The Spark
National Teacher Development Newsletter, May 2020
National Update
I hope that you are well and ready to dive into this issue of The Spark. You will find some great information and best practices shared. As you are already aware, the Talent Development Team is hosting live webinars and social media sessions for all to attend. You can find a list of the webinars here. Feel free to reach out and have a wonderful week!
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Christine Spalding
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Building Community
The Talent Development and Community Team is beginning to develop our strategic plan for Social Media in the 20-21 School Year. We want to hear from you! Please share your voice and be a part of our planning process to make our Social Media pages powerful for EVERYONE in our Community!
Brittany Churchill
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Teacher Highlight
Crissa Lewis
2nd/ELA, TNVA
In a small group reading class, Ms. Lewis teaches two leveled reading groups. Her lesson lasts for 2 consecutive days. The students are engaged in the learning task and participate fully in the lesson. It is a fantastic example of using groups effectively in an engaging virtual class session. Thank you Crissa!
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OMHS Enhancements
Saturday April 24th brought some new enhancements to the OMHS including:
- A new column of New Submissions on the Assignments page to call out new, unviewed submissions
- Improved accessibility on warning messages
- Ability to export quiz questions to the LOR from the Quiz Builder for non-Summit courses
Be sure to check out these new enhancements!
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Learn, Know & Grow
Over the last 4 months the content leads in Product Development have been offering sessions on the new courses for SY20-21. If you have missed any of the sessions you can access the session recordings and documents within the content tab of the Learn, Know & Grow SY20-21 Curriculum within K12Training.com. Some of the popular sessions include:
- Enhanced 6-10 ELA courses
- Summit 3 Math and ELA courses
- MS/HS Science enhancements
Additionally, information on the new and enhanced courses is available through your school's administration. Administrators can access course information documents, scopes and sequences, program guides and other items that will help you prepare for changes to your courses on the course offering pages.
Below are demo accounts you may use to view content from the new Grade 3 ELA and Math courses. There are also Embark Math and Embark Language Arts demo lessons on these accounts.
- Teacher Account
- Username: EarlyK5Teacher Password: K12Rocks2020
- Student Account
- Username: EarlyK5Student Password: K12Rocks2020
IMPORTANT: Please do not hide, reorder, skip or modify the courses. Many teachers may want to view the content and modifying the lessons will not provide the best experience for others.
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Promising Practices 2020 Highlight: Growing a Class Community
This year’s February conference was a huge success! We want to say thank you to all our presenters as well as the 3,000 teachers that enrolled and participated. Check out one of our most highly attended sessions in action: Growing A Class Community.
If you already attended this session and/or would like to view additional recordings, click here or search in K12 training for “Promising Practices Conference (Feb 2020) Recordings”.
The conference materials are all available in the Promising Practices Dropbox as well: http://tinyurl.com/PPFeb2020.
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Books! Where can I find more Books?
Looking for trade books, but don't have access to a library or book store? There is a national library of eBooks and audiobooks you can find using the overdrive.com site or Libby mobile app. Users can sign up using their phone number or get access to more books by using their local library card. You can find out more with this short recording or this webinar.
Big Universe is included in our K12 curriculum, and it is free right now for everyone. If you want to share this valuable free resource for families not enrolled in our schools, try this document. Thanks to Laura Smith of NCVA for assisting with the creation of this document. If you want a resource for families enrolled in your school, you can adapt the PowerPoint here.
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Identifying Special Populations within TotalView School (TVS):
Newsletter Team
Adam Blaylock
Chelsea Wilson
Christine Spalding
Newsletter Organizer & Editor