Blog

Vocation Day is November 10, 2011 at the High School. Signups start at 4:00 PM Monday, and are open through Wednesday at 8:00 AM. Sign up here. Click here to get more details on each speaker.

The past week I have heard a ton of conversations around school about stewardship week. No matter what you were inspired to think during the week, I am glad to hear conversations. A number of students have asked for some of the idea statements for writing a letter. Here they are:

• I hear you watched “Kilowatt Ours”… So did we.
  
• With Holland's energy planning, we can put our faith to work together.
  
• Thank you for thinking about the futre cost of energy for us right now.
• This community is a gift to us from our parents and grandparents. We want to make it better for our children and grandchildren.
  
• Coal could quintuple in cost as I live. Thanks for thinking about that now.

After chapel at the high school on Wednesday, October 12 the creative writing class is asking you to part in their efforts to rescue beauty at Holland Christian. You can start by reflecting on these questions.

High School and Middle School students have a limited amount in their printing accounts. This year the values have changed to reflect the fact that more and more teachers are requiring less and less printing. Each of you started this year with $3 on your printing account. You will be given for free $3 on the first of each month. You may accumulate up to $10. Black and white printing is still $0.10 and color is $0.50 per page. You can always check your balance if you need to, and you will get an email when you balance goes under a dollar. If you need more money in your print account stop by the helpdesk at your school with the dollars that you want added to your account. We only add value in dollar increments. Please think before you print anything, and keep encouraging your teachers to find ways to go paperless.

Welcome back to school. There will be a brief internet outage impacting all student web surfing and access to hollandchristian.org sites for about ten minutes tonight around 11:00 PM. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Also, if your filtering settings were changed by your parents, we will be making those changes this week. Be patient as we work on updating your settings. Thanks!

Welcome to our new look on Moodle. The look is not all that is new. There are several new features and under the hood changes that should make Moodle a better place to be. As a student you might be most interested in visiting the new My Moodle page, login and go to moodle.hollandchristian.org/my.

Friday, May 6 chapel at the high school will be about prayer. The leader would like to ask a question of the high school community. See and respond to the question here. You can also jump straight to the results.

Perhaps you have noticed more green around the high school. Not the green of spring, but green screens and walls. The tech people have been creating more opportunities for students to use green screens. We have two that you can check out from the helpdesk and we had the wall outside the Maroon and White Shop painted green. You can use these areas to create movies on location anywhere in the universe. To encourage the use of these new tools and places we are having a video contest. Here are the rules:

1. Must use a school green screen.
2. Must be exactly 53 seconds long.
3. You must be proud to show it to your grandparents.
4. One plot element must show a unique way to reuse a plastic Meijer bag.

The winner will be determined at the Family Fun Auction on May 20 by text message voting (standard text messaging rates apply). All entries must be received by May 18. There will be first and second place prizes. Please contact Mr. Peterson with questions and to submit your entry.

This morning in high school chapel Mr. Mosterd asked us to help raise $20,000 for earthquake relief in Japan. Click through in Safari to see a video about the devastation.

If you get asked at home tonight, "what did you learn in school today?" What will you say? WIll you talk about the high school chapel? What are you going to do with with the information the Mr. Mann presented? Record in the conversation on this blog what you learned this morning.

There is a new version of Flash Player available. It is significantly improved. The main reason you might want to update right away is the new version should use less CPU allowing your battery to run longer. There are two options for updating. One is to log out at school, wait about 20 minutes, and log back in. The update should occur while you are logged out. If you are in more of a hurry, you can install it on demand. Quit Safari and Chrome and follow the instructions in the video on this post to perform an On Demand Software Update. Enjoy the new faster Flash Player.

Have your teachers asked you to make movies or cartoons before? Most students at Holland Christian would say yes. Here is an interesting option. Animated GIFs were big 15 years ago because they were the only way to make moving images that loaded quickly. Now we have YouTube and other video sites, but even these are not perfect for everywhere. Specifically they are not great for a Moodle forum. When you attach files to a forum post they apear as downloadable links unless they are a graphic. An animated GIF is a way of making a simple silent movie a part of any forum post. Try making one as part of an answer to a forum post.

Thanks so much for all the help you have given us and for your patience as we worked on the wireless network. This evening we made some major changes and are very hopeful that the network will be more solid today. Please leave a comment on this blog if there are locations that are still not working well. You may also feel free to comment if there are places where the network was really slow during your school day and now it is back to normal.

Now that we have transitioned Holland Christian Google Apps to function more like a regular Google Account some changes have occurred. To learn more about some of the initial changes you will see watch the following video. As we roll out new changes we will share the new tools and the functionality that they bring.

Lately we have been heard some users ask why their internet is so slow when they switch classrooms. We think this may have to do with a recent update to our wireless system.

The short answer to the problem is to turn off and back on your wireless. If you are in a hurry, please try this temporary fix.

If you would like to help us gather some data on the problem then follow these simple instructions.

1. Before you turn off your wireless hold down the option key and click on the wireless menu.
2. There is a bunch of information in the menu now that is not normally visible. One of the items looks like this: BSSID 0:22:7f:1:fd:19.
3. Remember the letters and numbers after the last two colons. In the example screen shot and the example in the sentence the items to remember are fd19.
4. Then turn off your wireless.
5. Then turn back on your wireless.
6. Using the same technique see if the last four letters or numbers of the BSSID have changed.
7. Record this potentially new information in the form as well.
8. Once you have that information fill out our report form.

Do you have a project, made on your laptop, that truly shows what you learned? On January 31 we are showing off the high school to prospective students. I am setting up Media Center to showcase excellent laptop creations. You will have to talk to students and parents about what you made and learned. If you have a project drop by the high school helpdesk and show it to Mr. Peterson. You will be a part of a fun evening here at the high school and you might qualify to be part of other presentations with prizes.