What’s new on IXL – January 2023

IXL New features

IXL has compiled a list of their top new features to help you students and staff get the most out of IXL.

Keep reading below for a roundup of releases from the past month, including video tutorials for English language arts skills, mobile support for IXL games, iPhone app support for the Real-Time Diagnostic, and more! To stay current with our latest updates, follow IXL on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.

Table of contents

Major releases

English language arts video tutorials

Lights, camera, action: English language arts video tutorials have arrived! IXL now has videos for nearly half of our pre-kindergarten and kindergarten Reading Foundations skills. These tutorials help students learn how to read in a fun, engaging, and effective way. They provide research-based direct instruction for early literacy skills like phonemic awareness, phonics, and sight words, and they align with the science of reading.

Like IXL’s math video tutorials, these videos can be accessed from the practice page of their associated skills by clicking the “Watch a tutorial” link. Check out a few examples below:

We will continue to release more pre-K and kindergarten videos in the coming months.

IXL ELA video tutorials

Navigating Professional Development with Canvas Catalog

Need to know how to enroll in a course? Want to remember what courses you took in previous years? Want a record of PD for yourself? View the PCCS Canvas Catalog Guide to get all your catalog questions answered!

Preparing your Canvas Pages for the Second Semester

Especially for those that have a first semester or Quarter 2 Canvas course ending soon, here are some Canvas considerations:

  1. For high school Semester 1 / Q2 courses, Teachers will have access to make edits, give feedback, and grade assignments in Canvas until 11:59 pm on February 1, 2023 (middle school date is January 31, 2023). After that date, the course will have read-only access. For Year Long courses, read and write access will remain until the end of the school year with the exception of grades for the past terms. Grades will not be editable.
  2. High school students will have access to participate in FIRST SEMESTER courses until 11:59 pm on January 30, 2023 (middle school date is January 27, 2023).  After that date, students will have read-only access to the course (with the exception of quiz questions to which they will not have access).
    • If you do not want students to have read-only access, you will need to update your course settings.
    • If you want to extend student access past 1/30 for assignment submissions, see #4 below.
  3. Students will continue to have access in Year Long Courses to submit assignments with due dates in the first semester unless you have an available until date of JAN. 30 or earlier.  You can edit those dates in bulk by following the steps here.
  4. By default, students enrolled in a Canvas course will lose access to submit material when the course ends. To extend access for students to a Canvas course past the term end date, you must make the adjustment PRIOR to the last day of the course while their enrollment is active. Access cannot be reinstated after a course concludes. If you want to extend access to your students to be able to submit coursework towards a first semester / quarter 2 Canvas course, you will need to change the end date in your course settings to override the term end date in the system at least 2 days prior to the end of the term so it is captured in subsequent syncs. See https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Instructor-Guide/How-do-I-change-the-start-and-end-dates-for-a-course/ta-p/452354 for more guidance on this matter. An assignment’s available until date may also need to be adjusted. Please note, you will need to bear in mind MISTAR syncing will end due to grade submission deadlines and you may have to work with your records office to update a report card if submitted late work results in a grade change.
  5. Teachers can copy the content from their Semester 1 / Quarter 2 course to their Semester 2 course (and beyond) even after the course has concluded.
  6. TEACHERS please remember to PUBLISH your Semester 2 / Quarter 3 courses no later than the start of the term.
  7. If you’re considering cross listing your courses, please revisit this blog post https://tech.pccsk12.com/how-to-cross-list-your-semester-2-courses/ 

REMC’s January news and updates

REMC January Newsletter

REMC Courses

REMC offers a look ahead at course offerings to help you plan your professional learning

If you are looking to enhance your technology integration skills, explore new instructional delivery methods or learn tips and tricks from Michigan educational practitioners – The REMC Association has something for you!  To help with your professional learning planning, we are excited to share our January through June 2023 REMC Course schedule.

Take a look at all course offerings and register today! Earn 10 FREE SCECHs upon completion. Simply visit www.remc.org/remc-all-events/.

READ MORE

REMC Save

REMC SAVE has new pricing for Supplies, Furniture and Technology 

Save time and money by purchasing through REMC SAVE! New contracts for Supplies, Furniture and Technology launched on January 1st. REMC SAVE offers more than 1,500 individual items and 82 catalog discounts through 22 awarded vendors.

REMC SAVE is a service of the REMC Association of Michigan for all public and private schools statewide and other public agencies.

READ MORE

Podcasting REMC

REMC is offering Podcasting: From Idea to Implementation workshop on March 22nd   

Ready to start your podcasting journey? Looking to expand your podcasting knowledge with current practitioners? Join REMC on March 22nd for a workshop that will focus on amplifying you, your students’ or your colleagues’ voices through podcasting.

This workshop is a hands-on experience to equip participants with knowledge, skills, and time to begin developing and creating a podcast. Held at the Gratiot-Isabella RESD, people can attend as teams or individuals.  There is a virtual option.

READ MORE

From REMC’s January newsletter:

REMC explained

MISTAR-Q: FREE Online Training for Teachers

Monarch

Registration is open for the next session of Monarch running Jan 23 through May 23, 2023

Teachers are invited to transform their use of MISTAR-Q by participating in Monarch, an asynchronous online learning experience.

You will complete activities to increase your knowledge of MISTAR-Q teacher apps including Class Attendance, Grade Book, Seating Chart, generating reports, and more. Monarch is especially beneficial for teachers new to MISTAR-Q.

Working online at your own pace, you will progress through four levels of activities and earn digital badges in recognition of your learning.

SCECHs are available. You may between 7 and 13 SCECHs, depending on how much of the course you complete. Only activities completed by May 23 will count towards SCECH hours. Hours will be submitted at the end of the course in May.

This course is free.

Please register only if you commit to participate as there is high demand for this course.

Register here  – and watch for emails with details on how to get started.

Cannot remember your (Personal Identification Code) PIC number? Contact our HR Office or see the steps to perform a lookup online here.

Another random handful of web resources that might be of interest

Useful Sites

Unclutter is a free and open-source Chrome and Firefox browser extension that anyone can use to remove the clutter from a web page. That’s not all that Unclutter does. It also lets you save articles to read later, highlight and annotate articles that you save, and Unclutter lets you adjust the size and contrast of the text displayed on your screen. The clutter that Unclutter removes from web pages include all sidebar content as well as all advertisements appearing above, below, and in the body of an article.

Animate from Audio hosted by Adobe Express is a fun little tool that matches your spoken words to an animated character of your choosing. The finished product is a short video that you can download as an MP4 or share on your favorite websites. To create a video with Animate from Audio simply head to the site then select the character that you want to animate. Then record your spoken audio. After recording your audio Adobe Express then matches your audio to movements of your chosen character. The more inflection in your speech, the more movement you’ll see in the character.

Felt is a free multimedia mapping tool which just recently added some new features including new base maps and an updated image overlay feature. The image overlay feature on Felt can be used to overlay historic maps on current maps. You can adjust the transparency of the overlay to easily compare past and present views of roads, buildings, and landmarks. The updated version of Felt lets you use image files as well as PDFs as overlays.Felt makes it easy to add collaborators to your map, set individual permissions, and keep the map private within a team. And for those into maps, MapPuzzle is a simple online geography game based on the premise of political boundaries being the lines in a jigsaw puzzle. You have to drag the countries, states, or provinces into their proper places on the map.

TED-Ed’s Periodic Videos page features an interactive Periodic Table of Elements. Click on any of the elements to launch a video. Below the video you will find a link to the related TED-Ed lesson. Each of the TED-Ed lessons follows the typical format of providing a handful of multiple choice and short answer questions. The lessons also include some links to additional references.

Rubicon Atlas Updates including Google Calendar integration

Atlas What's New

Rubicon Atlas’ product team have been focusing on improving the Atlas experience for teachers and some recent updates include:

  • Calendar improvements across both units and lessons allow teachers to better manage pacing throughout the year with the ability to sync your Atlas calendar with your Google Calendar for streamlined planning. (see more on this below)
  • Editing lessons while viewing units simultaneously improves workflow and simplifies the planning process.
  • A brand new Atlas Dashboard to set the stage for a productive start to 2023.
  • To learn more about these and other updates, browse to What’s New in Atlas

VIEW and ACCESS your Atlas courses, units and lessons all within your Google Calendar! To learn more about the Google Calendar Integration and how to set it up, click here.

To login to Rubicon Atlas, browse to HERE

Closing Down Technology For Break!

Tech break checklist

Happy holidays all!

For those of you about to begin a well deserved two week winter break, which we hope will be all you hope for and a bit more, on THURSDAY before you leave (and possibly, if need be, again on Friday)….

WOULD YOU PLEASE SECURE ALL VALUABLES in the classrooms and office spaces you inhabit. This includes laptops, document cameras, Apple TVs, remotes, and interactive pens.

Further, would you please make sure all iPads and ChromeBooks are in their carts and those CARTS ARE LOCKED and plugged in before leaving.

Finally, would you please also POWER OFF any of the following equipment, if it is equipment you handle:

  • projectors
  • sound amps
  • SmartBoards
  • desktop computers
  • monitors
  • printers

THANK YOU for your cooperation.

Tech break checklist

Grammarly Extension Will No Longer Be Force Installed Starting January 16, 2023

Grammarly is a Chrome browser extension that reviews spelling, grammar, punctuation, clarity, engagement, and delivery mistakes in English texts. It detects plagiarism and suggests replacements for the identified errors. It also allows users to customize their style, tone, and context-specific language.

The Grammarly Chrome extension has been force installed on student Google accounts for the past several years, however, it recently started creating an issue with the built-in spell check feature in Google Docs. Its interference with Google’s native spell checker means that when students or staff are using Google Docs and words are misspelled, these mispellings aren’t identified with a red underline. While Google’s spell checker can still be used, the lack of underlining requires you to launch it by depressing Ctrl+Alt+X and using the arrow keys to cycle through words of concern.

To address this issue, the district will no longer force install the Grammarly Chrome extension on student accounts starting Monday, January 16, 2023. (Staff will not be impacted by this change since the Grammarly extension is not force installed on their accounts.) Unfortunately, when Chrome extensions are no longer force installed, they are automatically removed from the impacted accounts. If students would still like to use the Grammarly extension after it is removed, they must manually install it from the Chrome Webstore. Below is a direct link to where the Grammarly extension can be installed.

Grammarly Chrome Extension from Chrome Webstore

After the extension has been reinstalled, users will be able to use it as they have in the past, but also will be able to disable it when desired, such as when using Google Docs.

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact the technology department by submitting a service ticket.

Ditch Summit’s Free Online PD now available through January 6

Ditch that Summit

As mentioned in one of our last month’s blog posts, the Ditch That Textbook Digital Summit hosted by Matt Miller promises valuable knowledge from top innovators AND tips you can implement immediately. All videos — more than 80 — will be available in December and early January. Like any other conference, when it’s over, it’s over and the videos will disappear. Speaker videos last anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour. They’re practical and inspirational, from hand-picked education leaders. Each video is accompanied by a PDF notes page summarizing the message. Download the notes, share, and keep them as long as you want.

Ditch Summit