Week of January 18, 2022

 All Staff: Make Sure Your Address is CORRECT in the Employee Portal :

• Why?
• Make sure your W2 is sent to the correct address
• Prepare your TTSD account for the new Staff Portal (coming...March 2022)
• When? 
• ASAP (....was due Jan 14th for W2s)

http://portal.ttsd.k12.or.us >> Login

Self Service>> Profile 

Live Translated Captions in Google Meet
Live translated captions in Google Meet are now available mobie. Languages currently available are French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish

From Google…

Educator Resources

Celebrate Black History Month with Applied Digital Skills Looking for lesson ideas for Black History Month? Our "Celebrate Black History, Culture & Identity" collection offers great project-based lessons for students to discover and reflect on the contributions of African Americans and the legacies that have shaped our world.

Week of January 10, 2022

 Preparing & Practicing for Distance Learning with your Classroom 

• Elementary School Teacher/Classroom Prep Checklist
• Google Meet Link, practice breakout rooms
• Class communication (Remind, Canvas, Synergy, etc)
• Digital Tools
• Last Year lessons from Jan/Feb
• Secondary School Teacher/Classroom Prep Checklist
• Google Meet link(s), practice breakout rooms
• Practice digital workflow - lessons and receiving/submitting assignments online
• Communication and Support "sessions" for drop in help.

Week of Dec 13th - WINTER BREAK

WINTER BREAK STAFF NECESSARY UPDATES:

TTSD's winter break runs Dec 18th through Jan 2nd and is an excellent opportunity to run some lengthy updates.  All staff with TTSD technology please perform the following during your break to ensure your technology devices are working optimally and are secure.  It is the TTSD staff member's responsibility to back up their work documents and run the latest updates on TTSD issued devices. You may take these steps anytime before mid January 2022.

PLUG YOUR DEVICE INTO POWER BEFORE BEGINNING THE FOLLOWING...

1.  Check that you are backing up important work files from your laptop/mobile device/s: 
1. Computer Backup Instructions for laptops [could take a few minutes, up to a few hours]
2. Instruction to Backup iPad Apps
2. Run Operating System updates: [could take ~1 hour]
1. Update macOS computer << Please NOTE Step #3, click MORE INFO....

PRINTSHOP ORDERS:

  

Our printshop staff will also be taking the Winter Break off for some well-deserved rest.  Please note print jobs submitted just before the break and/or during the break will begin being processed on January 3rd (with a 3-5 day turn around).  Thank you for your pre-planning and support of our print shop team. 

Week of December 6th

Where Should I Go to Learn of Wide-Spread Technology Issues at TTSD?

• At times, we may experience wide-spread technical hiccups.  As soon as the IT Department knows and confirms the outage, the first place staff (and students) should check is the Announcements on the TTSD Ticket System

                                     

Examples may include - Canvas outage, Synergy outage, Google slowness, Amazon Web Service outage (like this week) - impacting logins to various TTSD systems, etc.

F = NG in Synergy Overall Grade

Per TTSD grading guidance for 2021-22 school year (see October 2021 communication from T&L below), we have adjusted the Synergy Report Card Score Type of Genesis grading to reflect this adjustment.  If you are using this score type in your gradebook (it's the default), you may notice your F's have automatically be adjusted to "NG"

Middle School Grade/Reporting Communication 

The below guidance was in play for quarter one, but will be extended for the remainder of the 2021-22 school year as we continue to experience COVID specific issues with quarantining and flexing instructional models/plans for many of our students, which has brought with it continued learning on the part of our parents, students, and teachers in dealing with health and protocol related issues.

Because students and teachers have had to continue to adjust to current in-person protocols, routines and systems changes, grades for the 21-22 school year are reflective of learning outcomes in the following way:  

Grades will be provided as indicated by an A, B, C, D  or NG (No Grade).  If a student receives an NG, it must be followed up with a comment with further explanation as to what the NG means/represents.

• This decision allows for student progress to be shared by letter grades already established and with the understanding that the adjustments are necessary due to COVID related protocols impacting students at all levels.
• F's can be defeating for students initially with the unpredictable shifts in delivery of instruction that can and have occurred. Given the many variables that continue to be beyond our control at this time, we will continue this year in issuing NGs (No Grade) with comments when necessary and continue to reflect learning outcomes using grades of A, B, C or D.

Week of November 29, 2021

Embedded Videos on iPads, Slow Internet, Google Timeout & Filter Errors

• Two known issues we are facing with our new Internet filter (LightSpeed):
1. EMBEDDED video links to either YouTube or Google Drive will not work on iPads.  Many teachers have streamlined their presentations with embedded videos in their Google Slides or on a Canvas page.  Unfortunately, the security settings we need on LightSpeed are preventing these from playing on student iPads.  Please place a DIRECT LINK to the video rather than embedding it for your K-8the grade students.
2. Computers (laptops, desktops -- not Chromebooks or iPads) are experiencing slowness, website/Google drive "offline," and some wifi disconnects. We are working closely with the vendor to remedy this issue. Restarting your computer often temporarily fixes the issue. If you are experiencing this issue, please share your experience in this ONE question survey

Down Day Weekend - 1st Weekend in December

The first Sunday of EACH month is reserved for the IT Department to perform disruptive (but necessary) maintenance on our networks systems.  With 24/7 access to online resources for our staff and students, we have reserved the FIRST Sunday of each month to perform this work.

Please note Sunday there will likely be disruption to various systems that may impact your access to: TTSD phone system, network resources (wifi), internet filter and Mac/iPad "Self Service"

Week of November 15, 2021

2021-22 Grading Periods:

  

In Canvas, teachers can choose to view assignments by individual grading period OR all grading periods, by: 

1. Open course card
2. Go to "Grades" menu
3. Click View >> Filter >> Grading Periods
   
   
   
4. Choose which grading period you want from the  NEW dropdown menu in the upper right corner
   
   
   

(NOTE: if assignments do not have any due dates, the last grading period will be automatically assigned. ** If you are "missing" assignments, please turn on your Grading Period filters (directions above))

Week of November 1, 2021

 Secondary Teachers: Canvas and Synergy

Last year we introduced Canvas as the TTSD LMS, due to its ability to manage more online learning needs . These features included: integration with 3rd party apps, a fully functional grade book, parent interface, and the potential sync to Synergy to ease in grade posting and transfer to Synergy to name a few.  Additionally, ur new MTSS system (iON) is able to pull grade book assignments and grades from Synergy to help us identify students who are in need of additional support, saving our staff countless hours data mining systems to create adhoc reports for weekly meetings. 

It's been a stressful start to the Fall 2021 school year, and I want to acknowledge quite a few things have changed since we left TTSD schools in March 2020.  As we try to settle into this school year and embrace all that it has to offer, I'm very aware that some of the systems setup was just "too much" for many at the beginning of the year.  

Conferences last week were a great opportunity for us to view our setup from parents perspective. We have found it's important to "regroup" and ensure Canvas is set up to communicate well with students and parents.  So, we have created TWO helpful knowledgebase (KB) articles to help our teachers review their Canvas setup so it syncs seamlessly with Synergy (and therefore with the MTSS system and displays an overall course grade for student/parents).

Highlights for Teachers:

• Use Canvas gradebook exclusively for all of your class assignments (digital or paper/pencil or participation points)
• Match your Assignment Groups in Canvas with your Assignment categories in Synergy grade book
• Double check the assignments you want to sync are in sync
• by either comparing your Grades in Canvas with the Synergy gradebook
• or an alternate way is to ask a student to show you both views from their perspective (this will help you see how it appears to students and parents)
• Set up your Canvas course card to "nightly sync" with Synergy
• Review the KB articles for tips and tricks on grade passback (Canvas > Synergy).

2021-22 Canvas Course Setup Checklist - Secondary Teachers

FAMILIES: How to View Middle and High School Student Progress - Using a Web Browser

 Elementary Teachers: Canvas and Seesaw

As many of you complete your Canvas course card setup, we have heard that some teachers are enjoying the use of SeeSaw with younger students.  To create an EASY link from Canvas to SeeSaw, you can download the following SeeSaw image and use the CRAZY long link to link the image directly to SeeSaw (magically without having to go through Clever app first):

CRAZY Link:  
https://clever.com/oauth/instant-login?client_id=1a3bcfced3726d93850d&district_id=5716acf32ccd5401000004bc

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