USADA True Sport Awards

I love being able to pass on information about awards for teachers. This one, called the USADA True Sport Awards, drifted into my email inbox this afternoon. The United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) and Discovery Education are looking for teachers to help motivate and positively affect the attidues and behaviors of middle and high school students by submitting a story--about a local program or idea for a future program--promoting the virtues of honesty, respect, teamwork, and healthy choices. You could be one of fifty winners who will receive thirty cash awards, ten advisory trips to Colorado Springs, Colorado and more!

To learn more go to: http://tinyurl.com/lkod76 or http://www.usada.org.

Helpdesk Tickets

help wanted
Originally uploaded by kandyjaxx

One of my technology colleagues reminded me about how important it is to use the Helpdesk feature when equipment breaks down or doesn't want to work quite right. This week, as everyone is returning from summer break, and you are using your computers again, there's bound to be some technology mischief. In helping out our wonderful CTT, Robert, it will be great if you can send a helpdesk ticket into him so he can keep track of what needs to fixed. The helpdesk icon is on the Novell Launcher. Make sure to choose our school name, Robert's name under contact, that you are a faculty member, your name, room number, and a description of the problem as specifically as you can. There will be lots going on this
week as we get ready for Open House and the start of school, so be patient as Robert gets to you. The computer labs are open for your use as well.

Some things you might want to check your first day back:
1) Does your computer turn on?
2) Can you connect to the Internet?
3) Can you print?
4) Do you have volume/sound? (Remember the volume will probably come through your projector).

FETC Fall Virtual Conference

Here's a FREE event! On October 22nd, the Florida Education Technology Conference is offering a FREE Virtual Conference at http://virtual.FETC.org from 10am - 6pm EST.

"This extraordinary online educational event delivers valuable presentations and unlimited networking opportunities straight to your desktop!" I'm sure it will be worth it, I attended both the face-to-face conference and the first virtual conference last year and learned a great deal and networked with teachers from all over the world. Yes, I do realize this is a Thursday and during school hours, but if you've got time during a planning period or are able to stay late a couple of hours (or even get some time at home) take an hour and see what's available. You can also register now and then if you can't make it, check into the archived sessions. "Attend as many sessions as you like, visit the virtual exhibit hall at any time and network when it's convenient for you. There are no travel expenses. No lines. No substitutes to schedule. No funding approval needed." Why not register today and check it out? The promo code is AX9V01. Click here to register.

Educator's Delicious Pages

Here is a listing of a few other schools and educators who have pages on Delicious with even more resources for you:

http://delicious.com/hyltonhs
http://delicious.com/tekkieteacher
http://delicious.com/kyteacher
http://delicious.com/langwitches
http://delicious.com/suhrl
http://delicious.com/teach42

Portaportal to Delicious

This school year, we'll be moving from using Portaportal for storing websites to Delicious. Portaportal, Delicious and many other sites like them, are sites that keep an online record of your bookmarks and/or favorites websites; without having to use the same computer. At first I was hestitant to make this shift, because I know a lot of teachers that are comfortable using Portaportal, as am I. However, another educator showed me all the great things you can do with Delicious and after talking with her, I found other educators I admire (and learn many new things from) and decided to give it try. Here's the website: http://www.delicious.com/heimms.

What makes Delicious stand out from Portaportal, is not only can you divide websites up into categories, you can also give them "tags" or keywords from which to search the site. For example, with Portaportal a user would have gone to the site and then clicked on the category they were searching under and then search through a list. With Delicious you can do the same, however, if you are searching for a specific keyword such as "verbs", you can type that into the search box and every site already bookmarked will come up when the page refreshes. No more searching through a whole list! The user can also look at the right side navigation bar and see two options, Top 10 Tags or All tags. With the first option, you will see a list of the top 10 keywords used to bookmark websites, with the second option you will see all the keywords used to described websites that have been saved. Right now, the top 10 tags are Language Arts, English, PDS, technology, Math, Social Studies, games, Science, History, and SOL.

Don't worry, all of the websites saved on Portaportal have been moved to Delicious, with quite a few additions. Delicious is easy to use, but if you're still not
sure, come see me and I will help solve any of your questions! If you would like websites added to this growing list, please send me an email with the URL and the
tags (keywords) for the website. I will also be holding a training session in September as well if you would like to create your own page. Once again, our new Delicious
page can be found at http://www.delicious.com/heimms.