Middle School Technology News

Over the past few weeks, we have been doing our best to introduce both new parents and students to all of the tech tools we use here at ISB.

For Parents:

Last week, Jeff and I led a Parent Technology Coffee Morning (an informal parent technology training held every first Wednesday of the month in one of the MPB rooms, usually at 7:30 or 8:30) focused on introducing new parents to tech at ISB.

We basically went through every tool listed on our student portal page and covered the most frequently asked parent technology questions:

• Changing passwords for PowerSchool & managing online updates
• Keeping up with student assignments via PantherNet (and the fact that only students have passwords for their PantherNet accounts)
• Keeping in touch with what’s new in classrooms via the Inside.ISB blogs
• Keeping in touch with what students are learning via the student blogs.ISB
• How to access the new Google Apps accounts we have for all students and why this is such a powerful tool for our school

We had over 30 ES & MS parents in attendance and we’ll most likely run this session again at least one more time this year since many of the parents were not new and simply wanted an update on what’s available and happening at ISB.

For Students:

I’ve also done 2 similar trainings for all of our new MS students (though not all students were released from class for both sessions). Thanks to James for the idea!

These new students should now be comfortable with:

• Using PantherNet as an online classroom (how to access information)
• Logging in to Google Apps for e-mail and Google Docs
• Basic blog posting (we created blogs and set up categories today)
• Navigating through PowerSchool to keep up with grades
• Finding community information on Inside.ISB

For Families and Teachers:

Our wonderful counselors and I have also created a standard letter home for all new students with a clear listing of all new ISB accounts (and their related passwords). Most seem to keep this paper at home, but if they’re having trouble accessing any of their accounts here at school, you might want to ask them to bring it in.

Hopefully this will help both our students and parents feel more comfortable with the many tools we use here at ISB!