Progress on Think Central (Elementary)

John and I have loaded all teachers and students into Think Central. If you have not already viewed the PowerPoint from Tuesday morning's presentation, doing that will make everything else more understandable.

Before logging in, run the "Web Checker" and be sure to download any needed software.

You may now go into Think Central with your own password.

• Choose your state, district, and school.
• Click the check mark for "Remember My Organization."
• Your user name will be your first initial last name.
• Your password is 1234, but you will probably be prompted to change that the first time you log on.

After you log in, be sure to go to "Accounts" and look at your information. Change anything that is incorrect.

The next task will be to select the products you wish to be able to use. You will click on the little icon on the left-hand side of the screen that looks like a wrench.

• Click on "My Products.
• Choose "Reading" as the subject and click your grade(s)
• Click "Refresh."
• Put check marks by all of the products you would like to be able to view online.
• Click "Save."

There is one area where classroom teachers can help me at this point. A week ago, had you logged in, you would have seen almost no products even available to check. Going in today, you will see tons of stuff. I personally checked two grades at one school and found that while the student materials seemed to all be there, some of the teacher materials were still not there. In addition, none of the assessments (weekly, theme, benchmark) are there.

It would be great if a person from each grade level at each school could volunteer to look at see what's missing (because it may well be different for each school and may vary from grade to grade) and then e-mail me a list of what you are missing. We are finding that the technology department at the company is pretty backed up and that the squeaking wheel...well you know the rest. We have been doing our share of squeaking this week (with the help of some people within the company who happen to like us) and getting results. I need to keep pressing until our stuff is 100% before their attention turns to some other school system.

The plan for Monday is to show Reading Coaches how to take all of the students who have been loading into the program and assign them to your classes. We will also go through how to add new students so that during the year, your names stay up to date.

The latest word is that assessments may not be up until the end of the month. So, plan to do the first weekly assessment pencil/paper (which I hate). As soon as assessments are available, I will put together another PowerPoint that will walk you through everything you need to know.