Getting Rid of those Pesky Blue Indicators

If you are someone who works with many people and uses several Microsoft Outlook calendars to keep you organized, then you know about the blue notification indicators next to individual calendars. If not, they are a simple number that looks like this:

(23)

As people add appointments to your public calendar these indicators
can grow larger and larger by the minute. Some folks don't even pay attention to them, while others (myself included) can't stand them! It's kinda like allowing your email SPAM folder to grow to astronomical proportions.

Recently, our school updated software to Microsoft Outlook 2010 and one of the first things I noticed was that Microsoft made it more challenging to remove these pesky blue indicators, but not impossible. Below is a tutorial for how to remove these notifications. Enjoy!

Using Student Email Addresses to Assess Students

The school district that I work in recently rolled out Google Apps for Education giving students the ability to collaborate and work together on numerous instructional activities in school or from home. One part of the this implementation was providing students with an email address. Obviously, parents and teachers have their opinions for whether or not their children or students should have/need an email address, especially at the elementary age. Heck, some older students may already have one!

One of the nice pieces to our "walled garden" is that it establishes a safe environment to share information between students and teachers. For those that don't know what a "walled garden" is, let me explain. The concept prevents anyone, I mean anyone, who does not have our school districts handle (for example: @gmail.com,) from communicating with staff or students. With this in mind teachers may be wondering how can will use this email address in school. Here are a couple of ideas:

Instead of an exit ticket, students can email their teacher with what they have learned as well as any questions they may have. Another idea is to send students an email with a question and have students respond by email.

Teachers could show how they are using technology by printing out student emails and hanging them up.

Keep in mind that parameters need to be set and email expectations need to be established from the very beginning. Students will love emailing their teachers and you will have a written record of student understanding.

One more tip: since you will be getting several emails from your students you may want to setup mail forwarding. Check out my tutorial on how to set this up here.

#HourofCode

Do you want your child to be a thinker? Of course! Do you want them to be an out of box thinker? Indeed. Do you want to stretch your child's thinking in a way that can help them in any area of life they choose? Then challenge them to learn code. I know that if I had at my fingertips, what these children have now when I was their age, it could have been a whole different world for me.

It's not often that I am impressed with things, but the program being rolled out by code.org during Computer Science Education Week is impressive. They have the support of some of the worlds most identifiable leaders and trendsetters. Take a look.

Code.org has put together a simple and effective way to show kids that coding is easy, once you get the hang of it, by using what they can relate to...Angry Birds. Genius! Their challenge, called the Hour of Code is to provide an opportunity for every student across the country to try computer science for one hour during Computer Science Education Week (Dec. 8-12). They have programming games for all ages, including games for the younger kiddos. Whats more is that they offer a self-service program that goes beyond the Hour of Code and encourages educators to teach students coding basics in the classroom or as an after-school activity. Even cooler is that code.org has written the lessons to go along so all you have to do is figure how to light the spark.

Here are some ways to include coding in your school day:

1. Take them to the computer lab and show them this video. Then, let them explore.
2. Provide a link on your Blackboard site or another site your school uses. Here are some:
• Angry Birds
• Coding (Unplugged)
• LightBot
• Tynker
3. Encourage your technology specialist or someone interested to hold a Coding Club.

I hope everyone finds some way to include the Hour of Code into their schools and classrooms. Please share any awesome ideas and ways you are spreading the word about computer science.