March 9, 2018

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Happy Friday! Maybe next week will be a normal week, pretty soon snow days should be behind us. Looking ahead to next week on Wednesday we have an assembly in the competition gym at 1:10. Aaron Thomas will be speaking to our and Gehlen's student bodies. Please have our students sit on main bleachers, Gehlen will be on the end bleachers. This should last a hour and then students will return to 6th period class. We will take the time left in the school day and then run through the last 3 periods. 

I will be starting to work on the master schedule and will hopefully have that done in a couple of weeks. Once I have something that looks good, I will ask a few of you to look at it for potential conflicts. When everything looks good, I'll load students into the schedule and hopefully we will be all set.

 Don't forget requisitions are due on Monday. If you don't plan on ordering anything please let me know that as well. Amy D. did send out a list of items you must order through her. Please make sure you have made her aware of any of these types of supplies, as she has the same deadline as you to get these turned in. 

 The end of the quarter is March 16, grades will be due on the 20th. Report cards will be run on this date and academic in-eligibility will begin. Hopefully we will have a normal week next week. It has been awhile.

Have a good weekend!
Mark

Staff News

Please keep Doug in your prayers as he recovers from his surgery. Next week Carrie Sjaarda will be subbing for him. 

 Please keep Ted Hallberg and family in your prayers as Carol's mother passed away this week.

Staff as Learners


Students as Leaders



Assistant Principal's Happenings


Librarian's News

MackinVia is a source of ebooks, audio books, and many news articles. It is paid for by the Iowa AEA. There are over 1200 titles available for student and teacher use. There is a free app for phone, tablet, or any smart device so a person can utilize the titles any time and any where. My one complaint is that the audio are audio only; there is no text to accompany, so students working on fluency would need to still find an in-hand print version. However, the audio only are perfect when traveling or exercising! Your user name SHOULD be first initial last name, (ex: nisebrand) with PW: Bulldogs.  If it doesn't work, please let me know, and I will let you know what yours is! 

Success Center Update

I was looking in one of my texts for ideas to help my students who struggle to remember vocabulary, and I came across visuwords.com, an online interactive dictionary and thesaurus.  You enter a word into the search bar, and the program creates an interactive word map with definitions, examples, synonyms and antonyms, etc.  It's color coded (and has a great key) so students can immediately see parts of speech, explore "is a kind of," "is a member of," "is a cause of," and so on.  Moving the different bubbles around helps clarify, and mousing over any of the elements gives you even more detail.  One more tool to help make connections in text!  

Instructional Coaches Corner

Speechify let's you turn anything into an audiobook - readings for school, reports for work, PDFs on your computer, articles online, physical books. It can be installed as a Chrome extension on your browser or an app on your phone. In this way you can listen while doing other things like driving, cooking, or at the gym. Avoid motion sickness if in the car, and stay focused even if you are easily distracted or feel tired.

Are you looking for a fun way to randomly select students in your class. Try Name Picker Ninja. The downside to this is you don't appear to be able to save your class lists. So you have to paste the class roster in and then use it. If you want to use it with the same class again later you would have to repaste the names in.

wheeldecide.com is another random selection tool. It has the same limitation as Name Picker Ninja.

While Random Name Selectorisn't flashy it does offer the ability to enter names and save the list for later use again.

Reading List is a Chrome Extension that can be used to save websites to browse through for a later time. Once the Extension is installed, visit the website of your choice and click on the Reading List icon. Choose the green plus sign to add to your reading list. Once the website is added to your reading list, there are a variety of tools to help you locate your articles. Use the All and Unread tabs to show all items saved or filter through unread items. You can manually revisit the website or use the search feature to quickly locate an article if you have a significant number of items in your list.

Many of us are familiar with seeing revision history within a Google Doc but did you know that there is a hidden way to do it with Google Sites also? Click here to learn how.

Are you interested in having your students podcast to an authentic audience? If so then anchor.fm may be just what you are looking for. anchor.fm allows you to record audio with your phone, a tablet or a laptop/desktop computer. Click here to read Matt Miller's review.

Article Worth Reading

Saturday, March 10
- 8:00 am IHSAA Individual Speech State Contest @ Kuemper Catholic

Tuesday, March 13
- 4:30 pm Varsity/JV Boy/Girl Track @ Buena Vista University

Wednesday March 14
- 1:00 pm Assembly

Thursday, March 15
- 6:30 pm Speech/Drama Banquet

Friday, March 16 
- End of 3rd Quarter
- 6:30 pm Dance Exhibition
- 9:00 pm Swinter Dance

Saturday, March 17
- Hinton Show Choir Competition

Sunday, March 18
- Show Choir Banquet

Monday, March 19
- TBD Varsity Boy/Girl Track @ USD - Vermillion

Wednesday, March 21
- 7:00 pm Athletic Booster Club Meeting

Saturday, March 24
- TBD Varsity Boy/Girl Track @ SDSU - Brookings
- 8:00 am State Solo/Small Ensemble Festival

Monday, March 26
- IHSAA Individual Events Speech All-State Festival @ Cedar Falls

Tuesday, March 27
- 5:00 pm Varsity Boy/Girl Track @ Unity Christian

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