Blog Archives

Ukulele’s in Friendship!

2/25/2021

Mr. Arron Wixson’s 7th grade general music class was in for quite a treat after Christmas break. Mr. Wixson worked with Mark Beckwith from CABOCES Professional Development to be one of the first teachers in our area to use the new Ukulele’s that were purchased at CABOCES Learning Resources. The 7th grade students worked with Mr. Wixson for about 6 weeks learning the scales and the chords so that before the February break they’d be able to play a song of their choosing. Everyone had a ball learning the new and unique instrument, and the sounds of ukulele’s filled the Friendship halls daily.
Thank you Learning Resources team and Mark Beckwith for helping make this happen. We can’t wait to use them again next year.

By: Mark Carls, CA BOCES Professional Development

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Microsoft Teams updates

2/16/2021

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A new month brings exciting new Microsoft Teams technology designed to help your classroom stay organized, save time, and collaborate in the months ahead. A slew of new features and updates are rolling out now and will be available soon to support both students and staff as they move into spring. Look at the included PDF for more info, as well.

Here are a few of the newest updates:

Teachers and students can brainstorm, take notes, and share ideas using Microsoft Whiteboard, a free-form digital canvas directly inside of a Teams Channel. Using the “+” tab sign at the top a Channel, you can then click to add a Whiteboard to your Team Channel. This feature lets Teams classrooms draw and write together using colorful pens, pencils, text boxes, and sticky notes. Teachers can either present material on a Whiteboard or make one available to the class for editing, allowing students to collaborate in real-time. After class, these Whiteboards are saved as a file, so students can reference their work.
It’s critical for teachers to understand not only how individual students are performing, but how classes are performing as a whole. Assignment and Grading, a feature in Education Insights, does just that. Teachers can access high-level information, including trends in grade averages and completed and missed assignments. They can also access more detailed information on specific assignments or students, so they are better able to provide individualized help when needed.
Teachers can enable/disable chat for Teams Meetings! Creating meaningful discussions with students using the chat feature inside Teams meetings has tremendous power for learning and facilitating engaging conversations between students. Sometimes, the chat can become a distraction to your meeting, and shift the focus away from the content you are trying to teach. Now, teachers have the ability to allow or prevent students from chatting during Teams Meetings with a quick toggle inside "Meeting Options" from the "..." bar. It can also be set up as a default option from the meeting scheduler ahead of time!
Uploaded files and resources can now be pinned in the “Files” tab! The Teams files experience can be messy, confusing, and disorderly to some teachers. Now, you can click the bubble beside a file or folder and choose to "pin" it to the top of the "Files" tab for quick locating and viewing! Great for adding resources and files that your students need to find without spending time searching! Files and folders can be pinned or unpinned at will, so you can always keep the most recent or up-to-date information at the top of the screen for the best and quickest access to the materials needed for success in your classroom.

As the year continues on, stay tuned as more updates and feature improvements to the Microsoft Teams platform head out to teachers.

By: Ryan McGinnis, CA BOCES Model Schools

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NewsBank

2/8/2021

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In December, 2020 Learning Resources recorded 148,893 searches in NewsBank. This database is filled with the most recent news collected from 11,706 regional, state, national and international sources. Students and faculty can search for news, blogs, videos, transcripts related to many topics including SEL, STEM, Diversity Equity Inclusion, Sports, and more. NewsBank’s Hot Topics feature makes it easy for 7-12 grade teachers to engage students in current events with ready-made questions related to articles. Those looking to bring perspective into the classroom or research project can search for an article by topic and/or any location in the world. Digitized newspapers from 1690-2000 provide historical perspective as well.

Historic newspapers can be searched by either the timeline or topic search to easily find news and eyewitness accounts and pro/con articles of events. Consider issues and daily life in the colonies or during the Revolutionary War, westward expansion, the Civil War, Reconstruction, industrialization, the Progressive Era, World War I, the Great Depression, Vietnam War, World War II, Civil Rights Movement, Cold War, globalization and other eras. Users can search for illustrations, advertisements, classifieds, birth and marriage announcements, obituaries, stories about historic people and other articles exactly as they appeared in print.

Although February is widely recognized as Black History Month, Black Life in America offers curated articles for easy retrieval and meaningful discourse year-round. Newsbank is offering FREE access to its database, Black Life in America through the month of February 2021. It provides comprehensive coverage of the African American experience from earliest times to today, and articles are curated from 19,000 American and global newspapers from 1704 to the present, including over 400 African American newspapers. Users are provided with full-text searching as well as access to content by Topic, Event, and Eras in African American History. This database is updated daily.

If you would like to know more on how to use this database, please contact Cecelia_Fuoco@caboces.org

By: Cece Fuoco, CA BOCES Learning Resources

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Ukulele’s in Friendship!

Microsoft Teams updates

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