Teacher Web Sites

Wouldn't it be great if you had a central place to store all of your class assignments, make announcements, list homework, and provide a course calendar?  Creating a Class web site is an easy way to accomplish this task.  Having a site for your course will allow your students (and parents) to see what the homework is, download worksheets, etc.

There are many free, user-friendly tools that will allow you to easily create your class website.  Google sites is one way.  Mr. Scopelleti and Mr. Savage both use Google Sites for their class websites.  Check them out!  Mr. Savage's is here;   Mr. Scopelleti's is here.  Getting started with Google Sites is simple.  Just click "sites" at the top of any Google Page, click "create", choose a template and start adding your content!  Click here for a comprehensive guide to setting up your Google Site.

Another option is to use Weebly.com.  This is a free site that will enable you to have your site up and running in no time at all!  I just created this test site in a matter of minutes.  Click here to see my example.   A guide to using Weebly can be seen here.

I hope I've gotten you thinking about creating a website for your class.  If you already have a site, please let me know so I can link to it off our school website.  If you're interested in creating your own site but need some help let me know!

What browser are you using?

Browser choice can have a big impact on your internet experience. Different browsers are better at displaying different sites, depending on how the site was developed.  Which browser do you use most often?  Please take a second to answer the poll on the right so I can see which browser is used most frequently as SSVT.

My favorite browser is Chrome.  Why?  Mostly because I use a lot of Google services. Since Chrome was developed by Google it was designed to interact seamlessly with all of the Google Services.  It also provides features that the other browsers do not, such as being able to drag and drop folders from your desktop directly into your Google Drive.  If you were using Internet Explorer or Firefox you'd have to drag one file at a time, which is much more time consuming.

If you haven't tried Chrome yet I'd highly recommend it.  You can download Chrome here, or submit a ticket with the SSVT help desk to have someone install Chrome for you.

Happy Surfing!

Staff Snapshot of the week:

If anyone has a photo they'd like to submit to our staff snapshot of the week, send them to Crystal!

TECH TIP: Email Filtering

SSVT maintains an email filtering service to help keep your inbox free of junk.  You may be surprised to learn that each day there are approximately 6500 email messages destined for ssvotech.org email addresses.  Of those 6500 messages, about 80% are tagged as “bad” (either spam, containing a virus, or in violation of our acceptable use policy) and are sent to a quarantine folder before they ever reach your inbox.  According to the reports, 99.4% of the time the quarantine correctly identifies these “bad” messages. What happens the other .6% of the time? 

Let’s say you were expecting an email from a vendor but it never arrives.  The vendor insists they sent it.  There is a chance that the message was part of the unfortunate .6% incorrectly identified as spam.  In order to locate the message you’ll need to do the following:

1.     Check your email for a “quarantine summary” message.  The sender will be “South Shore Regional School District”

2.     Open the message and scan through the list.  This is a list of all your messages that were caught by the spam filter.  If the message you’re looking for is in the quarantine you will see it in the list. 

3.     To release the message from quarantine click the “deliver” link to the right of the message. This will cause the spam filter to forward the message on to your inbox.

Hmmm... I hit “deliver” on the quarantine list but I still don’t see the email in my inbox.  What happened?

Because email spam and viruses are so rampant there is a second set of filters your message has to go through before you get it.  Sometimes a message you release from the SSVT quarantine will be identified as spam by this second filter and it will not be delivered to your inbox.  If this happens the message will go to a special folder in your inbox named “spam”.  To find this folder, go to the left-hand side of your gmail screen, click “more” at the bottom of your folder list and find the folder named “spam”.  Clicking that folder will show you its contents and you should then be able to find the elusive email message you’ve been looking for! Click the box to the left of the message and then click the button that says, “not spam” at the top of your message list.  This will tell google that this is a good message and make it so that messages from that sender will no longer be banished to the spam folder. 

I hope this tech tip helped you to understand the email filtering process employed by SSVT.  As always, if you have any questions do not hesitate to ask!

TECH TIP: ITunes U

Looking for enrichment? Have you considered iTunes U?

iTunes U makes it easy to learn from the world’s leading educational institutions. Take a full course or browse the world’s largest catalog of free educational content. The app includes a dedicated library where you can store all of your downloaded iTunes U content so that all of your lectures, videos, books, and full courses are available at your fingertips.