The Courage to Live THEIR Dreams…

March 29, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Most schools go through a strategic planning process where they develop a mission statement and perhaps a vision statement or set of core values to go along with it. My school is not unique in that process, but what I do find unique is the third and final bullet point for a very short mission statement.

Shanghai American School inspires in all students:

  • A lifelong passion for learning
  • A commitment to act with integrity and compassion
  • The courage to live their dreams.

Initially, this thought came from a young high school student who served on the committee for the strategic planning process. Everybody was talking about a passion for learning, academic excellence, acting with integrity and then this young man stood up and said, “what about the courage to live MY dream – not your dream… not my parents’ dream for me…. MY dream”. In our fast-paced, enormous, growing and driven city that we live in, this idea is not as easy as it seems for our next generation of leaders.

The statement made the entire room pause and what ensued was a unification of thought and feeling around support for helping the next generation by nurturing their courage within to live their own dreams.

Question: How do we as a school community provide opportunities like this for our students and children?

Answer: Teachers and parents must model the courage to live their own dreams as well.

Today we had a visitor to our school that personified the integrity, compassion and courage we all seek within ourselves and hope to teach our students. John Jacobson is an educator, a musician, an artist and has made a name for himself over the years in education and communities through his work with America Sings, a community service based organization that rallies communities through voice and dance. Most recently John has achieved notoriety through his Double Dream Hands YouTube phenomenon and has even appeared on the Ellen show, teaching her staff the Double Dream Hands dance as a birthday present.

 

John had the teachers up dancing and singing throughout his time with us, but it’s his words that went along with the actions that stick with me because it’s the message I want my students and my own children to know and remember, especially in this fast-paced, high octane city and school we live in at this time.

1.  ”Find something meaningful to with YOUR life… that is the meaning of life.” 

We all don’t have to go make the next great invention. Each one of us and our students has a place and purpose that unique to them. Finding that passion is the true key to their happiness.

2.  ”Find something to do, something to love, and something to hope for…” 

Don’t just find something to do because really anybody can tell you what to do with your life. Only YOU can identify what you love and what you hope for.

3.  ”It’s a lot about you, but it’s not ALL about you.” 

In our current environment, children are growing up fairly privileged as they have access to an amazing education, travel the world to visit amazing places… but what does that all mean? What’s point if our students don’t realize HOW they fit into the bigger picture. If they can’t figure out how to give back and fit into the bigger picture, see number two above.

John’s advice clearly fits into how we all want to educate our students. We all say this, but how do we model this as adults for our students so that they actually believe us? From our time with John today, I took the following three-word phrases away to help us adults lead the way to happiness, success and balance for everybody in our lives:

God is Love.
In any situation, you can face it with Love or hate. Always choose Love.

I love you.
The best words you can say to anybody

Fate is kind.
Good things will happen to you too if you always lead with love in your heart

Don’t get tired.
Even if you are, people don’t need to heart it. What if that one day you were tired, was the one day that you were meant to make a difference in somebody’s life? And while you are at it… walk faster. (Have you ever seen a depressed person walk fast?)

You are valuable.
Every unique person has a piece of the larger puzzle. We don’t need another Madonna or Steve Jobs, we need you.

I am enough.
Your unique role, led with love in your heart, is enough. Make a difference by doing something meaningful to YOU and say out loud, “I am enough”.

And just think, I remember all of this because of song and dance…

 

Filed Under: education

When New Students Start Midway…

February 21, 2012 By 2 Comments

When students start school at the beginning of the year with their classmates, they have the advantage of setting up their computers together. At my school, we take all of the students through a Mac and Me course which is a course designed to empower the students to not only set their computers up properly, but also works with the students to positively shape their digital footprint. When students start midway though the year, they miss the opportunity to experience this with their classmates. So, when students show up for the first time on a random Wednesday in February, I do all that I can to get them set up so that they can hit the ground running as they dip their foot into the pool of learning with technology. When new students dip their feet into the pool, their classmates experience a leadership role by becoming the teachers.

Today I spent nearly an hour with a single new student. From the moment I walked out with the computer, we hit the ground running.

Deciding on a Username
Our systems do not talk to each other. When a student changes their password in one location (i.e.: on their computer), it is not automatically changed for the cloud computing system, Moodle, nor WordPress account. Therefore, the first order of business is to decide on a username, write it down and give it to my aide so that she can manually go set the password in all of our systems. Oh, and the password has to be at least 8 characters long with a number because of our Google Student Gmail accounts. We manually set passwords for:

  • Powerschool
  • Equitrac printing
  • Student Blogs
  • Moodle
  • Student Gmail
  • Video portacl

Usernames and Passwords on the Computer Accounts
We give students their username that they will use for all systems related to school so that they can sign into their computer. The naming convention has the student’s first name, a number, their campus, and their graduation year. We sign them into the computer with the most famous default password in the world and immediately go to System Preferences to change the password on their personal account and the secondary install account.

Repair Disk Permissions and Complete Software Updates
The computers at our school have an image that was built and updated either over the summer or over the winter holiday. As a result, I show the students how to do Software Updates on their computer. The school image also hides the Sharing folder in System Preferences, but this can be corrected by repairing disk permissions. The students complete this step by creating a reoccurring event in their iCal, prompting them to do Software Updates and Repair Permissions once a week.

Connect to the Server 
The school uses a server that can be used while students are at school so that teachers can easily share files with students, and students can easily drop digital assignments into their teacher’s dropbox. I log the students in with the default password and have them change the password to match all of the other passwords. We then go to the math teacher folders so that the students can download their digital math textbook.

Set up Student WordPress Blog
Students who are already at school have been nurturing their blog for months if not years. I log into the WordPress MU blog with the students and set up everything in the backend so that they can hit the ground running when a teacher asks them to post reflections to their blog. Within their blog we do the following together:

  • Change title and tagline in Settings
  • Activate EmbedIt, Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam, Unfiltered MU and WP-SpamFree in Plugins
  • Change their theme in Appearance
  • Add Categories, Recent Posts, Links, Archives and Meta to their Widgets in Apperance
  • Delete the About Me Page
  • Create a link to each of their teachers under Links
  • Change the Uncategorized category under Post to Humanities and create a category for each one of their classes

I then show them how to write their first post complete with pictures and PDF documents.

Log them into Powerschool
I log students into the school’s Powerschool site to show them how to check their grades and how to register for After School Activities and sports.

Setup their Digital Portfolio in iWeb
All of the students in our school create a digital portfolio that can grow with them as the move from grade level to grade level. Students have pages for their Student as a Learner Profile (SLP), subject areas, electives and special projects like Reading EXP and their NGO site. I let the students hit the ground running because teachers weave the portfolio into their daily practice as the portfolio has turned into a dynamic representation of learning. Student can publish to an FTP server at school and I ensure that their account is active by helping them setup all of their pages to publish.

Activate Smartmusic
Our band and orchestra students and teachers use SmartMusic to supplement their learning. I wish I had SmartMusic when I was in school as it has been one of the best motivators and learning experiences for musical students. Basically, teachers assign a piece in SmartMusic and then students log into their account and play the piece into the computer with accompaniment. SmartMusic gives immediate feedback to the student by telling them if the note was early, late, sharp, flat, etc… Students then send the file and the score to teachers. Students, parents and teachers love SmartMusic!

Enter their Moodle Classroom
Our school uses Moodle to supplement what is happening inside the classroom. I make sure that students cannot only login, but that they are registered for the correct courses. I show they how to interact with the Moodle environment with their materials and course discussions. Not all teaches are using Moodle with the school as it’s part of our smorgasbord of tech available, but we are sure that each grade level has exposure in at least one of their classes.

Sign students into the school accounts for IXL and History Alive
Students use History Alive as a supplement to their humanities curriculum and IXL to practice specific math goals. The reports and graphs from IXL give detailed feedback to students, teachers and parents.

Discuss Digital Citizenship and Safety
Perhaps the most difficult part of student entering midyear is that they will not have benefited from the multiple class meetings and discussions about digital citizenship and safety. Before sending new students off to class, we have a conversations about what has been talked about all year at school around shaping online profiles. We openly discuss topics with students on that first day but follow up with conversations through the Mac and Me mandatory elective class that all new students take upon entry into school.

Before new students dip their foot into the technology pool, we do as must as we can for them so that they can feel successful within their first few weeks. They will hear phrases like

  • Get the files off the server
  • I’ve updated your iCal to reflect the new testing dates
  • Write a reflect on the blog
  • Send me your SmarMusic file
  • Post to the class discussion in Moodle
  • Access the decimal practice in your digital math textbook
  • Log into your History Alive account to learn more about…

Of course, they will here things like:

  • Greenscreen yourself in front of Mt. Vesuvius  and report live from scene about what is happening in Pompeii
  • Record you and a partner discussing this topic in Chinese and send me the raw Garageband file so that I may leave digital comments

But they’ll get there in time! In the end, I spent over an hour with each new student individually when they come in mid-year. What is important is that the new students are ready to hit the ground running when they enter the classrooms of our school!

Photo Credits:
yellow by darkmatter

 

 

 

 

 

 

Filed Under: communication, education

Parent CyberSmart Evening With Robyn Treyvaud

February 13, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Robyn Treyvaud (@rtreyvaud on Twitter) who is the founder of Cyber Safe Kids, visited Shanghai American School this week to work with our students, teachers and parents as we take our journey through a digital life. Her visit with our parent community was full of information valuable for all parents raising digital kids. Her key point was this: Parents have a PhD in the University of Life and need to focus on the underpinnings of technology by focusing on values with their children.

The methods of today’s communication have changed over time, and parents can help their children manage their digital footprint. Begin by Googling your child’s name and personal information. Follow that up by setting up a Google Alert so that you are notified if any information is put on the internet about your child.

One of the most startling statistics mentioned was that 82% of students who have broken internet house rules have experienced something negative online. Commonsense Media offers Family Media Agreements for all grade levels so that parents can start the conversation about digital footprints with their children. In the end, fences are not sufficient. For the kids to be safe around all water, we have to teach them responsibility through collaborative conversations.

Talk to children about stereotypes of gender online and about values for your family. The moral compass reminds us that our job as a parent is to help our children develop a strong moral compass that will guide them through life as they make decisions for themselves and others. While their are shades of gray, we can impact the decisions they make through explicit conversations about their digital footprint.

 
Good kids can do bad things because strong emotions can be released at the speed of a keystroke. Keep up with your child’s digital life no matter what their age. Use resources like the 2012 Parent’s Guide to Facebook and use Privacy Defender to help your children properly set their sharing preferences within Facebook.

We can best help our children by focusing on the values we hold true. Help children determine which side of the line they should be on when making a decision:

This video, Where Are You? created by Mark C. Eshleman and featuring Tyler Joseph just won Trend Micro’s 2011 “What’s Your Story” Internet Safety Contest.

For more information follow Robyn Treyvaud:

@rtreyvaud on Twitter

http://delicious.com/cybersafekids

http://www.cybersafekids.com.au

 

 

Filed Under: communication, professional development

What Caught My  Eye

August 23, 2011 By Leave a Comment

The beginning of the school year is such a great time for getting organized. Students, teachers, parents all say goodbye to summer and relish the fact that they “get” to be part of a routine again. At least I relish it! Part of what keeps me organized is sharing because it requires me to catalogue in my mind what is worthy of a second look and what I can let go of. So, when I can.. I’ll share with you What Caught My  Eye. It’s not all necessarily  related, but I really do like to type that cute little logo…

Flubaroo

SAS use Google Apps for Education and one of the features that many of our teachers like to use is Google Forms as it allows teachers to create an online quiz for students that they can access via a designated URL or teachers can embed it in their blogs. Flubaroo is a script that will grade the online quiz for one in one single step. Click to this link to grade a mock assignment and to view the setup instructions.

QR Codes

Scan Amanda's QR Code

QR codes are starting to pop up everywhere. Quick Response (QR) codes allow the user to scan a code with a QR reader in order to obtain further information about a topic, business or person. There are many ways that educators can use QR codes, but I would like to start with two upcoming events at SAS. Bonding Day is coming up for our middle school students and I think that it would be very cool to have a scavenger hunt out in Shanghai using QR codes to provide the clues. We are lucky at my school in that many of our kids have devices that will read the codes. A second event is Open House. Our parents at school have the devices so why not have each teacher put their QR code outside of their room for parents to scan? Parents would then have immediate access about the teacher including relevant contact information. It just a start… I recommend using Paperlinks to create your personal QR code and also their QR Code app on your iDevice to scan them.

Here is a good slideshare presentation about 40 Interesting ways to Use QR Codes in the Classroom

Giving Credit Where Credit is Due

This week, new and returning teachers are busy setting up their blogs on our school’s WordPress MU installation. Getting back into the routine of things, it’s important to model good online behavior for our students by crediting photos that we insert into our posts. We all need to do a better job of deterring students from going to Google Images and simply downloading and using a random image found as they may be copyright protected. So, here’s list of sites that will give you access to Creative Commons pictures. Use them and give credit where credit is due.

Flickr CC

Flickr Storm

Comfight 

Wylio 

Wikly – iPad Calendar App

Having my calendar in front of me is essential. About a week ago, Wikly was released for the iPad. I LOVE THIS APP! There is no set up as it just works. You have the ability to add events that automatically sync with your other calendars on your computers, blogs, iPhones… for those of you that purchased iPads this summer, pay the $1.99 for this app  - it’s worth it.

Evernote – Don’t forget about Evernote!

I noticed this morning the Evernote came out with a new update and thought about how much I use Evernote for the classes I’m taking now. It is so nice to have all of my notes for all of my classes in Evernote as I can access them anytime from any computer. It has helped me stay organized as I always seemed to have a hard time putting notes in folders in my Documents folder. Sound familiar? I noticed students using Evernote at another international school in Shanghai and it seems to work well for them in taking notes in their classes. For teachers, it’s very easy to take your notes and share them with your team with the click of a button. Don’t forget about Evernote!

Photo Credits

Exam Time by Cocoen

Note Taking by natashalcd

Filed Under:  Eye

The Difference Between K-5 and 6-12 Blended Learning

July 8, 2011 By Leave a Comment

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about blended learning in a k-5 setting lately. To be honest, I see it working beautifully in a 6-12 environment. As a teacher at an international school in China, I can assume that the students come to class with a set of online social networking skills. It’s “simply” a matter of giving the student the opportunity to transfer those skills to a formal blended learning environment. Afterall, it’s not a giant leap to go from Facebook to a Discussion Form in Moodle. The kids get quickly get past the technology and concentrate on honing their skills around reflection, analysis and online collaboration.

But what about students in the k-5 environment? Even assuming they come to school with a set of online social networking skills, is it possible for them to enter a blended learning environment? I whole-heartedly want to say YES! As a mom of young kids, I can see how they hop online and Skype, chat, and write emails with ease. I think the primary difference for the classroom teacher is the amount of adult intervention they use the students in their blended learning environment.

  • Planning – Create a higher level of scripted content, providing more guidance and structure for the young learner.
  • Resources – Use items like Google’s Custom Search to narrow the sites that students see when they conduct research. Allow for differentiation of products and choice so that each student has the opportunity to highlight their strengths.
  • Facilitation – Take a more proactive role in the face-to-face setting AND in the online setting to keep the students focused on subject at hand. Provide direct prompts for students to require to encourage peer to peer feedback under teacher moderation.

I keep forgetting about Google Custom Search. If you are interested in what ERIC has in its folds about blended learning, you can use this Google Custom Search: Just type in blended learning.

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Image Credits:
Learning is Here by cogdogblog

Filed Under: blended learning, education

Resources for Designing a Blended Class

June 21, 2011 By 2 Comments

Many schools are using Course Management Systems to offer their students a blended instruction experience.  What resources (technology, human, etc.) do you currently have at your disposal that could assist you in doing this? What resources do you feel as an instructional designer you are missing that would hamper your efforts?

Designing an online course in isolation is very difficult to do and I am fortunate to work in a school where we have the ability to use the team approach for the designing process. When designing a blended course at school several people are involved in the process. The classroom teacher is the instructional expert, the technology facilitator assists in the design, and the IT Staff assists with the background setup of our chosen CMS.

The classroom teacher is the content specialist during the design process at our school, but some of the teachers lack confidence in the technology area and relinquish any control to the technology facilitator. Ko and Rossen noted that some instructors turn everything over to the designer, expecting them to edit and upload all materials (2010). While not the norm, I’ve experienced this first hand in my position. Ko and Rossen did not mention a teacher’s motivation for relinquishing control, but I believe that it comes from a place of fear of the technology. As I’ve stated in previous posts, this comes back to a quality professional development and support program for the classroom teacher.

The technology facilitator at our school takes the lead in the course design process. It’s important to note that the technology facilitators at our school were once classroom teachers, which as Ko and Rossen note help them “understand the dynamic nature of teaching and classroom interaction” (Ko & Rossen, 2010, Chapter 4, Section 3, para. 1). The technology facilitator helps the classroom teacher gain confidence in the design process by consistently bringing the discussion back to what to what the instructor wants the students to learn and how they could demonstrate their learning. By keeping this idea at the forefront of all discussions, teachers are able to take a more active role in the design process.

The IT staff support the classroom teacher and technology facilitator throughout the design process at our school. Albeit, the IT staff needs a fair amount of support as well! The IT staff are the true geeks and often need consistent questioning and help with follow through, but they are the technical background support of our chosen CMS system and help us navigate through the technical complexities. It is worth noting, the technology facilitator is the technical “translator” between the classroom teacher and the IT staff.

The technology we have at our k12 international school allows us to be creative with design process. We use Moodle as our Course Management System, we are a 1:1 Apple Flagship School in Asia in grades 6 to 12 and are able to host media on our own servers for students and staff to bypass the Great Firewall of China.

The only missing component I see at this time in my school revolves around the number of technology facilitators. Over the past three years my particular division has grown from 324 students to 480 students and the number of teachers has grown at the same rate. I am but one technology facilitator, teaching all 480 students and their teachers. There are not enough minutes in the day to reach them individually and as a result my role has changed significantly with the growth. I find myself spending more time with just the teachers, hoping and knowing they will carry forward their new-found knowledge in blended instruction to their students. While I feel lucky to have the resources I have at my school, I can see the potential of what can be done with just one more of me…

References
Ko, S., & Rossen, S. (2010). Teaching online: A practical guide (3rd ed.). [iPad version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com

Image Credits
leader by varnent

Filed Under: collaboration

Middle School Student Led Conferencing & Tech

April 13, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Our middle school has been doing Student Led Conferencing (SLCs) for four years now and we’ve been making it better each year. As a middle school, we’ve come up with a plan of action and have something that we are going to move forward with next year. It has worked so well, our elementary school dipped into SLCs this year as an entire division. In year’s past, the middle school has used several methods to have students showcase their learning using technology:

 

  • Blogs

Each student has a working portfolio with their school blog. Over the past couple of years, students would using the tag of SLC to showcase specific pieces of work to demonstrate their learning. Each subject was represented and the students would reflect on their SMART goals in password protected posts. While it worked, it still felt messy.

  • MS Office Notebook Layout Portfolio

Students and teachers took a shining to the Notebook Layout view in MS Word. The students could create a tab for each of their classes, create a tab for goal-setting and could use the record feature to record directly onto MS Word. While this worked fine, it had it’s bumps because it was completely tied to their computer so their audience and feedback was limited. Additionally, students liked using VoiceCandy in their classes as a quick way to record instead of Garageband, but VoiceCandy and MS World do not get along on a consistent basis.

  • iWeb Growth Portfolios

This is the first year we have pushed iWeb with our teachers and students. We now have dedicated server space on site so that students have the option of publishing to the FTP Server, making their iWeb public OR publishing to their Local Folder on their computer. Two of our grade levels chose to use iWeb this year for SLCs and the students included work demonstrating their learning in classes as well as their own reflections for our newly adopted Middle School Student Learning Profile. Next year, iWeb will be used at all grade levels.

Using iWeb as a platform to be the umbrella for their learning has proven to be a platform that we are going to continue to support at our school. We are very proud of the growth and reflections that students have demonstrated throughout the portfolio creation process. I want to stress, the most important component of the SLCs is the communication that occurs between the student, the parents and the teacher during the SLC time. iWeb was the perfect platform for our students to organize the conversation about learning.

View Jonathan’s Portfolio for an example:

 

The feedback from the parents was extremely positive. The students were more engaged using the iWeb platform and the teachers spoke favorably of the iWeb platform for its ease of use with minor technical difficulties. It was a win-win-win for everybody!

Filed Under: communication, Conferences

Realtime Voting using the iPad and Phones

April 5, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Over the weekend, the students performed at our spring drama event called Murder in the Air which is a comical dinner theater production. The play was presented well as the audience members were active participants throughout the whodunit production. The audience sat at round tables just as if they were at a banquet because we gave them a bit of group work during intermission.

As a group, we asked them to discuss who they felt was the culprit based on clues given throughout the first half of the performance. Rather than simply having them write their guesses down on a piece of paper, I used Poll Everywhere to set up a website that would allow people to vote. I opened the website on the iPads we use at school and then bookmarked the site so that an icon for Murder in Air was on the Homescreen of the iPad. The audience loved this little piece of technology by voting on the iPad and they enjoyed seeing the realtime results projected onto the wall.

To take it a step further, we allowed individual participants to vote for the culpret using their phones.

Individual Text Results

They would text a number and then identify the culprit in their message using a pre-assigned number. The adults and kids alike enjoyed watching the bar graph update by the second and they seemed to text several times just to see the graph change!

It was something so simple but yet so much. We were able to showcase a bit of technology and show off our new school App that is available on the iTunes App Store by placing the Murder in the Air icon next to the SAS App.  Just a pinch of marketing… :)

Filed Under: Random Things

Parent Technology Workshops – Learning With Technology

March 28, 2011 By Leave a Comment

PTW1Before the Spring Break, we held the fourth installment of our Parent Technology Workshops here at SAS – Pudong. We hold the workshops once a month for parents so that they can feel up to speed in their child’s education. As technology is a tool for their learning, the Parent Technology Workshops give parents time to have discussions around the use of technology and to give them the skills they need to stay informed about their child’s technological journey.

The last Parent Technology Workshop was the first in a two part series called Mac OSX Scavenger Hunt. The scavenger hunt format introduced parents who are new to the Mac environment to important and useful features on the Mac so that they are better able to guide their children and gain a better understanding for themselves. We are finding that many parents have gone and purchased their own Mac and we want to support them!

PTW2The Scavenger Hunt has nearly 30 items and we talked in depth about 6 of them in depth in the 80 minutes we spent together. Below are the notes from our session. We’ll repeat and expand on the Mac OSX Scavenger Hunt during our next Parent Technology Workshop Sessions over Parent/Teacher Conferences on April 7th and 8th.

We’re looking forward to future Parent Technology Workshops as there is definitely a need in our community. Each time I do one, we have at least 50 parents that want to come and learn with technology.

What kinds of workshops have you done with your parents in your communities? What do they want to learn?

Mac OSX Scavenger Hunt Items Discussed:

How to take a screenshot on your Mac
 Hold down the keys Command, Shift, 4. The curser will turn into crosshairs. Click and drag the cursor over the area you would like to capture on your screen. The image will save on your desktop. Drag it to your iPhoto icon to save it into iPhoto.

How to use Time Machine
We recommend purchasing a separate hard drive that you can dedicate to Time Machine in order to back up your Mac. The hard drive does not need to be an Apple hard drive but should be between 500GB and 1TB. Once you purchase the hard drive, plug it into the computer and open Disk Utility. Select the hard drive on the left menu and then select Erase. Set the Format to Mac OS Extended (Journaled). This will erase and format the hard drive for Time Machine.

Next, go to the Spotlight to search for and open Time Machine. Turn the slider to the ON position and select your new hard drive as the Time Machine Backup hard drive. Your first back up will take a lot of time so I recommend letting it work overnight. After your first back up, plug in your hard drive at least once a week to update the backup. This will take less time.

How to right click on a Mac
There are two ways to right click on a Mac. The two handed method is to hold down the Control button and click on the trackpad. The one handed method is to put two fingers on the trackpad and then click on the trackpad.

How to create a PDF
 You can turn a document into a PDF easily on a Mac but using the print function. I use the shortcut of Command P to print or you can go to File and select Print. When the print window opens, look to the bottom left corner for the PDF button. Click on it and select Save as PDF. PDFs are useful because they are smaller files that can be read on almost anybody’s computer (Mac or PC).

How to do Software Updates
 There are two items we ask our students to do one a week and one of them is Software Updates. We ask them to put a recurring evening on their iCal with an alarm to remind them even though the the computer automatically checks for software updates. The fact is that many people click on the Not Now or Later button and find themselves behind in updates. Software Updates are important to extend the life of a computer’s Operating System (OS. It updates a computer’s applications, Security Updates, device drivers and firmware.

To do Software Updates, go to the apple icon in the top left corner of the screen and select Software Updates. The computer will check for new software. If you have not done this in awhile, you’ll have several updates available. It’s then sometimes best to click on the Show Details button and do a few updates at a time. Especially in China, the internet speed impacts how quickly and successfully software updates download.

 

Filed Under: communication, Job Description

Congrats to our new and old ADEs!

March 9, 2011 By Leave a Comment

The Apple Distinguished Educator community is a remarkable community to be a part of in this small little world of ours.  I was on twitter yesterday and Steve Katz brought the number of ADEs.  I hadn’t actually thought about it until yesterday, but when I looked up I found that Shanghai American School has 14 ADEs and 3 members of Apple Professional Development.

I hope that all of the new ADE recruits have a wonderful time in Vietnam this April at the ADE Asia Institute.  You are joining a supportive community where everybody lifts you up for the things you do well and encourages you through the things you can do better on.  That’s what it’s all about – we don’t have all of the answers but we are absolutely will to try and find them.

Everybody together now….. “YES, AND…..”

Congrats to our new ADEs at SAS this year:

And of course to our ADE Alumni at SAS – Keep the GREAT work up!

 

Filed Under: ADE
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