Uncategorized – Christ the Teacher Catholic Schools

Curriculum Documents

“Unwrapping the Curriculum and Curriculum Renewal”

During the 2009-2010 school year, our division participated in a professional learning opportunity to cognitively study and understand the renewed Saskatchewan Curricula.

Terminology:

Outcomes: Describe what students will know or be able to do in a particular discipline by the end of the grade or course.
Indicators: Are a representative sample of evidence that students will be able to demonstrate if they have achieved the outcome. The indicators also identify the breadth and depth of understanding that are required in instruction and learning.
Essential Questions: Are questions deliberately selected to drive the instruction and assessment for a particular unit.
Big Ideas: Are the answers to the Essential Questions. They are those “Aha!” realizations, discoveries, or conclusions(lasting understandings) that students reach on their own either during or after instruction.

Nature of the Process:

The process for “unwrapping” was built upon collaboration. Initially, teachers were divided into teams to collaboratively study each of the new outcomes. The first part of the task for each outcome involved the following:

Identifying the key nouns and verbs to help understand what students should be able to “Know” and “Do”.
Translating the intent of each indicator into “student friendly language”.
Creating Big Ideas and Essential Questions to assist teachers in developing assessments and to aid in instruction.
Levelling the verbs using Bloom’s Taxonomy to help understand the different degrees of complexity in each of the indicators.
Prioritizing the indicators in an effort to identify which ones are critical for student success.
Developing a list of grade specific vocabulary words.

Available Documents:

In each subject area, the “unwrapping process” enabled the creation of different support documents to help plan for learning and instruction. Please select one of the following subject areas:

Ministry of Education Microsoft Office Home Purchase Program

Microsoft Office 365 for Windows or Mac is availlable for all staff members. If your school provides Office at work, you could be eligible to get Office 365 Education for free! Install the latest version of Office on up to 5 PCs or Macs and on other mobile devices, including Android, iPad®, and Windows tablets. Includes 1 TB of storage from OneDrive so you can easily work together and stay connected. Click on the link below for more information on how to install.

Office in Education

Staff News

Ministry of Education Microsoft Office Home Purchase Program

Microsoft Office 365 for Windows or Mac is availlable for all staff members. If your school provides Office at work, you could be eligible to get Office 365 Education for free! Install the latest version of Office on up to 5 PCs or Macs and on other mobile devices, including Android, iPad®, and Windows tablets. Includes 1 TB of storage from OneDrive so you can easily work together and stay connected. Click on the link below for more information on how to install.

Office in Education

Setting UP CTTCS Email On Your Mobile Device

We have had mainy requests on how to setup our Christ The Teacher email on mobile devices. Here is the information you’ll need to set everything up:

In most cases all you should have to do is create a new mail account and put in your CTTCS email address and password. The rest of the configuration should be performed automatically.

If you need further information about incoming and outgoing mail use the following:

Setting	IMAP (incoming)	SMTP (outgoing)
Server Name	outlook.office365.com	smtp.office365.com
Port Number	993	587
Encryption Method	SSL	TLS

Ways to Avoid Email Phishing Scams

1. Guard against spam. Be especially cautious of emails that:
* Come from unrecognized senders.
* Ask you to confirm personal or financial information over the Internet and/or make urgent requests for this information.
* Aren’t personalized.
* Try to upset you into acting quickly by threatening you with frightening information.

2. Communicate personal information only via phone or secure web sites. In fact:
When conducting online transactions, look for a sign that the site is secure such as a lock icon on the browser’s status bar or a “https:” URL whereby the “s” stands for “secure” rather than a “http:”.
Also, beware of phone phishing schemes. Do not divulge personal information over the phone unless you initiate the call. Be cautious of emails that ask you to call a phone number to update your account information as well.

3. Do not click on links, download files or open attachments in emails from unknown senders. It is best to open attachments only when you are expecting them and know what they contain, even if you know the sender.

4. Never email personal or financial information, even if you are close with the recipient. You never know who may gain access to your email account, or to the person’s account to whom you are emailing.

5. Beware of links in emails that ask for personal information, even if the email appears to come from an enterprise you do business with. Phishing web sites often copy the entire look of a legitimate web site, making it appear authentic. To be safe, call the legitimate enterprise first to see if they really sent that email to you. After all, businesses should not request personal information to be sent via email.

6. Beware of pop-ups and follow these tips:
* Never enter personal information in a pop-up screen.
* Do not click on links in a pop-up screen.
* Do not copy web addresses into your browser from pop-ups.
* Legitimate enterprises should never ask you to submit personal information in pop-up screens, so don’t do it.

You should always be careful about giving out personal information over the Internet. Luckily, companies have begun to employ tactics to fight against phishers, but they cannot fully protect you on their own.

Remember that you may be targeted almost anywhere online, so always keep an eye out for those “phishy” schemes and never feel pressure to give up personal information online.

Consultant Support – Mathematics

Math Support Docs Kindergarten Planning Templates

In preparation for a Kindergarten workshop last year, Deanna Hansen and Darcy Todos created the following planning template by modifying the one provided in Children First: A Resource for Kindergarten (Saskatchewan Ministry of Education, 2009).
Below is a blank template and Deanna Hansen’s completed templates for the first three outcomes in Number.
Please feel free to use the templates. We welcome any feedback.
If you use the blank Planning Template to complete another Math Kindergarten Outcome please feel free to share your work with other teachers in our school division.

Questioning Templates

Below you will find templates that could be used to organize a math lesson where the focus is on gaining understanding of a math curricular outcome by utilizing “Open” and “Closed” Questions that have been created in a “Lesson Progression”. To help in creating questions, the verbs in “Blooms Taxonomy” have also been added in both French and English.

Year Plans

At a request to help each other develop year plans in mathematics – you might find the following templates useful as a place to start. Feel free to edit and make changes as you plan your year to help your students “discover” the curricular math outcomes in your grade.

An invitation to share… we would welcome anyone who would be willing to share their year plans with other colleagues in our division by simply emailing them into our division office.