When it comes to eighth grade, most students will tell you that their favorite unit is World War II. Over the past few years, Perry Jr. High teachers, Caroline Wiegand, 8th grade Social Studies teacher, pictured below working with two students, and Sue Ruhmel, 8th grade English teacher, have collaborated to produce replica newspapers of World War II. As part of the project , the students spend a week in the Library Media Center researching and writing articles for their newspapers centered on a specific time period during the war. Within their group, they have an editor who helps keep the group on task as they produce a newspaper complete with a front page headline story to an editorial with everything in between. This past spring, with the assistance of Technology Director Jim Dieso and Junior High Librarian Mary Pat Connors, the students are able to take their hard copies and transfer them to Mrs. Wiegand’s website as World War II newsletter web pages that can viewed online! By using the website to publish their material, the students were able to share and view everyone’s work with each other, their parents, the community, even the world!! This helped to give the project a real life perspective much larger than was possible in the past. Students of Mrs. Wiegand say they enjoyed the project because they liked the team work that required all students to have a part. This project is a great example of how to use the district website effectively in your classroom. Throughout the school year, there will be numerous workshops relating to web publishing. For example, this fall look for the October workshop session on SchoolCenter School where you can learning about setting up student editors to add content to your own school website! Plan on attending this or one of the many other web publishing workshops offered this fall and learn what you can do to incorporate web publishing technology into your classroom experiences!

Spell checking in Microsoft Word is very useful, helping students and teachers to edit their work effectively. Microsoft Word provides several options for spell checking a document and knowing some of the shortcuts can save you some time when try to clean up some material you have written.

As you are probably aware, by default, Word has automatic spell and grammar checking enabled. Using this feature, the Word spell checker use wavy red underlines to indicate possible spelling errors and wavy green underlines to indicate possible grammatical errors. These wavy lines will appear as you type the document and can be removed after you finish composing your content.

After typing, to check the whole document’s spelling, you have three options:

1. Click on the Spelling and Grammar toolbar button (if it available on the Standrd toolbar; see diagram to the right.)
2. Click on the Tools menu and choose the Spelling and Grammar... command.
3. Use the keyboard shortcut by holding down Option + Apple + L keys all the same time.

Any of these methods will of course open the Spelling and Grammar window and let you change or ignore potential errors Word has found in the document, (see diagram below.)

What you may not know is that a quick way to spell or grammar check an individual work is select a word with a wavy underline by double-clicking on it and then Control–clicking on it (Press down the Control key on the keyboard and click it with your mouse button.)

Upon doing this, a pop-menu will appear under the word with corrections to choose from, (see diagram to the right). From there, you use your mouse to either choose one of the suggestions or choose Ignore.

Based on your choice, Word either replaces the word with the suggested one you picked from the menu or it will simply remove the wavy line from the word.

SOME QUICK KEYS MAKE SPELL CHECKING EVEN EASIER!
Here are a couple of nifty keyboard shortcuts that can really speed up your spell checking tasks in Word. Try these out and see how easy they can be to use!

• While in any Word document, hit the F7 key.
  This will immediately pop open the Spelling and Grammar window and starting spell check the entire document from beginning to end. See how simple it can be to spell check…just one key away!
• After selecting a single word within any Word document, hit the Shift and F7 keys.
  This will open the Microsoft Reference Tools panel on the right side of your screen. In this panel, you can see the definition of the selected word as well as the Microsoft Thesaurus where you can find the meaning and synonyms for the selected word. All this information with a simple keystroke! Pretty amazing, right?

By now, you have heard about the My Learning Plan website around New Hartford Schools. Starting last spring, the district adopted My Learning Plan (often referred in the district as MLP for short) as the official means of tracking and managing all Professional Development activities offered in the district. MLP was chosen as the system of choice because of its leading status as a web-based service for professional development tracking and since it has been largely designed by educators for educators. The system offers a wide of features that New Hartford started piloting this past summer by accepting registrations for summer CAP and technology workshops. Starting this fall, My Learning Plan will be used exclusively in the district to post and accept registrations for all Teacher Center activities offered both inside and outside the district. Users can browse the online catalog of professional development courses and activities using the search or calendar views and then sign up right online, from home or school, anytime of the day or evening! In addition to its fast and easy online registration, users can configure their accounts for extensive email notification options such as when they are approved for something, when a new activity becomes available in the Dsitrict Catalog, or even to receive an email reminder 1-5 days before an activity begins! Email notifications can also be sent when a participant is moved from a wait list to confirmed participation and for cancelled activities. Lastly, MLP can be used to submit proposals for activities they would like to teach or see offered in the future!!
In September, several workshops will be offered on learning to make effective use of My Learning Plan. Check out the website for more details. Once the site loads, simple use your school email address and OS X password to log onto to the site. Once signed on, click the District Catalog link along the left and start browsing OR click on the Quick Links above in this newsletter to connectly some of the key workshops about MLP that will offered this month!

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Eager to learn about new ways to use Mac OS X even better? Come to our monthly OS X "Talk, Tips & Tricks" session. Find out more.

Below are select technology courses to be offered by the Teacher Center next month! To learn more, log onto My Learning Plan then click the links below for more details about each class and/or to sign up right now online!

Thursday, September 7
How to Make Seating Charts From GradeQuick

Tuesday, September 12
Introduction to GroupWise

Friday, September 15
Introduction to Classroom Web Publishing

Wednesday, September 20
Introduction to iTunes

Tuesday, September 26
BrainPOP for Junior High & Elementary Teachers

Wednesday, September 27
SchoolCenter School: Exploring the New Features of Your School Website

Tuesday, September 12
iPhoto Slide Shows for Elementary Teachers

iCal Users
Download September Events