Five on Friday

1.  Momentum turns the New Tab Page into your personal dashboard. It combines photographs, inspirational quotes, a to-do widget, weather report and a quick-links widget for your favorite websites. I really appreciate my to-do list presented to me in a cool, organized way every day.  Below is a view of mine.  In fact, I keep mine as a tab all day and drag the tab to the far left of my browser so that I can refer to it but it is out of the way.

---

2  Math Landing is a database of mathematics lessons and interactive resources for use in elementary school. You can search for lessons and interactive resources by grade level and or by mathematics topic. You can search Math Landing and access the resources without registering. If you do register you can participate in the Math Landing message board community, share resources, and create personal folders of resources that you find in the Math Landing community.

---

3.  TUOD, you have heard of BYOD or bring your own device.  TUOD is my own acronym that stands for Teachers Using Own Device.  Several of you have asked me about the wifi code.  Let me be honest.  I do have it. However, I do not have permission to enter it in for personal devices.  I can only use it for division owned machines.  The Tech Department has no problem with you using your own machine.  However, in order to do so you must put in a help ticket and get your school's IT person to set it up for you.  

---

4.  Something else that a few folks have asked me about this week is why their web tools are not working properly or have quit altogether.  I did some research on this and have found a possible answer.  It may have been as simple as having an outdated browser.  In fact for three different people this week their problem was the browser.  A simple way to check if your browser is up to date is to visit Browse Happy. Browse Happy lists the six most commonly used browsers, the latest version of each, and links you to the download for the latest version.

5.  Friday at the Movies!  If you're looking for a short explanation of Labor Day to share with students, take a look at the two videos below.

​History of the Holidays is a series of videos from History. Each installment explains a different holiday. The Labor Day video is embedded here.

Why Do Americans and Canadians Celebrate Labor Day? Is a new TED-Ed lesson. Here is their video.  And something that is makes this even better is that they include a lesson plan to accompany the video.