Congratulations go to…

Joanne Schlappe, the happy winner of a CPS system donated by Engaging Technologies. The system was donated as a fundraiser in Garden City, Kansas to benefit Relay For Life. Thank you to and all that were involved in making this happen. They raised over $500 from all over the district.

A Song for Students: “Not on the Test”

For all the emphasis that we put on the benefits of CPS with testing, I hope we don’t give the impression that testing is the absolute in school. I am amused (and somewhat saddened) when our little 8-year-old out-of-the-box thinker comes home with answers checked wrong on his worksheets from school. The answer is correct, but it is obviously not what the teacher was “looking for,” meaning that probably wasn’t what was in her answer key. School is just sucking the creativity and out-of-the-box thinking right out of him! One of the things that I like about CPS is the ability to generate discussion in the classroom, opening doors for lateral thinkers to share ideas.

It is a tragedy that pressure on educators has led to such a focus on test results and the one correct answer that we are systematically stamping out the ability to think laterally and enjoy learning for learning’s sake.

Here’s a song for your students if they are feeling a little stressed out about all the standardized testing…

• Listen to: A Song for Students: ‘Not on the Test’

Enlighten, March 2007

We’ve posted our latest monthly newsletter on our website!

Get links to great articles by Marc Prensky on engaging our “digital natives,” CPS testimonials from teachers, principals, and superintendents; and the outline of an incredible promotion from eInstruction and ExamView that expires at the end of this month. Check it out!

CPS In The News…

We’ve recently added some fantastic news articles to our website which spotlight CPS clickers in the classroom. Check them out HERE!

You Know You Should Be, But Are You?

Backing up your data, that is. We all know we should, but we never expect something like data loss to happen to us!

I thought exactly the same thing when I recently reformatted my hard drive. I had purchased an external hard drive and diligently transferred all my important data on it. Imagine the sickness I felt when that data on that drive was corrupted. I literally felt like I had been through a fire and experienced some of the depression and scatteredness that probably comes with that. I work every day on my computer, and years of accumulated data and photos were gone in an instant.

There are some lessons we just don’t learn until we have to learn the hard way, but if I can help one person to not make the same mistake I did, I’ll certainly try. After sending both my external drive and my recently reformatted drive to a data recovery service, I was left with a big bill and not much data recovery.

Here’s a few things I was “enlightened” to during this experience…

• 1) Backing up data on a regular basis is definitely less work than having to recreate all of your data, not to mention the fact that some of that data will be impossible to recreate.
• 2) It’s not really of matter of “if” your hard drive will crash, but “when.” Hard drives aren’t designed to last forever, so be prepared by backing up data on a regular basis.
• 3) Data recovery is possible on many crashed hard drives. In fact, the less you try to do to fix the problem, the better off you might be. I had started using my reformatted drive again after sending off the corrupted external hard drive to the data recovery service. When the company told me that they might be able to pull underlying files off my reformatted drive, they instructed me to stop using it immediately. Who knows? More data might have been recoverable if I had stopped using it immediately after finding my data corrupted.
• 4) Data recovery isn’t cheap and will cost you an arm and a leg (and maybe your firstborn child if you need it in a hurry).

We know the many hours you put in as teachers creating tests, worksheets, games, and CPS databases. Don’t leave your fate in the hands of your computer hard drive. Make sure you are regularly backing up all your hard work!