Exporting students from WESPaC Gradebook to make contacts in Gmail

You can generate a list of e-mail addresses for each of your student sections, that you can cut/paste into your contacts in e-mail.

Go into WESPaC

Click Teacher Access, then My Gradebook

 Click the Secondary Gradebook link for the first section you want to work with

Open the Reports Menu, and choose "Class Roster" from the list

Choose Email from the list, and click "Export to Excel"

The student e-mail column is the one you want.  Copy and paste it into gmail, and you can create a group with it as follows:

Click the mail menu in the upper left corner of Gmail

Click Contacts

Click New Group in the sidebar

Name it after the section of the grade book you chose in the steps above

Click the add people button after clicking the name of the group in the sidebar

Click Paste, and it should add the students to your e-mail list

Excel Spreadsheet on Mac shows up blank

Recently a staff member on a Mac started having a problem with Excel spreadsheets showing up completely blank, even though the content was still there.  If she double clicked a cell, she could see the content, but the whole view was not showing the spreadsheet.

This happened with both spreadsheets she had created, as well as ones other people sent her.

Changing the font, font size, or other attributes fixed the issue temporarily.

In looking at her Mac home folder,s he had an older copy of the font Arial in her local ~/Library/Font which was getting substituted for the one in /Library/Fonts and which appears to have been corrupt or no longer valid.  The font was dated 2001.

Deleting the fonts in her local font directory solved the issue.  The Mac is running 10.6.8 and Office 2008 with SP 3.

Changing Teachers from Comprehensive to Focused in eVAL System

When you log into eVAL, you should see an additional item on the "Evaluate Teaches" or "Prepare for my Evaluation" drop down menu, called "Administration".  If this does not show up, your district Data Security Manager needs to assign you the role of "eVAL Building Administrator" to make it show up.

When you click it, you'll get a different color coded menu across the top, which includes the yellow "assignments" option.  

When you choose that menu item, you'll see a list of your teachers at your site, and you can choose the radio button for either comprehensive or focused.  If you choose the radio button for focused, you will get a pop up asking you to select the criterion they're going to work on.

If you want to make a teacher drop off your list, just uncheck the box next to their name in your "assigned" column. 

Blocking unwanted mail in Gmail

From the Google Mail Help:

Sometimes you may get unwanted mail that isn't necessarily spam.

While you can't currently block messages from specific addresses or domains, you can set up a filter to send those unwanted messages directly to Trash.

To set up a filter, follow these steps:

• Click the down arrow in your search box at the top of the page. A window that allows you to specify your search criteria will appear.
• Enter your search criteria. If you want to check that your search worked correctly, click the search button. Clicking the down arrow again will bring the window back with the same search criteria you entered.
• Click Create filter with this search at the bottom of the search window.
• Choose the action you'd like for these messages by checking the appropriate box. (In this case, we suggest checking "Delete it.")
• Click Create Filter.

Share your Google Site

If you took the Google Sites class and got your page up and running, you may still have one step left. If people are saying that they can't get to your Google site, or get a "password required" page, you may have your permissions set such that the public can't get to it. To change the site permissions, do this:
- Go to your website by clicking Sites in the black bar at the top of your e-mail
- On your main page, click the More button
- Choose Sharing and Permissions
- In the "who has access" section, click the Change button, and set it so anyone on the Internet can find and view the page.
- Click the radio button next to “Public on the web”
- Click the green “Save” button to save the changes

Meridian phones on key systems

Some quick tips on adjusting your key system phone (applies to phones at Cape/CCMS/JMS/Hathaway and District Office)

To adjust the contrast, you can push the Feature Button, then the * or Star key, then the 7 key

Choose the number corresponding to the contrast you want, with 1 being light, and 9 being dark.

Press RLS to end the change.

To change the tone of your phone's ring (there are four available) you can do this:

Press Feature, then * (Star) and then 6

Enter the number 1 through 4 to hear the different options.  Press RLS to save the new ring tone.  You can also use this to adjust the volume of the phone's ringing.

Slow Gmail on Safari/Mac

An end user was complaining of slowness in Gmail using Safari on the Mac.  After taking a look around, quitting and re-opening, and trying a couple items found online, I noticed that there were a number of tabs open in another browser window.

It turned out that the re-open tabs on startup was causing him to end up with Gmail open in more than a dozen tabs at a time.  In addition, he was moving between Google Drive, Calendar, and Gmail using the black bar at the top of the screen rather than cycling between browser windows to find the one that was already open, which was opening additional windows.  With each window he opened, Gmail got even slower.

The solution was to close any extra Gmail windows in the background, and help the user use the "Window" menu to find Gmail rather than re-opening it each time he wanted it open.  I also disabled the "reopen windows at login" to keep it from starting up with more than a dozen instances each time after he shuts down.