New! Parent Workshop Series: All About Google

Our parent community has asked! And we're responding! As important as it is to provide professional development and support to staff and training to students, do not forgot one other key component.. PARENTS! Just think.. with Medfield's move to a digital world of communication, workflow and creation to prepare students with 21st Century Skills, parents not only need to be informed, but also educated with what we're asking students to do in our schools!

This October, Blake MS has begun to offer Friday Parent Workshops. We launched with our Google Series of 3 workshops: Understanding Google Apps for Ed/ Gmail for the Medfield District, Google Calendars in the Classroom and now, Google Drive as the new Workflow.

Our first two workshops had a great turnout with 25+ parents participating. However, if you were not able to attend or missed out, links to the presentations are found at the top of this website. Also, our third workshop of the series is being held this Friday on Halloween. Please note, that the location has changed to the Blake's computer lab (see info on invite below).

This Google Drive workshop will focus learning Google Drive on the computer, please do bring your iPad with the following apps installed: Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Slides. Click on the image below for a list of direct links to the iTunes Store.

A quick note those who attended the Google Calendar Session-  We spent time learning about having your child share their homework calendar with you (if s/he is recording HW on Google Cal) and subscribing to the Cluster Calendars (particularly the 7th grade cluster cals). You'll find that there is an issue that needs to be resolved on our end in order for this to happen. A Google Admin setting needs to be changed to give you access to seeing the details of the calendar instead of busy/available. Please stay tuned as this may take a day or two.

* We're also in the process of hopefully getting the district calendar to be shared as a google cal through the district website too-- which will allow you to subscribe to it.

Any questions, comments, do not hesitate to contact me! dhorvath@email.medfield.net

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CaptureBlake- our new photo-sharing community blog!

                               
October is Connected Educator's Month.... but what about including how we as educators can connect with our students too? At Blake MS, we launched a new blog called CaptureBlake. The idea behind it is to take advantage of everyone's access to a mobile camera & use it to capture life as a Blaker! It works like this..students & staff receive a daily email with the photo prompt for that day.

Here is our Photo Challenge List for October!

(Shoutout to 8th Graders Tatum and Anna for their contributions to the List!)

Of course, there are a few basic rules:

• You can take pictures of yourself, pets or your family, objects, scenery or draw /create your own image.  Think about using fun photo apps to add filters, make a collage, add stamps and text,cartoons, etc.
• This should be your own work and not a copyrighted image from the internet.
• Your photo should be school appropriate.
• You can submit only one photo per day.

Students and staff submit their photos to an email address that posts directly to the CaptureBlake blog as a draft. They include the name of the day's photo challenge, a title and their first name /grade.  With the blogger app on my iPad, it makes the process easy to approve and publish the photo entries as they come in!

Hoping there will be a growing- interest as everyone becomes more familiar with this new project and just think, we'll have a photo album of the year by June!

**My Favorite free Photo Editing Apps:

SnapSeed

Photo Editor by Aviary

Diptic

Over

PhotoSLice

PIcLab HD

PicCollage

*FYI: Many free photo apps have in-app purchasing for additional features or are ad-supported until you upgrade.

The above pics were created on the computer w/ picmonkey.com and canva.com 

Feel free to leave the name of your favorite photo apps in the comments below.

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