Meeting+Minutes+December+1,+2010

**  Wednesday December 1, 2010   ** Members present:  Kyle Tammen, Heidi Dudley, Diane Frank, Kent Sauls, Jill Schrader, Kevin Keena, Matt Keenan, Mike Schreiber, Mike Mahoney  1) **   Quest Grant   **    Heidi distributed a handout that is an overview of the Quest Grant. []     Everyone was encouraged to go to look over the grant rules and get some ideas on what would be seriously considered by looking at winners from previous years. Heidi said that Mike Rudolph is going to apply and ask for laptops for a science project he wants to do in his classroom. Grants of up to 10,000 will be awarded. The deadline is January 10, 2011. Some of the key terms in the grant description are “innovative, new, and relevant technology.” Judging from past winners these are things the judges will be looking for. This is something that teachers could think about and apply for over the break, so encourage your department members to apply.      2)  **  Java Updates and Infinite Campus  ** The latest Java update is version 6, update 22. With this latest update we have noticed that within the Gradebook of IC, you cannot see information in an upper left white section that you could see before the update. Most teachers don’t use this upper left screen anyway and would never notice the change. The only time it is a problem is when someone has a lot of scores and areas to fill in for a student and likes to use that screen area to see which student square they are grading in at a glance. If someone in your department comments about how they have lost this function, please let Heidi know and she can install an older version of Java for them and stop the automatic Java updates on their machine. Until Java or IC gets a fix for this, this will be the workaround. 3) **   Write a Query in Infinite Campus   **    Heidi showed everyone how to write a Query in IC that makes it possible to pull out customized reports for things such as checking your Advisory students’ attendance or grades. Everyone at the meeting followed along on their computers and got hands-on experience on how to do this along with a step-by-step handout that Heidi provided. She showed how to write a query using the selection editor also, if you need to have a special group of students that are not grouped by a class or activity. For the handout on this, go to Teacher Folders (Groups 0:) HHS>HHS Technology>Infinite Campus>Checking Attendance and Grades w AdHoc.doc      4)  **   SAS Curriculum Pathways   ** Since this is a service we are paying for, Heidi wanted to make sure everyone was aware of the new student password (and that everyone can get in by using the student password, since it looks pretty much the same whether you are viewing SAS as a student or a teacher). The new student log-in (user name) is plane9song. The log-in screen can be found by clicking this link: [] This is something we would like to get into in more depth, perhaps at our next tech committee meeting. In the meantime, everyone was encouraged to go to the SAS site and explore the different curriculum areas. Heidi looked in the Language Arts and the Spanish areas a little and found a lot of resources for both. If members get a chance to look at this before the next meeting, we could see what different departments think of the resources that are available for their particular curriculum. 5) **  Delete Profiles  **      Delete Profiles is a little program that gets rid of log-in accounts on computers. It helps to run this program once in awhile if you have a lot of different people that log-in to your computer (so it might be good to use this program on classroom computers, but not on computers in office areas). To see how many user profiles are currently on a computer, you can right click on Start and choose Explore. Expand the Documents and Settings Folder (if it isn’t open already) and you will see a list of folders with user names. The computer creates a profile (folder) for each user that logs into it. The Delete Profiles program will delete these profile folders so that the computer doesn’t have to think about all of these profiles which can slow it down during start-up. To find the Delete Profiles program, go to the Teacher Folder (0) and then HHS>HHS-Technology>IT SUPPORT>Tech Helps>delprof.exe. Copy the delprof.exe to your desktop and double click on it to run the program. Type “yes” in the black window when it asks you to. When the program finishes, the black window will go away. Keep in mind that this will delete all other user’s information (except the profile you are logged in as) that is stored on their desktop and any shortcuts or favorites others may have. If someone else teaches in your classroom, you will want to make sure they have nothing saved in their profile that they want to keep before you do this. 6) **   Turnitin.com   **   []     We have purchased a school license for Turn It In this year. Students can submit a paper and the site checks for plagiarism, and helps students to cite correctly. It does have some features that make it possible for teachers to use it for grading. Amanda Hurley is the school administrator for Turnitin, so tell her if you do not have an account and you want one and then she can send you an invite.      Heidi wanted to show the committee this site but we ran out of time, so this is something that could be part of our Tech Bytes for the next Tech Committee Meeting in January.      We briefly discussed updates to various items. Cyber Bullying will go over more in advisories in either January or February. IE 7 and Outlook personal folders have been done as far as we know. If you hear of anyone who still has not updated these, let us know if you need any help (remember Outlook Personal Folders will go away in December after we leave on break, so anyone who still has stuff in personal folders will lose it all if they haven’t made the move by then). The budget update has mostly to do with classroom computers. The Dell 745s that are currently in classrooms are going out of warranty in March. Heidi is thinking that maybe these computers could end up going to the small library lab and replacing 270s there. The classroom computers could then be replaced in sections. Heidi mentioned that this could involve the need to re-image these machines so committee members and/or other staff may be asked to assist with this. **  *Next meeting Wednesday, January 26. **
 * HHS Technology Committee Meeting Minutes  **