**All ES Faculty meeting this week. Please refer to the Schedule and Agenda (in the sidebar) for further information and what to bring.
Stacy will be off campus December 7-11. Please see Krista with any questions or concerns.
I am excited to announce that Camille Johanssen will be joining our elementary team beginning in August 2016. She will be a member of our fifth grade team. Camille is coming from Lima, Peru and is joined by her husband, Jacob Johanssen, who will be teaching Mathematics in the High School. More information about Camille will be made available when we have completed all hiring (across all three divisions).
Although the influx of sweets in the Sweet Treat Cafe have come to an end, the warmth of the fire, the holiday movies and the festive music in a relaxing atmosphere will remain all this week. There are still a few holiday treats that will be made available. Bring your cup, grab some java, tea or juice and enjoy time with your colleagues.
Date and times: December 7-11, 8:00-4:00 pm.
Where: Sweet Treat Café (ES Office Rm 155)
See you there!
The library kindly request books be returned as you finish with them. If you can begin sending them our way as early as today we would greatly appreciate it. Receiving several hundred unit books on Friday before the holiday will cause a back log in circulation beginning in the new year. You help with this will enable us to get out new unit books to you in January. We are happy to pick up book carts and replenish it with your new unit books.If you would like new books for your classroom library I am happy to have your students select them during library this week. Just give us a call or send us an email.
Happy holidays from the library
As many grade levels are administering end of unit writing assessments at this time of year, please remember to record students' scores in the 2015 - 2016 Writing Progress Database.
~from Practical Ed Tech
Trying to get all of your students to the same set of websites at the same time can be a frustrating experience for you and for them. Just a mis-typed character or two can create a frustrating experience for everyone in the room. One way to avoid this situation is to post all of your links on one course webpage or in a blog post. Another solution is to use a link bundling service that will group all of your links together into one package. Then instead of sending out a bunch of individual links you can just send one link that will open all of the bundled links for your students. Here are three services that you can use for just that purpose.
LinkBunch is a free service that you can use to quickly send a group of links to your friends, colleagues, and students. To use the service just visit LinkBunch, enter the links that you want to share, and click “Bunch.” When you click on “Bunch” you will be given a URL to share with anyone you want to see the links in your bunch. When someone clicks on the URL for your Bunch he or she will be able to open the links you bunched together.
Bitly is one URL shortener that I have been using for years. It’s simple to use, especially if you use the bookmarklet, allows you to customize URLs, and it offers good statistics about the use of your links. Bitly offers an option for bundling bookmarks into one package that you can share with just one link. Bitly bundles can be created collaboratively if you invite other Bitly users to bundle links with you. The nice thing about Bitly is that you can view how many times a link has been used. So if you have 25 students and the link has only been used 20 times, you know that at five students aren’t where you need them to be.
FatURL is a handy little tool to use when you need to share a group of links to someone. To share a group of links through FatURL just copy and paste or type URLs into the bundle box. You can add comments to each link. After creating your bundle hit the share button to send it.