Hello Everyone,

I can't believe that this school year is already half over. I hope that everything is going well in your classrooms. I just wanted to remind you of some of the PD available in the district this month.

United Streaming
This Friday, Jennifer Parker-Moore from the Macomb ISD will be at Pinewood from 4:15-6:15 to train staff on the more advanced features of United Streaming. Some of the topics that will be covered is how to use the image bank, how to issue usernames and passwords to your students, and giving your students assignments that they can complete on the United Streaming website.

Pearson Inform
On February 11th we will run a training on using Pearson Inform to get test data on your students', as well as how teachers will be able to collect data across classrooms to quickly get aggregated data. This will run from 2:45 - 4:45 in the distance learning lab in the high school.

Michigan Electronic Library(MeL)
This session will show you how to access and use the essentials of the Michigan eLibrary (MeL) Databases for the K-12 classroom. The MeL Databases contain magazine, newspaper and journal articles, documents ,images, videos,  digital e-books, and online tests and tutorials-many of which aren't available on the open Web. It contains many general resources that cover all subject areas geared specifically for children, teens, and adults to use in the classroom and home. Time will be given to teachers to search their own specialized topics. Also, we will show how using GOOGLE can be beneficial in a way that is effective to both you and your students. This session will be facilitated by Denice Hildebrant (The Middle School Media Specialist) and Kathy Swanger ( The MISD's head librarian). This session will be held on February 25th from 4:15 - 6:15 in the Middle School Media Center.
Nettreker D.I.
On March 5th Jennifer Parker-Moore will again come to our school district. This time to train teachers in the use of Nettreker. Nettreker is a free website for teachers with Michigan Learnport accounts that helps teachers find activities and lessons that are aligned to the Michigan State Standards, as well as a large number of other tools that teachers will find interesting.

Keep contacting me about PD sessions that you will find beneficial to you. We have been able to or will run sessions on Study Island, The National Writing Project, MeL, and Tech Tools for Writing from requests that teachers are making.

Remember that all sessions held in district must have a minimum of seven people register or they will be canceled. So if you see something you are interested in see if you can get some colleagues to come as well.

Thanks,

John