Tech Teacher of the Month November

Congratulations to Laurie Hollman from Mission Oak High School!

Tech Teacher of the Month- October

Congratulations to Tulare Union's Eric York! Eric is a Science teacher who incorporates some awesome technology into his classes.

Web Filtering Policies

Our web filtering policies can be found on the web filter policies document under Technology Documents to the right. The document shows what categories are available to us in the filter, and which categories we have turned on or off for restricted or unrestricted students. Additionally, the restricted policy is enforced on all students from 11:00 PM to 6:00 AM Monday through Friday.

Our overall goal with this policy is to never restrict students from doing homework, but to restrict them from non educational sites if they are restricted or when they should be getting ready for school the next day. Certainly there will be sites in the "wrong" category that inadvertently get blocked, or sites that are correctly categorized but not usually educational that a student might want to use for research. If we are made aware of any sites that are needed for educational purposes we will do our best to allow them.

As to restricted and unrestricted, this information is pulled from the Aeries authorizations table. A student will be restricted for one of the following reasons: They do not have a current Responsible Use Agreement on file according to Aeries; Their parent or guardian has requested they not have access to games or social media; Disciplinary restriction for violating the Responsible Use Agreement; Academic restriction if they have shown that full access is too much of a distraction and their grades are suffering. The latter two reasons are controlled by school site staff.

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Tech Teacher of the Month- September

Congratulations Jana Petersdorf! Jana teaches Drama and English at Tulare Western High School. Watch her video to see how she has been incorporating technology into her classes.

Google Chrome Extensions

We have been blocking chrome extensions at a pretty high rate as students find extensions that interfere with policies and programs we are using. I am currently working on setting up a approved chrome extension list with Google. Once this is complete, we will limit students to the approved list of chrome extensions. We hope to have this change completed by end of day Monday. If you are using a chrome extension with students that the District did not push out, please send me the name so I can add it to the list.

No restrictions will be placed on staff in respect to chrome extensions. If you come across an extension in the future you want to use with students, simply send us the name so we can add it to the approved list.

Google Photos

As part of a review of our Google settings with a third party, it was recommended to us that Google Photos be disabled from our Google Domain. Google Photos allows for syncing photos taken from a cell phone to a photo library. This automatic syncing comes with huge risks when mixing personal and work related content. Disabling Google Photos does not prevent you from manually copying appropriate photos to Google Drive for use in class.

You may have noticed that you lost access to Google Photos about a week ago. This was premature on our part and I apologize for any inconvenience this caused. Google Photos is on again, so you can copy any photos from it and save them. For work related photos, those should be copied into Google Drive. Personal photos should be migrated to a private Gmail account Google Photo library. Google provides unlimited photo storage with Goole Photos even on a personal account.

Access to Google Photos will be permanently removed on November 3rd at 8:00 AM. It may take Google a few hours for that change to take effect. If you have any questions, please ask me otr your site tech.

Technology Tools

Social Media Policy

As a reminder, all staff need to review the Social Media Policy and agree to those terms. We will be holding meetings on October 5th, 9th and 16th to review the policy and explain the process for staff to use and create District approved accounts. https://goo.gl/UiMWWm.

SAMRwise

We are halfway through the Summer/Fall cohort. Only two cohorts left; Winter and Spring. If signups for the Winter cohort will go out in a few weeks. SAMRwise the game has launched with two new levels, SAMRwiser and Super SAMR!  Badges, swag and a leaderboard can be found at: https://app.alludolearning.com/games/206-samrwise/

1:1 Student Devices September Update

We are working on cleaning up processes with fines and repairs and we continue to enter in insurance and payment information into Destiny. Chromebook usage is up 60% over last year. Gmail usage is up 30%, Google Drive usage is up 20%, Calendar usage is up 80% and Google Classroom use is up 482%. Overall we are very happy with the rollout so far and are excited about the future as we continue down this new path.