It’s not just about volume. It’s about clarity, tone, and inflection. Using your enhanced audio system helps ensure that your clear message reaches every student in your classroom, with less strain on your voice. Your enhanced audio system will improve both the quality and volume of your voice and has benefits for student comprehension, attention, and behavior. Up to 15% of students have some hearing impairment (often undiagnosed or undetected). Students may receive services for a speech or language impairment. Others have language processing issues, difficulty distinguishing layered voices, or are easily distracted by noise. Young students and multi-language learners especially benefit from clear auditory input. Your enhanced audio system can help!

Benefits

• Teachers have less vocal strain/no need to use “teacher voice”
• When students hear better, they learn better
• Less need to repeat instruction
• Students are more involved and less disruptive

Tips and Tricks

• Use every day to form a habit
• 4-6 inches below chin
• Charge nightly
• Speak at conversational level
• If you can hear yourself, it’s too loud
• Invite a colleague in to help evaluate the volume
• Adjust for number of students in the room, ambient noise, and classroom activity

If you would like help getting started, please reach out to the Instructional Technology TOSAs or the OSD Help Desk.

The following is a submission from Dave Baird, Network Systems Administrator in the Technology Department

When was the last time you checked your spam or junk email folder? Once in a while, a legitimate email can be sent to your spam folder instead of your inbox. We recommend that you check your spam folder periodically for legitimate emails that have been sent there by mistake. If you do find a message that has been accidentally marked as spam, you can fix this by taking one of the following actions:

1. Select the message which has been marked as spam and click Not Spam at the top of your inbox.

2. At the top of the message, there will be a grey text box, which explains why this message was flagged as spam. To unmark this as spam, click Report not spam at the bottom of this text box.

After following one of these actions, the message will be moved back into your inbox and out of the spam folder. Monitoring your spam folder will help to ensure that future messages from this sender are not flagged as spam. Additionally, adding colleagues to your Google Contacts can help with proper mail delivery.

Kami has just released the Kami Library, a collection of ready-to-go and editable templates. In the library you can find graphic organizers, activities, SEL check-ins and more. The Kami library can be accessed by clicking the Kami extension in Chrome or by visiting https://www.kamiapp.com/library. Templates from the library can be opened and edited using Kami or downloaded for printing. Kami is a PDF annotation tool that runs as an extension in Chrome and is fully integrated in Schoology. More information on Kami and how to use it with students can be found in the Kami module of the OSD Tech Tool PD Series.

On Tuesday, February 22, the Technology department will complete a necessary upgrade to OSD voicemail services. Unfortunately, it is not possible to migrate saved voicemail messages or recorded greetings from the old server to the new. This means that everyone will need to re-record their voicemail greetings when we return to school on Wednesday, February 23, 2022. Instructions will be sent out to all staff on how to create the new recordings.

Also, please make sure any of your unheard or saved messages are cleared by the end of day on February 18, 2022. 

Note: This upgrade does not affect the pre-recorded phone trees many schools currently have in place.

Thank you for your patience.

Last fall we emailed all employees to ask that you ignore an automated email from a vendor, Riverside DataManager. The automated email was sent in error by the vendor and asked employees to enter a password to access “DataManager.” Some employees recently notified OSD Technology that they received a similar email from the same vendor. Technology reports this, too, was an automated email sent in error. This is not a phishing or scam email, but you are not required to create a password.  There is no follow-up by employees required.

SecURLy is our district web filtering and automated health/safety system for our student Chromebooks. SecURLy Classroom helps classroom teachers monitor student engagement during the school day, guide students’ browsing, and communicate through chat and announcements.

SecURLy Classroom has just released a new user interface, called Nucleus. You can choose to use the original view or switch to the new view. All of the features you use will still be there, it will just look a little different. In addition, there are some exciting new features in Nucleus. Those new features include:

• Preventing side-by-side windows (force maximize)
• Close a tab and add the site to a blocklist
• Add site to multiple blocklists at once
• Choose end time instead of class length
• Auto apply site lock at start of class
• Bring a selected tab to the front
• Ability to schedule class sessions to start automatically

To switch to the new view in SecURLy Classroom, click “Switch to Nucleus UI” in the upper right corner on the SecURLy CLassroom page.

For more information on these changes read What’s New in Classroom 8.1, complete the SecURLy Classroom module in the OSD Tech Tools self-paced PD, or contact the instructional technology TOSAs (Jamie Sproul, Sharyn Merrigan, or Bob O’Donnell).

On Tuesday, February 22, the Technology department will be completing a necessary upgrade to OSD voicemail services. Unfortunately, it is not possible to migrate saved voicemail messages or recorded greetings from the old server to the new. This means that everyone will need to re-record their voicemail greetings when we return to school on February 23, 2022. Instructions will be sent out to all staff on how to create the new recordings.

Please make sure any of your unheard messages are cleared by the end of day on February 18. 

Note: This upgrade does not affect the pre-recorded phone trees many schools currently have in place.

Thank you for your patience.

It’s not just about volume. It’s about clarity. Using your enhanced audio system helps ensure that your clear message reaches every seat in your space, with less strain on your voice.

You know from experience. Masks interfere with your ability to communicate with your students. There is a major difference in the quality of your voice when wearing a mask. Your enhanced audio system will improve both the quality and volume of your voice. Masks aside, 15-22% of our students have some hearing impairment.  Your enhanced audio system can help!…but only if you use it.

Benefits

• Teachers have less vocal strain/no need to use “teacher voice”
• When students hear better, they learn better
• Less need to repeat instruction
• Students are more involved and less disruptive

Tips and Tricks

• Use every day to form a habit
• 4-6 inches below chin
• Charge nightly
• Speak at conversational level
• If you can hear yourself, it’s too loud
• Test with different masks
• Invite a colleague in to help evaluate

Last spring we emailed all employees to ask that you ignore an automated email from a vendor, Riverside DataManager. The automated email was sent in error by the vendor and asked employees to enter a password to access “DataManager.” Some employees recently notified OSD Technology that they received a similar email from the same vendor. Technology reports this, too, was an automated email sent in error. This is not a phishing or scam email, but you are not required to create a password.  There is no follow-up by employees required.