Using the Reminders App to Support Student Executive Functioning

Key's Quick Tips are provided by Kelly Key, Assistive Technology Coordinator for Barrington 220. Each month, I will feature a tool available on the iPad to support our students, including short video demonstrations. This month, I am highlighting how to use the Reminders app to support executive functioning for students.

The Reminders app is available on every iPad. This could be a very useful tool for our students that have difficulty with executive functioning. They can use it as a checklist, or set visual and auditory reminders to go off at a certain time (or location)! Students can share the reminder with you and you can add to it from your iPad. You can also add photos and icons as visual supports.

Check out all of the different ways to use it as well as a video tutorial below...

• Use as a planner to put their homework in (goes off when they get home) and shows them the list
• Pack something for homework (goes off at the end of the day)
• Go to the nurse for meds at a certain time
• Go to a therapy (i.e., speech) at a certain time
• Prepare a student for a transition (i.e., in 5 minutes we will pack up and go to PE)
• This can be used as a task list or visual schedule, they can check it off as they complete the list
• Set it for certain intervals- teach the student when they get the alert to monitor their behavior (i.e., are you listening, looking at the teacher, on task with your assignment, etc.)

Comment below if you have additional ideas to share!

A New Look for Campus Instruction Reports

Campus Instruction reports help teachers to analyze grade, assignment, and attendance data; generate helpful forms; and track student work. A recent enhancement to Campus Instruction Reports makes it easier for teachers to set personal favorites and to navigate the growing listing of available reports.

Teachers are encouraged to explore the various reports available today.

Create Report Favorites


Create your favorites list for easy access to reports.

Sample With Favorites Set and an Icon Selected
Select an icon to narrow the report listing a specific set of reports.



Portal Usage Report
Have you ever wondered if your students and/or their parents are visiting the Infinite Campus Parent Portal? The Portal Usage Report will show who in this class uses the portal and how frequently. In the example below, the top line indicates how many times the student has accessed the Infinite Campus Student Portal, and the second line indicates how many times the student’s parent has accessed the Parent Portal.



Student Missing Assignments
Do you often wonder how many total assignments one of your students is missing? The Student Missing Assignment Report provides teachers with a quick way to know about a student’s missing assignment in all their classes.



Infinite Campus Community
Infinite Campus Community helps all users stay current on new features and options. Join thousands of teachers all across America and visit Campus Community frequently to search Campus Instruction for more news and enhancements!

Check Out the New and Improved Apple Teacher Learning Center

If you haven’t been to the Apple Teacher Learning Center recently, then you really need to check it out again. Apple recently added new resources for teachers meant to improve the teacher and student experience in a one-to-one classroom. The Apple Teacher Learning Center has evolved into much more than the place to get your badges. There is now an entire section of learning resources for teachers with over 120 real examples of the ideas and concepts at work. In case you haven’t visited since your earned your Apple Teacher designation, here are just a few enhancements and additions to the Apple Teacher Learning Center:

Earning badges to become an Apple Teacher

What Apple says: "The Apple Teacher designation is intended to serve as a foundation to launch into other programs such as Everyone Can Create or Everyone Can Code."

My take: The process to become an Apple Teacher has changed. Rather than having separate badges for productivity and creativity, these lessons, badges, and quizzes are embedded into the other badges through examples and questions. There are now six badges needed to become an Apple Teacher with the iPad: iPad, Pages, Keynote, Numbers, GarageBand, and iMovie. These same badges can be earned for the Mac as well. 

Learn Skills for iPad and Learn Skills for Mac

What Apple says: "Keep your learning fresh and go beyond the basics with activities and idea-starters that you can apply to your own lessons."

My take: Although this section of the Apple Teacher Learning Center is not new, it's one you should visit. The two sections Learn Skills for iPad and Learn Skills for Mac are great ways to quickly learn, relearn, or practice a task. Do you know how to post an image in Keynote on your MacBook Air but can’t figure it out on the iPad? Can’t remember how to add audio to a Pages document? Want to add shapes and drawings to a Numbers document? The skills sections offer quick and easy-to-navigate tutorials for specific tasks on iPad and Mac.

Creative Classroom Activities

What Apple says: "The Everyone Can Create collection of project guides was designed to help you bring creativity into every lesson. And we’ve created sample activities that apply ideas from the guides to exploring space across multiple subjects. Learn new skills and see how easily you can bring them into the lessons you teach."

My take: This new section to the Apple Teacher Learning Center offers real teacher examples of how to use the creativity and productivity tools of the iPad to unlock creativity in both you and your students. Real-world examples of podcasts, storytelling with Clips, augmented reality (AR), photo, video, and more are explored to help inspire you to take your lesson to the next level. 

Everyone Can Create

What Apple says: "The Everyone Can Create collection is designed to ignite creativity for you and your students. Discover project guides, lesson ideas, activities, and more, and learn how to integrate music, drawing, video, and photos in your daily workflows."

My take: This section offers access to the full Everyone Can Create curriculum in a user-friendly, self-paced, step-by-step journey to improving your creative skills in video, music, drawing, and photography. The activities and projects are designed to present small, doable tasks that build on one another until, before you realize it, you are working at a near-professional level. 

Everyone Can Create in Action

What Apple says: "Learn how educators are using Everyone Can Create to bring lessons to life with music, video, photo, and drawing activities."

My take: Have you experienced the powerful Everyone Can Create curriculum developed by Apple? This year, every teacher in Barrington 220 will have the opportunity for a professional development experience taught by an Apple Professional Learning Specialist. Whether you’ve had the training yet or not, this section is worth a look. This section provides many examples of Apple Teachers using video, photo, drawing, and audio to enhance their lessons and increase student ownership. Examples include "Building listening comprehension with sketch notes," "Explore number patterns with Rhythm and Beats" and "Bring historical figures to life through podcasts," and many more. 

Classroom and Schoolwork

What Apple says: "The Classroom app turns your iPad or Mac into a powerful teaching assistant. Guide learning, share work, and manage student devices—all from the same app. Facilitate individual, group, and whole-class activities with just a few taps. Getting started with Classroom is easy."

My take: This is a great resource to learn more about the Apple Classroom app that you can use to manage the focus and flow of your physical classroom. 

Teaching Code

What Apple says: "Introduce students to coding through interactive puzzles, playful characters, and activities for both in and out of the classroom. With the super fun Swift Playgrounds app and helpful Everyone Can Code guides, anyone can start coding in Swift while building essential creativity, collaboration, and problem solving skills."

My take: Exploring the Everyone Can Code curriculum in the Swift Playgrounds series will give teachers a basic understanding of coding language and concepts. Understanding coding, even on a basic level, helps teachers and students ability to problem solve through computational thinking and allows the user to both experience temporary failures and feel the thrill of solving challenging problems. In short, learning coding is good for the soul. 

What We Can Learn from Spear Phishing Attacks: An Interview with Russ Vander Mey

During the month of January 2020, Barrington 220 experienced several targeted spear phishing attacks across a few of our schools. While we have some excellent systems in place that do an excellent job of identifying and blocking many types of email-based attacks, spear phishing is the is among most difficult to identify using automated systems. Luckily, many of our Barrington 220 employees noticed that something was “fishy” and immediately contacted our Tech Support team, who were able to immediately begin to take steps to thwart the attacks.

To review, a basic phishing attack is, “the process of attempting to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity using bulk email which tries to evade spam filters” (KnowBe4, 2020a). Spear phishing is similar, but even more targeted and insidious: “an email targeted at a specific individual or department within an organization that appears to be from a trusted source” (KnowBe4, 2020b).

I sat down with our own Russ Vander Mey, Director of Technology Services, and we reviewed the issues, patterns, and lessons we learned from these recent attacks here in Barrington 220.

Russ indicated that the January 2020 attacks were all defined as “CEO Attacks.” In other words, “a scam in which cybercriminals spoof company email accounts and impersonate executives to try and fool an employee” (KnowBe4, 2020c). Of course in education, our organizational leaders are superintendents and principals, not CEOs, but the definition still fits the attacks we experienced.

Russ explained the situation. “The ruse was that an attacker contacted employees by email using fake email addresses that impersonated the superintendent or principals. It happened at several of our schools.” Russ noted that the fake email accounts were all Gmail accounts, likely because they are free, easy to create, and perpetrators can name them almost anything. An example fake email account in these attacks would have been brianharris12345@gmail.com or stevemcwilliams54321@gmail.com.

WHAT WE CAN LEARN: Check the To: field. All legitimate Barrington 220 staff email accounts end in @barrington220.org and NEVER @gmail.com. 

Russ continued, “when the attack would begin, the perpetrator seems to have already created the messages, and they send them out all at once to the teachers and staff in a particular school.” How did they get all this information? “The email addresses were found by visiting the public district website and identifying the school leader. Then the attacker used the directory to pick teachers and other staff members to contact.”

The attacks followed a similar pattern, according to Russ. The first email sent was usually short: “Do you have a minute?” This was sent to several staff members at the same time. If a staff member replied, the attacker knew he or she had the staff member's attention. The next email followed quickly with a fictional story stating, for example, (impersonating an administrator) “I’m in a meeting right now and can’t get to a phone. I need 5 Amazon gift cards immediately! Please run down to the store and buy 5 $100 gift cards. Scratch off the numbers on the back and send me a pic. I’ll pay you back this afternoon.”

Another pattern we saw was that the attacker usually wrote in non-standard English (incorrect grammar or other mistakes) and sometimes used expressions that would unlikely be used by the leader being impersonated. For example, in one situation, the attacker impersonating our Superintendent asked to “send me your digits.” While our Superintendent was aware that this was slang for “send me your phone number,” Dr. Harris indicated that this is not a phrase he would ever say, let alone type in an email to a staff member.

WHAT WE CAN LEARN: School district leaders will not ask you to purchase gift cards or provide confidential information. Also be aware of how an email is written. Leaders will not likely write emails using slang or incorrect English.

Since this original series of attacks in January, we have had no additional major spear phishing attacks. Each time our Tech Support team learned of an attack, we immediately escalated the problem to and went to work mitigating the threat. Our efforts include sending emails to the affected school staff (or sometimes the entire district), blocking known fake emails, and assisting staff members who may have responded to one or more of the email attacks. These emails about attacks will usually come from Russ Vander Mey.

In general, if an email doesn’t seem quite right, please contact a member of the Barrington 220 Tech Support staff (x. 1500); your building LTA (Library/Technology Assistant) or Teacher Librarian; or if possible, check in with the administrator in person who allegedly sent an unusual or out-of-character email. Please exercise the tactics we are teaching in our Security Awareness training we are holding in every building. If you have not yet had the training, you will likely have it soon.



References

KnowBe4. (2020a). Phishing. Retrieved from www.knowbe4.com/phishing
KnowBe4. (2020b). Spear Phishing. Retrieved from www.knowbe4.com/spear-phishing
KnowBe4. (2020c). CEO Fraud. Retrieved from www.knowbe4.com/ceo-fraud

Help our Parents Help Our Students with Digital Citizenship

Over the past several months the Technology and Innovation Team (most often Director of Instructional Technology Ty Gorman) has had the opportunity to visit several PTO groups and school staff meetings in person to speak about issues pertaining to digital citizenship in and out of school. One issue that is frequently raised is when teachers and staff ask for advice on how to help parents deal with Internet and/or iPad issues at home.

Since the beginning of the One to World program, we have maintained several resources online at www.barrington220.org/onetoworld. The most-requested information is stored on the Parent Information page (linked from the left column of the One to World section).

We recently updated our resources for parents and families that provide basic information about the One to World program, followed by step-by-step directions for parents to set up Screen Time on district iPad devices. The guide is a dual-language (English/Spanish) document:

Working with iPad In & Out of School / Trabajando con el iPad Dentro y Fuera de la Escuela (PDF)

Watch Your Colleagues in One-Minute Spotlights

The Learning NOW One-Minute Spotlight video series highlights some of the many ways Barrington 220 students are learning across the district with technology in episodes that are about one minute long. The series aims to create a better understanding in the Barrington community about how students learn now and how the classroom environment has changed with the addition of a technology device in the hands of each student.

Here are some recent episodes featuring teachers and students at several Barrington 220 schools in a variety of grade levels.

Students in Luci Dvorak's Barrington High School Freshman English class use iPad to create story arcs and character development for original short story compositions:



Students in Katy McCullough's Barrington Middle School-Prairie social studies class use use iPad to create sketchnotes to demonstrate learning:



Students in Sarah Ogan's Barrington Middle School-Prairie art class use iPad and Adobe Photoshop to create stunning dreamcast visuals:



Grade 2 Teacher Abigail Hamilton at Sunny Hill Elementary uses the Classkick app on iPad to give her students informal learning assessments and then provide real-time feedback and personalized assistance during the school day:



Students in Ms. Meckert's Grade 3 class at Hough Street Elementary use Notability, Explain Everything, and Classkick on iPad to differentiate feedback after a tough test:



Students in Ms. Christianson and Ms. Haney's Grades 3-5 class at Hough Street School engage in a multi-part poetry project that allows them to analyze, create, post, and perform poems in different mediums in digital and analog formats:



Students in Ms. Hillard's Grade 1 class at Barbara Rose Elementary use Seesaw for a math activity on the 100th day of school to learn different ways to count to 100 using tens frames:



You may always visit the Learning NOW YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/learningnow220.

How to Engage the Lock Screen on a Mac

As part of our recent and ongoing Security Awareness training here in Barrington 220, a particular recommendation is shared—when we are not using our computers, we should lock our screen. The  Lock Screen setting increases security by restricting unauthorized users from accessing district computers.

While locking the screen is fairly simple on an iPad using a Passcode and/or the Sleep/Wake button (on the upper-right corner of the device), it occurred to me that all users may NOT know how to lock the screen on a Mac.

First, please note that there is a difference between logging out of a Mac and locking the screen. Logging out usually takes several seconds and involves waiting for applications to close, and then later, logging back in requires both a password and waiting for apps to reopen (or you need to open them yourself). Most of us probably don’t have time to wait for these delays several times throughout the day.

However, the Mac can instantly lock the screen in less than a second, and when you need access again, you are returned to the exact point you stopped working in only the amount of time it takes you to type your computer password.

There are at least three ways to easily engage Lock Screen.

Lock Your Screen Immediately

This one is arguably the quickest and requires no setup:
use the key command Command+Control+Q

Less fast, but just as easy, pull down the Apple menu and select Lock Screen.

In both situations, type the computer’s password to unlock.

Set Up Lock Screen with a Hot Corner

A “hot corner” is a feature that allows you to move your computer’s pointer into any of the four corners of your screen to trigger a command, in this case, Lock Screen.

1. Open System Preferences (under the Apple menu and/or in your Dock).
2. Open Desktop & Screen Saver.
3. Click the Screen Saver tab (top center). Click the Hot Corners... button (lower-right corner).
4. Select a corner of your choice and set the behavior to Lock Screen. Click OK.
5. Close System Preferences.

Type the computer’s password to unlock.

Lock Screen Automatically after a Specified Time

This option requires two separate settings, but both are relatively simple.

1. Open System Preferences (under the Apple menu and/or in your Dock).
2. Open Security & Privacy. Click the lock in the lower-left corner and type your computer password to make changes.
3. Click the General tab and check Require password [immediately] after sleep or screen saver begins.
4. Click Show All.
5. Open Desktop & Screen Saver. Click the Screen Saver tab.
6. Select a Screen Saver option and set Start after: a specified amount of time of inactivity.
7. Close System Preferences.

Type the computer’s password to unlock.

Using the Lock Screen feature will increase security by preventing unauthorized users to access your district-assigned Mac.