This month's Tech Tips has a focus on equity and some of the resources available to make our work more responsive to language, disabilities, and cultural heritage, as well as recognizing the efforts of district staff who have engaged in equity-focused professional development.

National Celebrations

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Teaching Tolerance

Teaching Tolerance provides free educational resources to educators to “foster inclusiveness, reduce bias, and promote educational equity” for K-12 students in the United States. These resources include ready-to-use lessons, texts, performance tasks, and professional development, sometimes connecting with other partner organizations that have great resources as well. 

Native American Education

Web Accessibility

Docs, Slides, and Sheets Accessibility

Auto-Fill of Personal Information

Skyward Phishing Emails

School district personnel are being targeted by a popular cyber-attack called phishing. In this case, the end-user is sent an email to change their Skyward password. If they click on the link within the email,  a screen appears that asks for their username, password and Social Security Number (SSN). This is a common fraudulent attempt to obtain personal information, but unfortunately too many users continue to fall victim.  

Auburn School District and WSIPC will never ask an end-user for their SSN to log in to the Skyward environment. Any staff member seeing this email, should mark it as spam and delete it. If you have fallen victim to this fake login screen, contact the Department of Technology immediately and take swift action to protect your personal information.

Two frequently asked questions from the DOT Helpdesk this month:

Google Classroom

Some teachers have reported attachments not appearing for students when assigning work.

For students to view attachments, they should follow the steps below:

• 1. Click the classwork tab at the top

  2. Click on the assignment title to expand the assignment

  3. Click on "View Assignment"

  4. Locate "Your Work" in the top right corner and click on the file with your name on it.

The student view is sometimes very different to the teacher view, which can lead to confusion here.

Chromebooks Not Turning-On

This is a common issue for staff and students, particularly with elementary students newly having devices at home. If a Chromebook reaches 0% power, it can have difficulties turning on. 

Ensure that the Chromebook is connected to a power source, and has been charging for a few minutes.  Then follow these steps:

• 1. Press Esc+refresh key+power button together 

  2. When you see the exclamation mark screen, you can hard reboot by holding the power button for 20-30 seconds 

  3. Log in normally once it powers back on

Deep Equity Training

Shout out to the Department of Technology staff who were in the third cohort to complete Deep Equity training this year:

Tiffany Burt | Laura Cohen | Rick Fawver | Lynette Miller 

Raquel Quirino | Kelly Starkel | Megan Turner

ATLA & ATLA Cadre Leaders

Congratulations to this year's ATLA participants for completing our first-ever equity-focused course!  Even the school closures and a switch to an online format didn't stop the vital work that these teacher-leaders engaged in to create more culturally-responsive experiences for our students, and to shift our district culture to become more equitable for all. Staff can access the materials and, for the last session, the recordings on the ATLA 3.0 webpage.

Staff Support Contributors

We have had a plethora of help while creating our bi-weekly PD pages. Now that we are not creating anymore, we want to take a minute to thank all those who have collaborated with us along the way.