matthew.smoot@pccsk12.com.

There, unfortunately, is still not a fix at this point from Google on the printing issues occurring in Google Chrome. It is a known bug that crashes the Chrome browser when a print job is attempted and more than one printer is available that shares the same driver (which exists in our environment); they do have engineers working on a fix.

Here are some suggestions to be able to print:

1. When trying to print- Press Ctrl Shift P. This will open a dialog box and often, but not always, allow you to send the file to a printer.
2. Download the file you want to print as a PDF and then open it with Adobe Acrobat. By opening your file as a PDF in a separate software, you can bypass Chrome and will be able to print.
3. Open and print what you want using a different browser such as Microsoft Edge or Internet Explorer. Edge is Microsoft’s internet browser. To open Microsoft Edge, click on start menu on bottom left corner and in search bar type “Microsoft Edge.”

As soon as Google confirms a patch and we have tested it, we will release info through email and/or blog. At this point the earliest a fix is expected from Google engineers is sometime in late June.

We know this sounds a lot like EdPuzzle, if that’s something you’re already using, but ClassHook is a little different. What makes ClassHook’s “Pause Prompts” different from services like EDpuzzle, is that Pause Prompts aren’t intended to be homework assignments or individual assignments. Applications for Education Pause Prompts include giving students time to jot down some notes from a video or giving students time to answer or ask questions in small groups. ClassHook’s search feature could save you time when you’re searching for a video clip to support a point in your lesson plan and it can also be helpful in finding a video to build a flipped lesson.

ClassHook’s “Pause Prompts” let you add questions to an existing video as well, and it’s a great service for finding video clips to use in your classroom. Not only do ClassHook clips come from well-known movies and television shows, but you can also search for those clips according to subject area and topic. To reiterate, earlier this month, ClassHook introduced a new feature called Pause Prompts. Pause Prompts are questions that pop-up and pause a video in progress. The prompts are meant to be used for facilitating classroom conversations or to give students time to take notes at an important point in the video. https://www.classhook.com/

G Suite Updates is the official feed from the G Suite team and provides essential information about new features and improvements for G Suite customers. Click “Subscribe by email” for a link to add your email address. Or at least bookmark the GSuite Product Updates site to check out what’s happening as new releases occur.

For example, you can keep up to date on features that will both benefit your students AND you!

Learn that Google Sites just added the ability to create image carousels: https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2019/05/create-img-carousel-sites.html

Learn that Google Sheets just added the ability to remove duplicates and trim whitespace: https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2019/05/new-sheets-features-may.html

Learn that Google Slides now includes automatic, real-time, closed captioning: https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2018/10/automatic-real-time-captions-google-slides.html

Learn that Google just revamped their GSuite Learning Center

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