At SHS, we use a tool called “Papercut” for printing. The purpose of Papercut printing is to avoid wasteful printing. With Papercut, every student and faculty member has a Papercut account and is given a printing budget. Because all of the printers at SHS use Papercut printing, Chromebooks need to install an extension called “Mobility Print” in order to print to any of the printers here.

SHS Help Desk student Arjun Rastogi put together instructions on how to do this. You can find them here.

Additional printing resources/information can be found here.

This tip is useful when students who are trying to print from the library desktop computers find that they can’t print at all to the library copier or the elevator landing copier from any of the computers. If this happens to you, it’s possible that there is a queue of student work that hasn’t been printed and has held up other print jobs. This is how you clear up that queue.

1. Click on the printer icon in your dock to open the print queue

2. Click the “Jobs” menu

3. Select “Show everyone’s jobs”

• If you see a print job there that is holding up the other ones, select it and delete it.

• Click on “Resume” to restart your print job.

Over this past semester, we’ve gotten a lot of tech support requests from students who have been unable to print. Most often, the issue is that the students are trying to print out a document with a few pages and they have insufficient funds available in their PaperCut account.

SHS Help Desk student Michael Simons has put together a cheat sheet to show students how they can check their PaperCut printing accounts so that they are aware of the balance of funds available to them.

What is PaperCut Printing?

Though PaperCut has been in effect for almost 2 years now, many students aren’t aware of it. PaperCut is a printing management system, that allows us to track printer usage by individuals at SHS.

Unfortunately, in the past, there had been a lot of waste and abuse of printing privileges, which cost the school district a lot of money. Often students would print copies of a document and then never even go to retrieve the document. Sometimes multiple copies of a document were sent to a printer, rather than using the copy machine (which costs less) to make copies.

To cut down on abuse of printers, all staff & students now have “PaperCut” accounts. Students are entitled to $5 of printing for the school year. Files printed to printers generally cost 10 cents/page, with color printers costing more and printing to copiers costing less.

To learn more about managing your PaperCut account, please see the cheat sheet on Checking PaperCut Balances.

Has your computer been having battery loss issues? Is the computer slow when using any software? Is the time glitching? Has the internet connection been having issues? There is a simple solution! Restarting your computer is the best solution to help with these problems. There are many benefits to restarting your computer. First, restarting allows the computer some time to take a minute to restart its “brain.” Technology experts suggest restarting laptops on the weekend so they can rest before the week starts. In addition, although the computer empties its active memory (RAM), it will not wipe anything else. It only empties this due to the fact that it is trying to clear any faults. Rebooting will flush out unimportant and random data impeding your laptop. It will also help get rid of any technical issues such as time glitching, battery loss, or slow screen/browsers. Lastly, restarting the computer also fixes the internet connection, stops memory leaks, saves money from having to go to technical support, and allows your computer to run faster.

If you need help to restart your laptop, follow the guided steps below.

1. Click the Apple Symbol Button on the top left-hand side of your computer.

2. Next, find the Restart button.

3. Then, click the button and the computer will restart(remember to press the “okay” button to confirm).

4. If you need any more help, go to the tech office or the SHS Help Desk in the library.

Hope this helps!

Issue: Your computer’s date and time are off, which shouldn’t be a huge deal. But the real issue is it prevents you from using certain software and can incorrectly date important work.

Solution: This time glitch can be fixed in two ways. The first thing you should try is restarting your laptop. If that does not work, go into Self Service on your laptop and click the “Unlock Date & Time” application to install it. This will allow you to fix your date and time by yourself without a problem.

Here is how to get the application:

1. Find the search button on the top right of your menu bar.

2. Search for Self Service in the search area.

3. This is what will pop up.

4. Scroll down to find “Unlock Date & Time”

5. Click the application to install.

If you need any more help, go to the tech office or the SHS Help Desk in the library.

Hope this helps!

This week’s Tech tip comes from Max Avratin, who demonstrates how to log out from Google drive on an iPad.

Since school iPads are shared between many students, it is essential that students who use Google Drive on the iPads know how to sign out when they are done. If you don’t sign out, you leave your files exposed to anyone else who chooses to use that same iPad after you. In addition to the video tutorial, we also have a quick cheat sheet that also gives step-by-step instructions.

If you have questions or suggestions on this or any of the other Help Desk tutorials, please come visit us up in the SHS Library during periods 1,3,4 or 6.

Are you a Google calendar user? One of the many great things about Google Calendar is that it is so easy to integrate it with your smartphone’s calendar apps, whether the built-in Calendar apps on the phone or one of the many Calendar apps in the app stores. What I love about my Google calendar is that I can enter events on my computer or my smartphone and those events show up in both places, allowing me to always be able to keep track of events wherever I am.

We have been asked a few times about how to import Schoology’s calendar into Google calendar and Rishi Patel has put together a very easy-to-use cheat sheet to explain how this can be done, making it even easier to keep track of all of your calendar events in one place. The cheat sheet can be found here: Importing your Schoology calendar into a Google calendar.

Enjoy!

As some of you might have heard from students, Schoology sometimes shows past assignments that have not been submitted via the Schoology portal as “overdue”.

This is because the default setting for assignments is for students to submit them online. However, you can change this with the click of one button when creating new assignments! To find out more, please see the one-page cheat sheet put together by Help Desk student Rishi Patel.

Rishi is happy to provide any kind of technology integration support to teachers during Eagle Blocks on Mondays and Wednesdays. He will even make “house calls” to your classroom! Just fill out his tech integration support form to make an appointment: Tech Integration SchoolDude. Thanks!

Did you know that you could set up Schoology so that you get an email or text notification whenever certain types of events occur? For students, you might want to be notified when a teacher posts a course update or sends you a private message via Schoology. For teachers, you might want to be notified when a student sends you a private message or even when a student comments on a post or assignment.

Setting up Notifications in Schoology is highly recommended. You might even want to go to the Notifications tab, just to turn off some of the notifications that get set up by default when you enter your email address into Schoology.

We’ve got the resources to help you do this. Thanks to Help Desk Seniors Anthony Vo and Diane Prager, there is both a video tutorial and a one-page quick start guide to help you out. Check them out and feel free to stop by the Help Desk if you have any questions. We are located up in the library during periods 1, 3, 4, and 6.

Editor’s Note: This is an adapted re-post of an article written by Anthony Vo. See Anthony’s blog for more postings written by him.

Based in California, Breakout EDU describes itself on its website as an “immersive learning games platform”, a series of interactive puzzles designed for students to apply different lessons from class. The challenges are similar to “escape the room” games, in which people use their wits to break out of a locked room. Instead of a locked room, teams must figure out how to get inside a tightly locked box (shown below).

Breakout EDU builds the wooden boxes by hand and sells them online and the games are customizable. Teachers can build lessons that challenge students to think creatively to get into the box. Part of Breakout’s mission is to impact teaching at a basic level, making it more problem-based, more social, more interactive, and more physical.

“The Sound, the Light and the Fury”

On April 4 & 5, students in Mr. Gorman’s Physics classes used one of the puzzle boxes as a review game. Students working in teams were given brief instructions before being given the freedom to problem-solve as they saw fit. The “instructions” took the form of riddles and hidden messages, some of which were only visible with a special flashlight.

Students seemed to be eager and engaged, yet thoroughly challenged by Breakout’s wooden box. The puzzle was designed to make the students think critically and work through a series of clues, each bringing them closer to the box’s contents.

The lesson drew directly from the class’s curriculum, as students had to use what they learned from class to properly solve the puzzle. For example, students shown to the left consider the reflection of light in order to obtain a valuable clue.

Despite the challenge, the students persisted and each class was able to solve the challenge they were assigned. After each part of the puzzle had been successfully cracked, the locked box finally opened.

Inside the box, Mr. Gorman’s class was able to enjoy a sweet reward for their smart work!

Editor’s Note: In addition to Jarrod Gorman, other SHS teachers who have run Breakout Games with their classes include Abby Theberge and Nivedi Das.

This week’s “Tech tip” comes from Help Desk student Kevin Earley. Would you like to be able to skip some of the preliminary parts of a YouTube video and get right to a specific segment of the video? Well, you can, and it’s relatively easy to do!

Just go to the specific part of that video and right-click (or control + click on a Mac) to see a menu of options that includes “Get Video URL at current time“. Then just highlight and copy the text and paste it into another web browser or link. Check out the video tutorial for more information.

This is great for teachers who don’t have time to show an entire YouTube video in class but want to quickly get to one particular part. Note that this will not eliminate the advertisements or annoying sidebar distractions. It also will not crop the video to end at a certain time or embed questions within the video. There are other tools that can offer these features and which we will describe in a future blog post. However, this method does not require you to do anything other than right-click and copy/paste. Quick and easy… Enjoy!

Though the name is confusing (it has nothing to do with the “Safari” web browser), Safari Montage is an incredible new resource that is now available to all Sharon schools staff members.

What is Safari Montage? – Safari Montage is essentially a video repository system. Our subscription to Safari Montage gives us access to all kinds of rich educational media content, such as video titles from the History Channel, National Geographic, PBS, and the BBC (as well as content from many other leading video publishers). The system also allows us to upload, store and manage our own video content as well. In addition, it allows teachers to create and share “playlists” to organize video content related to their curricula and share those playlists with both teachers and students.

Going forward, we are planning to upload Help Desk tutorials to Safari Montage. As a result, when you click on links to tutorials that are posted here, they will take you to a log-in screen for Safari Montage (see image below). To log in, simply use the username and password that you use to log in to any computer on our network.

So that you can try this out for yourself, please check out the brand new “Google Forms” tutorial created by Help Desk Senior Mark Botaish. For more information about Safari Montage, please see Help Desk Senior Leeanne Germain’s Safari Montage cheat sheet or ask a member of the Help Desk team. Thanks!

Socrative is an excellent tool for polling a classroom in a very quick manner. This can be useful for obtaining a fast read on the class’s understanding of a topic or their opinion. The abundance of options the tool provides makes it great for a variety of uses. Some options the tools provide are multiple-choice quizzes, short answer responses, and a game called Space Race. Signing up for an account is really easy. You can either register using an email address and password or just log in using a Google account. When you create an account, it asks for a room name, which students will be required to enter when logging in to take one of your quizzes. It’s recommended that teachers at Sharon High School name it SHS + their last name (i.e. SHSNewman) to keep things simple.

[Editor’s note: for help getting started with Socrative, feel free to contact Stacy Newman, stop by the SHS Help Desk, or take a look at a video tutorial or cheat sheet. There is also a great demo that you can watch on their website.]

Kaizena is an excellent free tool that allows teachers to give more helpful feedback on students’ written work. Some notable features are the ability to link to websites such as grammar tutorials, add voice notes, and add written comments. Rather than just telling a student they have a dangling participle or misplaced modifier, you can actually attach a link to an online grammar guide, so they know how to fix the sentence and use the correct grammar the next time. Also, students will see comments on their papers and understand the reasoning behind their grades instead of just seeing a number entered into PowerSchool.

Kaizena is also an excellent app for peer review. Students have the ability to invite other students to review their work, so writing can easily be reviewed by multiple people, even at the same time.

Recently, Kaizena has also developed a Google Chrome extension that allows you to add feedback directly in Google Docs, so if you want to take advantage of this new feature, you must open Google Docs in Google Chrome. Once in Google Docs, click on the “Add-ons” menu at the top of the page and then click “Get add-ons…” Search “Kaizena” and click the green “Free” button to install the Kaizena add-on. The following video will provide a lesson on how to start using the Kaizena add-on for Google Chrome.

[Editor’s Note: ELA coordinator Nick Bacigalupi will be providing a workshop on using Kaizena at our upcoming Sharin’ Tech conference. If you’d like help getting started in the meantime, please feel free to reach out to Stacy Newman, SHS Instructional Technology Specialist, or Zack Brody, member of the SHS Help Desk.]