Meeting+Minutes+September+28,+2011

** Wednesday September 28, 2011 ** Members present: Kent Sauls, Jentry Byelveld, Kyle Tammen, Heidi Dudley, Diane Frank, Brett Wamsley Matt Keenan, Barb Bolen, Mike Schreiber, Mike Mahoney, Kevin Keena Guests: Gwendolyn Wallace, Joe Burnham Heidi showed everyone the Heritage Tech Committee wiki http://hhs-techcommittee.wikispaces.com/Home+and+Links and demonstrated a little on how we update it. Invites for new members were sent out to all who haven’t joined the wiki yet. Members were encouraged to add to the wiki any resources or agenda items they would like to share with the committee.
 * HHS Technology Committee Meeting Minutes **
 * 1) **** Welcome Back- Heidi **

Joe Burnham is the Google contact person for LPS. You can contact him with any Google related problems. The district (Dan Maas) sent out an email today (9-28-2011) titled //“Google Migration for Email/Calendar/Contacts at the end of Fall Semester.”// Please share with your departments __not to worry__ about this at this point. We will talk about it as a staff at the in-service (October 13) after conferences. Sooth your staff, this is what you need to do. Joe Burnham talked about how this migration will work. He explained why (as in why we are making this move). Right now we use Outlook with a server that is going out of warranty in June. We don’t want to invest in that anymore. Also Google (@lps.k12.co.us) has services on it like Picassa, YouTube, and iGoogle. Basically every Google- type service will be available. **__What is not happening__ is that we are __not losing our user folders__.** We could still use Outlook (but Joe thinks it is not as good as Google Gmail). Outlook would be for people who would have to use mail merge (won’t work online). Most staff may want to just use gmail (not Outlook). All district Email will be down for 20 or 30 seconds while they redirect it to gmail on the 18th or 19th of December. Within 2 days of this switch all of your mail will show up within gmail. This will start on the evening of December 16 (and access to district email may be off for a couple of days). You will still be able to use the Online Web Access site [] to log-in (but once you log-in the site will then redirect to lps on Google. If you need to have Outlook as your repository for you mail you have to do that at the staff machine where your Outlook mail was set-up when you return in January. District distribution lists are already created within lps gmail (like HHS-Staff). **Your personal distribution lists __will not__ transfer over**. You would have to do it via an export and import feature. If you have just 3 or 4 contacts in a group it would be easier to just rebuild it by hand.  There is a way to get the student’s lpsk12.org addresses out of IC if you want to create lists to email your students (and Joe can show you how to do that). Distribution lists in gmail are called a Group, a Folder is called a Collection, so the terminology may be a little different, but processes are similar between the two email systems. Don’t switch any Outlook Web Access yet (from your smart phone or whatever) wait until at least the break to try to do that. One of the biggest issues may be to stop hitting the Outlook icon to access your mail on your staff computer. In classrooms the Outlook Web Access shortcut will still work (it will just redirect to the Google Mail Server). We then had all tech committee members activate their Google .lps.k12.co.us account. They signed in with NewPassword1 (to sign-in for the first time). We are suggesting you change the password to your network password (to make it easier to remember). If this sign-in doesn’t work you need to contact Joe Burnham because you may have an old Google account attached to your lps.k12.co.us email that needs to be released. You can get the data that is residing within this old account moved or have the account renamed if you want the stuff out of this account (see Joe if you need help with this). Once members signed in they were told that they could use any services within it (like Google Docs…) **except mail**. (Mail within lps.k12.co.us Google will not be available until ITS makes the move during winter break). __ Email for teachers on .org may end next June __, so start using your lps.k12.co.us as soon as you can with your students. (**Think of lpsk12__.org__ as the student and/or instructional side** of lps Google **and lps.k12.co__.us__ as the staff side** of lps Google).
 * 2) **** Google and staff migration- Joe **
 * Bottom line is that all staff will need to do this piece (like the members did during our meeting) before they leave for winter break. The district will be doing their piece once winter break begins so that email will be able to be accessed through Google lps.k12.co.us when staff returns on January 2nd. **

Have you heard of Moodle? There was a teacher from Arapahoe (Bryan Haytak) that did an in-service here at Heritage once. Gwen met with him. Karl Fisch (Arapahoe) is in charge of the Moodle server space for the district. The Moodle service itself is free but you must have server space to handle it. If you go to Moodle.org there are some informational things to help you. Brian Haytak created a number of short quizzes (3 or 4 questions) and it gave him a quick, canned response on how his students did. If he then wanted to group kids before an activity, he knew what to do with them. If you are interested in using it with one or more of your classes, we must designate your class on IC (that you have Moodle). If you have different classes it can separate those groups. Heidi does the designation for you and then notifies the district to “flip the switch” so that you can use it with your classes. Gwen will speak to the district about how we can get some training on it, if there is enough interest. So, go to their site, Gwen can send you 2 different presentations about what it can do. Lots of teachers within Moodle will let you do a guest sign-in. You could do one class to test it (Kyle Tammen asked about it). If you have advanced students you could have them practice/test it with you. It will look for key words in an essay if you want. Moodle seems to be more front-loading time intensive but once you have it set-up it should be able to do a lot. There are lots of shared resources from other teachers on it so you can learn from others. Gwen asked if we could use more training on Apps (“yes”). Gwen is trying to create ways to have training during school (and get teacher coverage). Let Gwen know if you are interested in Moodle.
 * 3) **** Moodle – who might be interested????- Gwen **

Soon all of our students will not have personal log-ins anymore. This will change dramatically how students log-in to computers and how they save things here at school. This is going away over Winter Break. We need to start changing this behavior now! Every single student at Heritage will log-in the same way; user name is: hhsstudent and password is: eagle. And hhsstudent uses the NT1 domain (instead of student1). Students will not be mapped to a user folder anymore! All it gives them access to is the network and a printer. They have to log-in to Google Apps (lpsk12.org) to get to their stuff. Every single kid has a Google Apps account. Students find their Google information in IC portal. The Technology tab lists the login and password for each student. Students need to start being aware of these 2 different pieces of information. They will then create their projects as a Google Doc or they will have to save their work in their Apps account by uploading it to Google Docs. Students will either save work on a flash drive or save in Google. If you are requiring kids to write you have to be showing them what they need to do to save it this way. We are guessing that the district will turn the switch off (for individual student log-ins) at the end of this semester.
 * 4) **** Google and Storage for Students- What is Changing?- Heidi ****__ *** __****__ (see Disclaimer below) __**
 * __ *** __****__ Disclaimer __**** : What you see discussed here is the information we were given to pass on to staff at the time. __Effective 10-5-2011, this information has now changed__. The district has decided to __NOT go with the generic student log-in__ hhsstudent this year. Please continue to have your students log-in with their individual accounts (unless instructed to do otherwise). We will let you know when/if the district decides to make the move to generic log-ins for our students. __This will NOT happen this school year!!!__ **
 * *Next meeting Wednesday, October 26. **