IT News and Notes

CLEVER

If you have been to the Mentor Schools website lately, you may have noticed a slight change in the drop down menus for staff and students. Gone is the long list of programs the district provides. The links have been replaced with one link - Clever (All District Programs) . There are three main reasons why we are instituting Clever at all grade levels.

With a Single Sign On (SSO), Clever allows users a single set of credentials (which are your Google credentials) to access all of the programs the district provides.
With students moving in and out of our district, Clever allows for a seamless transition for having students placed or removed from rosters. Clever connects with Infinite Campus so when a change is made there, it is also made with programs in Clever.
Clever allows teachers to customize their pages by adding links to other resources they want students to access easily.

In January of last school year, we had a soft roll-out of Clever because they were still working on the iOS app. They have made some improvements to the app. To begin this school year we will be encouraging all staff and students to use Clever to access district programs. Please note that final rostering is being completed this week and access to all programs will not happen until the first day of school for staff and students. Here is a quick video to show how easy it is to log into and access programs in Clever.

NEARPOD

For the last three years, the district has provided 100 licenses to teachers in grades K-12 to use Nearpod. We have received great feedback from the teachers using this application. Nearpod also recently added the Common Sense Media Digital Citizenship lessons along with lessons to support Social Emotional Learning. These reasons have led us to purchase a license for all teachers to use Nearpod .

This year you will be able to find all of the Digital Citizenship Lessons for your grade level through Nearpod. Nearpod can be accessed through Clever by clicking on the icon and logging in with Google. Once in Nearpod, you can click on Mentor Exempted Village Library found in the left toolbar. In the library, you will see a folder for each grade level where the Digital Citizenship lessons can be found.

Common Sense Media just released updated Digital Citizenship lessons for all grade levels. Nearpod is currently converting their lessons to match this new curriculum. We will be updating those lessons in Nearpod as soon as they become available. You will see a NEW label on each of these updated lessons. Feel free to use the lessons from last year, these NEW lessons as they become available (or a combination) to implement the Digital Citizenship curriculum this year. If you want to learn more about Nearpod, Mrs. Roediger will have sessions during the PD Day on August 14th.

FEATURED STAFF MEMBERS THIS MONTH

Kassi Pike - STEAM Teacher at Lake and Orchard Hollow

Kassi Pike is excited to start a new challenge this year as the STEAM Teacher at Lake Elementary and Orchard Hollow Elementary. Kassi is being recognized as this month's Featured Staff Member because of her work with Clever and for being an Apple and Google Level 1 Certified Teacher. Kassi used Clever extensively toward the end of last year, especially with the 3rd grade PBL they did with Lake Health. She said "It was nice to push out approved research websites for the students." As for this upcoming year, she is looking forward to experimenting on how she can best use Clever in STEAM.

Kassi has also completed the Apple and Google certified Teacher Level 1 credentials. She did this as one of the options for summer professional learning. She really enjoyed learning about many different Google apps such as Science Journal and Google Keep. Kassi found that using Google apps every day made Level 1 credentialing a little easier. Kassi's goal is to always stay current whether it is with technology or with curriculum. Congratulations Kassi on being recognized as this month's Featured Staff Member!