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October 31, 2005

Mabry Named 2005 Silver Statewide Accountability System Winner

Congratulations! Mabry has been named a 2005 Silver Statewide Accountability System award winner. The Governor's Office of Student Achievement in collaboration with the Governsor's Office and the Georgia Department of Education is recognizing public schools across Georgia for improving and promoting excellence in student academic achievement. Mabry is a 2005 Silver Award Winner for Hightest Percentage in meeting and exceeding academic standards. This SSAS award provides recognition to the Mabry staff, district office, parents students and community for the hard work and dedication to academic excellence.

A banner has been delivered to Mabry to celebrate our hard word.

Posted by Tim Tyson at 03:28 PM

October 25, 2005

Meeting with Senator Isakson

During our visit to Washington, DC, for the Scholastic and Intel's Schools of Distinction awards gala, we were delighted to have the opportunity to meet with Senator Isakson at his Dirksen Building office. He graciously had his picture taken with us and spoke very highly of Mabry Middle School.

Senator Isakson has mentioned to me before that he has several of our students in his Sunday school class. He congratulated our teachers and students for their hard work that earned our school this prestigious award.

Pictured (left to right): Chris Swanson, Mabry ILT; Janet McCrary, retired Mabry ILT; Senator Johnny Isakson, Georgia Senator; Dr. Tim Tyson, Mabry Principal

Posted by Tim Tyson at 07:26 AM

October 15, 2005

The 5th Annual Mabry Film Festival

The 5th Annual Mabry Film Festival will be held on April 25, 2006, at 7:30PM.

This year tickets will be sold for $3.00 each. Any profit made from the film festival will go toward technology at Mabry. Tickets will go on sale on April 10th. Initial ticket sales will be limited per team (details will follow in April). However, tickets not sold by the end of the day on Friday, April 14th, will go on sale on a first come first served basis on Monday, April 17th.

Training will begin on November 4th. Each official school team will send 1 student, 1 sponsoring teacher, and 1 sponsoring parent to the all-day training.

Participation in this nationally acclaimed and highly engaging student activity is completely voluntary. Students interested in participating on an official school movie team must express their interest to one of the sponsoring teachers. This year's list of sponsoring teachers includes: Exploratory: Mrs. Smith, Mrs. Evans; PE: Mrs. Spannagel; 8th Grade: Mrs. Shockley, Mr. Benzin, Mrs. Kirhsner, Mrs. Kaplan, Mrs. Hartnett, Ms. Collins, Mrs. Isreal-Hiles, Mrs. Stephens, Mrs. Jennings; 6th Grade: Mrs. Riddlehoover, Mrs. Armijo, Mrs. Miceli, Mrs. Sneed, Davis; 7th Grade: Mrs. Kulkarni, Ms. Larkin, Mr. Howard; Other teachers include: Mrs. Hendrix, Ms. McCall.

This year's theme will be discussed in detail during the training session on November 4th. The theme has now been announced on MabryOnline's own Podcast Central.

Posted by Tim Tyson at 04:22 PM

School of Distinction Celebration Announced

Mabry Middle School will be celebrating the incredible honor of being named a 2005 School of Distinction Award winner for Technology Innovation with a reception and catered dinner on November 15, 2005, in the new Mabry Cafeteria. Be sure to read the School of Distinction Celebration posted to the main web page for more details.

Posted by Tim Tyson at 03:34 PM

Schools of Distinction Award Celebration

Mabry Middle School was honored in the Grand Ballroom of the Mayflower in Washington, DC, on October 6, 2005, by Scholastic and Intel Corporation as the recipient of the Schools of Distinction Award for Technology Innovation. I was humbled by the spectacular event honoring 20 schools around the United States for exemplary work with the children in their care. Mabry received a check for $10,000 from the Intel Foundation as well as over $250,000.00 worth of donations from the following companies: Agilix, Blackboard, Dell, eInstruction, Future Kids, Microsoft, Pitsco, Primedia, Riverdeep, SAS, Scantron, School Net, and Smart Technologies. These companies, combined with Gateway, Intel, and Scholastic, gave over $5,000,000.00 to the 20 winning schools.

Mabry will be celebrating this incredible honor with a reception and catered dinner on November 15, 2005, in the new Mabry Cafeteria. Purchase your tickets from our bookkeeper, Ms.Osterfeld. Tickets for the evening are $10.00. Tickets will not be sold after November 10th. Guests from Intel, Scholastic, other corporate donors, the State Department of Education, local, state, and federal government will be invited. This will be a wonderful celebration. All of our parents and students received their dinner celebration invitations during Conference Week. This will be a "Sunday best" dress up event. Make your plans now to join us.

Posted by Tim Tyson at 01:19 PM

Using Bloglines (Windows and Mac) to Manage Your RSS Feeds

Setting up your Bloglines account & Subscribing to MabryOnline’s RSS Feeds

This short tutorial assumes you know how to:

• Use your computer’s browser to navigate to places on the web
• Copy and Paste

Ok, let’s do it!

1. Go to bloglines.com
2. Sign up for your free account
3. Enter your email address
4. Enter your password (which must be at least 6 characters long)
5. Re-type your password
6. Select “-0500 Eastern” for our time zone
7. Be certain that English is selected as the language
8. If you wish to subscribe to the Bloglines Newsletter, check the box
9. Click register
10. When you receive an email to complete the registration process, click on the link in the email, which will take you to your Bloglines account.
11. Click on the tab “My Feeds” located in the top left hand corner.
12. Click on the “Add” link just under the “My Feeds” tab.
13. Keep this window available as we will use it again in just a moment.
14. Open a new window in your browser.
15. In the new browser window, navigate to Dr. Tyson’s blog address: http://mabryonline.org/blogs/tyson/
16. Select and then copy the above address
17. Paste the blog’s web address into the Bloglines window in the space next to “Blog or Feed URL:”
18. Click the [Subscribe] button
19. If, under the title “Available Feeds” multiple versions of the web address appear, you may:
20. Click on “Preview this feed” for each one to see if one looks better to you than the others
21. Click on the checkbox next to the feed to which you wish to subscribe.
22. You can play around with the Options, but, while those are cool and powerful, they are beyond the scope of this tutorial.
23. Click the [Subscribe] button at the bottom of this window.
24. Repeat steps 8 through 14 for each blog address to which you wish to subscribe. (You will only use my blog address once. Each time you repeat these steps, you will put in a different teacher’s blog address.)
25. To read the new posts, click on the title of the blog you wish to appear.

Posted by Tim Tyson at 11:56 AM

Using Firefox on Windows to Manage RSS Feeds

Windows users can follow these steps to use Firefox.
Presently RSS implementation is not built into Windows Explorer. You have many other software options however. I will present information on using Firefox, which is available for Windows and Macs. I'm using the Mac version and am assuming it is similar if not the same as the Windows version. I'll come back to this post at some time in the future, when I have access to a Windows machine, to confirm exactly the steps for Windows users. Mac users with OS 10.4 will find Safari more feature rich than Firefox, but that's personal preference.

If you need Firefox, you can download it for free from this link.

• Install Firefox. (For Mac users you simply drag and drop the download. It's easy, but Safari on 10.4 has better RSS implementation. Use it if you can.)
• Launch Firefox
• Configure any proxy settings if you need to and know what they should be. Most home computers will not need this. Many work machines will.
• Navigate to http://MabryOnline.org
• Scroll down to the bottom and click on Dr. Tyson's Desk
• Notice the little orange "radar-like" icon at the bottom right hand corner of you browser window. I also put one on the bottom of the right hand grey sidebar on my blog. Don't use it unless you know what you're doing.
• Click on the one at the bottom of your browser window
• A drop down menu appears
• Choose "Subscribe to Atom..."
• An Add Bookmark dialog box appears.
• Click the down triangle to show all bookmarks.
• Click "New Folder"
• Name the new folder "MabryOnline"
• Click Add
• Navigate up to [Bookmarks] in your top menu bar
• Click on it
• At the bottom of the list you will see "MabryOnline"
• Move your mouse over it
• From the Desk of Dr. Tyson appears
• Mouse over it
• The last 15 posts I published appear

You can do the same thing for each of your child's teachers. When you are done, I would suggest putting them all in a folder called "John's Teachers" or "Kimberly's Teachers" and locating that folder on your toolbar for faster access.

In Firefox here's how to move your MabryOnline RSS feeds onto your toolbar in a folder with your child's name:

• After selecting the RSS feeds from each of your child's teacher's blogs, click on [Bookmarks] in the Firefox top menu bar
• Drag each of the MabryOnline folders created in the section above under the "Bookmarks Toolbar Folder"
• Make certain the MabryOnline folder is highlighted and click on the large round blue "Properties" button at the top of this window.
• Give the folder any name you wish (Your child's name? You can make a new folder, one for each child, research project, etc.)
• Click OK
• Click the red button that closes this window (Windows uses click on the "X")
• Your RSS feeds appear on your toolbar

As you can see, this is really very straight forward. If you use a news feed aggregator then you certainly know how to already do this and have some additional powerful functionality. I hope this helps you stay informed about all things MabryOnline!

Posted by Tim Tyson at 11:47 AM

Using Firefox on Macs (Apple) to Manage RSS Feeds

Mac users who do not have OS 10.4 but are running a previous version of OS 10 will use these directions.
The instructions below will be for Firefox, which is available for Windows and Macs. Mac users with OS 10.4 will find Safari more feature rich than Firefox, but that's personal preference.

If you need Firefox, you can download it for free from this link.

• Install Firefox. (For Mac users you simply drag and drop the download. It's easy, but Safari on 10.4 has better RSS implementation. Use it if you can.)
• Launch Firefox
• Configure any proxy settings if you need to and know what they should be. Most home computers will not need this. Many work machines will.
• Navigate to http://MabryOnline.org
• Scroll down to the bottom and click on Dr. Tyson's Desk
• Notice the little orange "radar-like" icon at the bottom right hand corner of you browser window. I also put one on the bottom of the right hand grey sidebar on my blog. Don't use it unless you know what you're doing.
• Click on the one at the bottom of your browser window
• A drop down menu appears
• Choose "Subscribe to Atom..."
• An Add Bookmark dialog box appears.
• Click the down triangle to show all bookmarks.
• Click "New Folder"
• Name the new folder "MabryOnline"
• Click Add
• Navigate up to [Bookmarks] in your top menu bar
• Click on it
• At the bottom of the list you will see "MabryOnline"
• Move your mouse over it
• From the Desk of Dr. Tyson appears
• Mouse over it
• The last 15 posts I published appear

You can do the same thing for each of your child's teachers. When you are done, I would suggest putting them all in a folder called "John's Teachers" or "Kimberly's Teachers" and locating that folder on your toolbar for faster access.

In Firefox here's how to move your MabryOnline RSS feeds onto your toolbar in a folder with your child's name:

• After selecting the RSS feeds from each of your child's teacher's blogs, click on [Bookmarks] in the Firefox top menu bar
• Drag each of the MabryOnline folders created in the section above under the "Bookmarks Toolbar Folder"
• Make certain the MabryOnline folder is highlighted and click on the large round blue "Properties" button at the top of this window.
• Give the folder any name you wish (Your child's name? You can make a new folder, one for each child, research project, etc.)
• Click OK
• Click the red button that closes this window (Windows uses click on the "X")
• Your RSS feeds appear on your toolbar

As you can see, this is really very straight forward. If you use a news feed aggregator then you certainly know how to already do this and have some additional powerful functionality. I hope this helps you stay informed about all things MabryOnline!

Posted by Tim Tyson at 11:46 AM

Using Safari on Macs with OS 10.4 to Manage RSS Feeds

If you are a Mac user using OS 10.4 this couldn't be any easier.

• Keep this window open (so you can read it), and open a new browser window (Go to [File] and down to "New Window") then navigate to http://MabryOnline.org
• In Safari, your browser, you see a little blue RSS icon on the right hand side of the MabryOnline.org URL. (If you don't see it, and you are on the main page for MabryOnline.org, then you are not using Safari on OS 10.4 (known as Tiger) and will have to go to the Firefox section of these instructions.)

• Scroll down to the bottom of the main MabryOnline.org page you just opened, and click on Dr. Tyson's Desk.

• Once you arrive at my blog, click on the little blue RSS icon next the the http://mabryonline/blogs/tyson/ url. It looks just like the one pictured above.
• A new page appears that looks very different and has the URL: feed://mabryonline.org/blogs/tyson/atom.xml. Drag the icon just to the left of the word "feed" in the URL down to your toolbar.
• In the little window that appears, give it a name you will remember, like "Dr. Tyson's blog."
• You're done. To read my RSS feed in the future, just click on the name you assigned it in your toolbar. Do you see why I love a Mac?!

To view your RSS feeds, simply click on the name (in the tool bar) you assigned it. You can get fancy and organize them. It's easy. Let's do it.

Organize your Safari RSS Feeds:
Most people don't organize their bookmarks very well. HUGE mistake. Let's take just a couple of minutes now to save you time and frustration later.

• Click on the tiny open book icon on your tool bar.
• Click on Bookmarks Bar in the left hand column that appears.
• At the bottom of the page you see 2 plus signs, "+".
• Click on the one on the right. No, the other right.
• Name this folder "[your student's name]'s Teachers Blogs."
• In the list on the right of the window you see the name you assigned to my blog when you drug it's icon down to the toolbar. Drag the icon next to it (and each feed url that you put on your toolbar) into the folder with your child's name. Look at your toolbar. Nice, isn't it. Notice, it will even give you a total count in the toolbar of the new posts you have yet to read! Do you see why this is outrageously cool!

Let's get outrageous!
If you're a 10.4 Mac user and you're still with me on this, I'm going to introduce you to an as-yet-little-known feature of OS 10.4 that is really nice. Here are the steps for making the MabryOnline.org site RSS feeds appear as a gorgeous screen saver on your machine.

• First, make sure you have used the above directions to subscribe to MabryOnline's RSS feed. (The directions above specify my blog, you can use that one if you want. Otherwise, subscribe to MarbyOnline.org's RSS feed. Any RSS feed will work)
• Click on the blue apple in the extreme top left hand corner of your screen and select "System Preferences...".
• On the top row you will see "Desktop & Screen Saver." Click on it.
• Make sure the button labeled "Screen Saver" is blue. Click on it if it is not.
• In the list on the left, click on "RSS Visualizer."
• Click on the "Options" button
• From the drop down sheet that appears, select the RSS feed you wish to use. (MabryOnline.org or Dr. Tyson's Blog...)
• Click on the "Done" button.
• Click the "Test" button. Amazing, isn't it!!
• Move the blue button on the "Start screen saver:" timeline to the length of time you want your computer to be inactive before the screen saver turns on.
• Click the red button in the top left hand corner of this window to quit System Preferences. You're done.

Posted by Tim Tyson at 11:41 AM