Welcome to another issue of the Coffee County Tech newsletter where in each addition we hope to provide you with tips and resources that will help your daily teaching experience be beneficial to your students.

Breaking News: Netrekker purchased for all schools in the state! Below is a description provided by the company:

netTrekker d.i., the latest version of netTrekker, the award-winning search engine for schools, supports differentiated instruction with standards-based online resources, organized by readability level to help every child achieve. Access more than 180,000 educator-selected online resources organized by readability level and aligned with YOUR state standards. Quickly and easily find resources for general-education students, ELL/ESL students, those working below or above grade level, those with reading challenges or special needs, and more. Each of netTrekker d.i.'s 180,000 resources has been assigned a readability measure based on Lexile® ratings and eight other popular methods. Don't be caught off guard by Google® image search again. Send your students to the new netTrekker d.i. image database for safe, pornography-free images to use in school multimedia projects or classroom presentations. See why more than 11,000 schools nationwide use netTrekker.

This service has just been made available to us in the past week. There are plans in the works for teacher training and creating resources on how to use this wonderful resource and will be forthcoming in the next couple of weeks. Eventually, each teacher will be able to save their searches and be able to organize them for each class. ENA is working to get this information out to the Technology Directors as fast as they can. Feel free to start looking around this site. There is a lot of information on the site. Simply enter your search in the search box at the top. You can also use the subject/outline search. One of the neatest features is the Timeline section. Once you select a timeline then you can click on the subject.(Upper right purple box). There is also an image search section. Check out the standards section as well. For students that need to be read to, there is a read aloud tool (near the top right side).
The link below will take you to home site, however you will see tabs at the top of the page for elementary, middle and high school sections. These sections are really for students to use. This service is not just for teachers to use. It is designed to help students search for what they need. The link will also be on our home page. The site may be a little sluggish since it was just opened up to the whole state last week.

http://school.nettrekker.com/subject/

Spam, Spam, Spam!
You may have noticed that there has been increasing amount of spam in your e-mail mailbox. Let me assure you that this is happening with just about every e-mail system in the world. Here are some stats for our system: From 12:00 a.m. until 6:00 a.m. on Monday October 23 we have received 40,000+ e-mails. That is 66 messages per employee! Of that 40,000 our spam filter only allowed 120 messages total. There will be some that slip through. Please just delete them. I've noticed an increase on my personal home account as well. Spammers are constantly trying to work around the filtering systems that are in place. Sometimes it takes the filtering systems a while to compensate. If you're getting a few more spam messages and you have in the past please do not be concerned.
Here are some suggestions that will help you keep getting more spam with your school account and possibly your home account:
•Do not use your County E-mail address to sign up for other types of web services etc. unless they are specifically for education and your classroom. For instance: If you sign up for a photo sharing place then they will take your e-mail address and sell it. They have to make money someway to provide you the service!
•(Especially good hint for home) if you must sign up for different accounts on the Internet create a G-mail(Google), Yahoo, Hotmail, or an extra e-mail account you can use for registering with different sites. If for any reason that e-mail account gets slammed with spam you can close that account and create another one. Many times on line services will sell your e-mail address to spam companies.
•Never, ever, ever respond to a spam e-mail especially where it says you want to unsubscribe. All you have done is confirm to the spammer that your E-mail is a legitimate e-mail address.

(Applies to the Client not the Web Access)
When ever you need to set up a calendar date with someone(or even a group) all you need to do is send a new appointment. You send an appointment the same way that you send an e-mail. The only exception is that you need to click on New Appointment instead of New Mail. Click on New Appt (should be a button located on the button bar of your GroupWise Client, if not click File on the menu and then choose New, Appointment). and a window will pop up that looks similar to the e-mail composition window except that it has time and date fields. Fill out the information as needed. Then click send and the message will be sent as a calendar message.
If you receive a calendar message and you want to place it on your calendar, open the message and choose accept. If that calendar event does not need to go on your calendar choose decline.
An alternate way to send an appointment is from the calendar view. If you are in the calendar view, just right click on the day that you would like to add a calendar event, and then choose New appointment and you have the appointment window that will pop up. Follow the steps stated above.
You can click here http://www.coffeecountyschools.com/train/index.htm to check out the Newsletter archives to check out tips for using the calendar.

Google Earth - A web site that might get you thinking on how to use Google earth:

http://www.juicygeography.co.uk/googleearth.htm - Many different Ideas