SchoolRack on Net @ Night with Leo Laporte

Not sure how I missed this myself but a friend recently told me he heard our name on the weekly radio show Net @ Night with Leo Laporte. I thought I’d share it with the rest of you, it’s always fun to hear how the general public perceives SchoolRack.

Play the snippet here, it’s only about a minute and a half in length and well worth a listen!

Be sure to view it in full screen!

1. New Student & Parent accounts feature (for access to discussion boards, private messaging, assignment collection, and more)
2. New text editor for editing your website posts
3. New calendar feature
4. More themes for both Free and Plus accounts
5. More clip art to choose from for your SchoolRack website

1. One of the main feature additions to SchoolRack is the new section in your Dashboard called Students & Parents.  These features offer a communication platform between you, your students, and/or your parents.  The premise is simple: you create a private group for either students or parents to join (you are given a code to hand to them), you have your students or parents register their own accounts on SchoolRack with the code you provide, and you now have access to all the group features offered in the menu:

Groups, where you will be able to manage all your different student or parent groups.  For example, if you want to create a group for your first period class.  You can also create a group for a club you manage at school, there really is no limit to its usage.  After you’ve created a group, you can then use all the features available to your in the list above.

Assignments, where you can post assignments to any of your groups.  After you post an assignment, students will be alerted of the assignment posting and will be able to view the details in their private accounts (none of this information is available publicly).

Discussion Boards, where members of your groups can reply to any topics you place on your website.  You have the option to make discussions private or public, even to approve all posts before they become active.

Private Messaging, for members of your groups to send you messages and vice versa.

For example, if you have a lot of tabs in your “Word” document, the formatting does not always maintain itself in SchoolRack.  If you want something to be lined up underneath each other, it is usally better to just type it into SchoolRack.

Your SchoolRack document can always be copied and pasted into a “Word” document.  This is what I usually do.  I type my original document in SchoolRack, spruce it up with color fonts and color highlights, then copy it into a “Word” document.  This way if I teach the same class next year, I can make minor adjustments in “Word” and just paste into SchoolRack.  At the end of each semester I copy and paste everything from SchoolRack into a Word document for reference for the following year.

One thing that does take getting used to when typing in SchoolRack is that the return actually double spaces.  If you want a single-spaced return you must hold down the “shift” key when you hit “return.”

When I highlight something in SchoolRack that is my way of announcing to the students that there is an upcoming test or quiz.  They know that if they see something highlighted that they should pay special attention to this.  I’ve even developed a color-coded system for my students.  For example, when they see blue highlights they know that a vocabulary quiz is coming up.  Green highlights represent a chapter test.  The list goes on.

It is also possible to insert graphics, animated and not, in order to add some character to your entries.

Fortunately, my school has a fair amount of equipment for me to choose from.  Granted, not every teacher uses what is available to them, but some do.  As a result, the students at our school receive a top-notch education with hands-on experience using sophisticated equipment.

I must admit though that after having taught for over 3 decades, change doesn’t always come easy to me.  However, I have been trying to take advantage of the wealth of resources available to me.  For example, the newest addition to our equipment, the document camera, is an amazing tool in my classroom.  The best way to explain its use would be to describe it as a modern day overhead projector.  Instead of having to make transparencies it is possible to place a worksheet, test, or any paper by the camera and have it exhibited to the class.  It is very compact and can fit in a book bag, and can come in handy in many ways!

Also, in my math classes, I now use PowerPoint presentations to teach difficult concepts.  Along with printouts that I hand my students, I present the lesson, using a more detailed, animated presentation and have the students take notes on their slides, adding the information as we go.  I must admit, it is tedious work creating these presentations, but once I have them I can use them repeatedly.  It sure beats writing the same thing on the board 3 or 4 times a day!

In my experience, the time spent leveraging technology in the classroom has been well worth it.  I’ve come to realize that technology is here to help and whenever I hear about a new method I think of ways to introduce it to my class.  Like SchoolRack, one of the more recent additions to my classroom.  It helps keep my students (and their parents) informed of what’s happening in the classroom at any time so they can tune in to what I have to say outside of the classroom.

My SchoolRack homepage

Those are just some of my thoughts and experiences — please share any technology insights that you might have or lessons that have worked well for you.  Let’s share ideas for our students to reap the benefits!

To make sending emails to large groups of people easy, SchoolRack has incorporated a simple email system for emailing groups of students, parents, or both at the click of a button.  The feature is called the Mailing List feature and is available to all SchoolRack users.

Each email list can maintain up to 100 recipients on a SchoolRack Plus account (Free accounts allow 30 recipients).  You can organize your email lists by course or category.  For example, if you are a math teacher and teach algebra and geometry, you can have one list for your algebra students and another one for geometry students and send messages to them separately.  Another way to organize mailing lists is to have one list for students and another for parents.

However, if you have not already created list, SchoolRack certainly makes it very user friendly. To get started, simply start by:

1. Click on the Mailing Lists link in your SchoolRack account
2. Click Create Mailing List
3. Give your mailing list a Title, Description (will appear on your website), and input any email addresses you may already have (optional, later students/parents will be able to sign up for your mailing list on your website)
   NOTE: You can add email addresses to your list manually whenever you want, but once your mailing list is created, visitors to your website will be able to subscribe to your mailing list on their own.  This way you don’t have to input all email addresses by yourself, you can have your visitors do it for you!
4. Once you are satisfied with the number of subscribers in your mailing list, you can send your emails by simply clicking the Compose button on the mailing list page.
5. Then fill out the simple form with your subject and email and click Send Message.
   

That’s it!  As you can tell, on SchoolRack, the responsibility initially is with the student/parent to sign up to one of your mailing lists.  The easiest way to establish and maintain one of these lists is to create one and then inform your students to ’subscribe’ to one directly on your website!  Here is what it looks like on a user’s class website:

Well, have a great time communicating with your students and their parents!  Let me know if you have any questions below!!

We all try many different things to motivate students.  Extra credit, brownie points, read an extra book, report on an article, do a problem on the board, these are all typical examples of trying to get students involved.  Sometimes we have to think outside the box, which isn’t always easy for many of us.  We need to try to develop some new, innovative ideas that will attract the students.  Truly I am an ‘old-fashioned’ teacher and believe that the responsibility lies with the students. They are the ones that should want to learn.  However, if I live solely by that rule, the reality is that I will be miserable in the classroom.  I need to break my routine and be more creative.

I have tried a variety of things, ‘homework excuse notes,’ ‘homework passes’, ‘interventions’, etc.  Students have to fill out a ‘homework excuse note’ every time they did not complete their assignment.  When I collected five per student I called home and read the parents the excuses!  ’Homework passes’ are earned by the students when they complete a certain number of assignments, consecutively.  The pass allows them to be excused from one assignment…of their choice!  At my school we have an “Enrichment” period every day for 40 minutes.  It’s basically a study hall, but students can go to other teachers’ rooms to get help.  I have done ‘interventions’ with students by assigning them mandatory “Enrichment” periods to get the extra help that they are not seeking.  None of these ideas have worked with every student, but each one did have an effect on some of the students.

Do you have an innovative idea that you use?  Please share your ideas with us.  Remember, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel if you have something that works!

When I first began my career as a math teacher, back in the 70’s, I had the mindset that the students would learn to read and write in their English classes.  Not that this doesn’t occur in those classes, but I’ve learned over the years that all of us can help in this endeavor, no matter what course we teach.  Having made this discovery after many years of teaching, I sought out teachers with whom I could collaborate and develop projects with.

For several years I worked with a guidance teacher and an English teacher.  We developed the “I Search” paper.  The guidance teacher would talk about careers, colleges, etc; the English teacher taught a unit on research papers and how to write them; I had the students write a 3-5 page paper on how mathematics related to the career that they had chosen.  They could include all aspects of math:  what they should take in high school, what they would need to take in college and how math would be used in their career on a daily basis.

In most cases the results were impressive.  I had one student that wanted to be a musician write an incredible paper relating math to all the difference chord types, cadences, etc.  It was absolutely amazing!

I want to encourage you, maybe even challenge you, that no matter what subject you teach, incorporate writing into your class requirements at least once a week.

Send home a short note, reminding students of some old rules, as well as any new ones.  You can include your SchoolRack website and any other pertinent information.   Just remember, be sure to keep your site up to date…that always seems to be the toughest thing to do.  I suggest that you start by planning the whole week out at one time.  Remember, you can always make changes as you go.  Ideally, and I’m speaking from past experience, inputting a month at a time is always nice.  Even if your initial entry is just a rough outline, there’s something to be said for just sitting down and doing it!

Aside from beginning SchoolRack, another thing I’ve always have to deal with at the semester is those students that go into the second semester of a course with a D or an F in the first semester.  This has always been a struggle for me. I teach college prep courses at the high school level and I believe in the concept that every student has a right to fail, but I don’t believe in setting them up for failure in the second semester.  This year I am working with two other teachers who will be providing some extra help once or twice a week, out of the kindness of their heart I should add.  Maybe hearing the same concepts from a different person might help motivate these children.  I’ve done the usual interventions such as contacting parents, sending home notes, speaking with the students, etc.  I’m always looking for new ideas….any thoughts out there?

I have approximately 200 students and I have 500+ hits weekly, on the average, to my SchoolRack website.  Parents love having the opportunity to verify what their child is telling them, especially when they get a progress report with a low grade and discover that they have been ill-informed.

Additionally, the website gives the parents your email address.  I don’t know about you, but I would much rather reply to an email then have a conversation on the telephone!  Get your parents involved with SchoolRack.  Both you and the parent will absolutely love it!