August 19, 2005

Back To School Night
Back To School Night will be on Wednesday, August 31st. For all the details, visit http://arapahoe.littletonpublicschools.net/ and click on more info beneath Back To School Night.

Club Café
On Monday, August 22nd, Link Crew will sponsor a Club Café for freshman and new students. This is a chance for students new to the building to learn about different clubs and opportunities to get involved. The Club Café will be held in the cafeteria from 2:30 to 3:30 and students will be able to ask club sponsors and student members what each club entails. Please encourage your freshman or new student to attend. Please note that the bus schedule will not change and students will be responsible for their own ride home.

Fall Sports Schedule
The Fall Sports Schedule is now available online at http://arapahoe.littletonpublicschools.net/goto/Sports_Schedule .

LPS Campus Portal
The LPS Campus Portal (https://campus.lps.k12.co.us/campus/portal/littleton.jsp ) is our tool for parents and students to access instant, online, timely and secure student information: class schedule, attendance, report cards and transcripts (and - coming in mid-September - assignments and grades for all classes.) Campus Portal is a means to further promote educational excellence by enhancing our program of communication with parents and students. Once you have an account, you will have access to all of your LPS students on one screen.
In order to access the portal, parents first must complete a form (two pages, available online - http://arapahoe.littletonpublicschools.net/media/eDocs/AHSParentPortalRequest.pdf - or at AHS), then bring the form in – with a photo id – to our attendance office. (The photo id is a federal requirement for privacy reasons – you must present it in person.) At that time you will receive an “activation key” that will allow you to create your parent portal account online. (Students will receive information in September about how they access the portal.)
We will have a table in the Cafeteria during Back to School Night on August 31st beginning at 5:30 pm. If you already have an account, we are asking that you please stop by and sign the new Acceptable Use Agreement (this is a result of new School Board policy and is needed for all parents who have accounts). If you do not have an account yet, you can sign up that evening. You must bring a picture id.

Department Spotlight – Art Department
Art, art and more art! The first Art Club meeting will be on Monday, August 22nd in our new and fabulous art room E11. Art Club will meet on the first and third Mondays of the month during the year. We usually meet from 2:30 to 3:30. Don't miss our first organizational meeting! We will be planning our Homecoming float as our first activity of the year. Bring your creative ideas and meet in Room E11 right after school. We also welcome our freshmen artists! The Art Department is very excited about the new changes in our area with the addition of a new art room and photography lab. Come and see the "new look"!

Weekly Warrior Delivery Will Be Changing – This is the last E-Mail Edition
As we indicated in the previous issue, this will be the last e-mail edition of the Weekly Warrior. Below this paragraph is the item we ran last time giving the reasons why, as well as instructions on how to access the new online version. We realize that those instructions might be rather confusing so – if all the verbiage about RSS and aggregators wasn’t helpful – please remember you can ignore all that and simply visit http://ahsweeklywarrior.blogspot.com/ each week to get the Weekly Warrior (it’s also linked from the AHS Web Page). If you want to try using RSS but couldn’t wade through last week’s description, here is a simplified version:

1. Get a free account at Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com/ – follow the instructions there for signing up).
2. Once you have an account, click on Add Feed.
3. In the Blog or Feed URL box, type or paste http://ahsweeklywarrior.blogspot.com/atom.xml .
4. Click Subscribe.
5. Add other RSS Feeds as you find them (for example, http://ahsdailyannouncements.blogspot.com/ ), then visit Bloglines periodically to see which sites have new content. (You only need to do this if you plan on subscribing to other websites via RSS, otherwise you can just visit the Weekly Warrior website (http://ahsweeklywarrior.blogspot.com/ ) each week – no need to use Bloglines.)

Original (possibly confusing) Item from Last Week
When we started the Weekly Warrior three years ago, e-mail was the obvious choice for delivery method. While that has worked fairly well, we no longer think it is the best solution. Some of the issues surrounding using e-mail include:

• It takes too much time to manage the email list. Because we don't have "mailing list” software, we spend a lot of time adding and changing email addresses. Also, people's email addresses become non-functional and the emails come back and we have to delete those addresses.
  
• There are problems on the receiving end as well. Some people's email software tags it as junk mail. Sometime people have spam filters that require us to go to a particular page, type in some info, and get "approved" for sending emails to that address. Sometimes people's emails reach their quota - so it gets rejected. People change their email addresses fairly frequently and end up not receiving the Weekly Warrior.
  
• With all the problems with spam, lots of people's email inboxes are so full that they end up not reading the Weekly Warrior because they just don’t realize it’s there.
  
• Sometimes whole ISP's (like AOL) will temporarily block the Weekly Warrior, thinking it's spam.
  
• While we send an email each week, there is no "web version" for people to access or to use as an archive of previous Weekly Warriors.

So we’ve decided to publish the Weekly Warrior on the web, specifically on a blog that you can subscribe to with RSS. There will be two ways to get the Weekly Warrior, visit the web page (http://ahsweeklywarrior.blogspot.com/) or subscribe to it via RSS. If you’re familiar with RSS, then you know what to do next. If you’re not, read on.

It depends on who you ask what RSS stands for, but we’ll use Really Simple Syndication. You can read more about RSS at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(protocol) , but the basic idea is that many websites are RSS enabled - you can “subscribe” to a web page “feed” and be notified anytime that page changes. You manage and read your RSS feeds through an “RSS Aggregator”. This allows you to keep track of any updates to your favorite websites without having to actually visit those websites. RSS also has the advantage of not being “spammable” – you manage your subscriptions and decide what you want to read. Most major news sources now offer RSS feeds, as well as other websites and blogs. Anywhere you see an orange XML button or words like RSS Feed, Site Feed, or Atom Feed – it indicates a page you can subscribe to.

To get started, you need an RSS Aggregator. There are three main types of RSS Aggregators: web browsers, online aggregators, and client aggregators. (You can read more about aggregators – and see a list of available ones – at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_aggregator ).

Web Browsers
Both Firefox 1.x (http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/ ) and Safari 2.x (http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/safari/ ) have RSS capabilities built into them (as will the next version of Internet Explorer).

Online Aggregators
There are a variety of web-based aggregators. The advantage of web-based aggregators is that you can manage and read your feeds from multiple computers without having to worry about them being out of synch. There are many web-based choices, but Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com/ ) is a highly recommended online aggregator.

Client Aggregators
You can also install an aggregator on your computer. The advantage of these aggregators is they sometimes have more features than online aggregators. The disadvantage is that you are tied to managing your RSS feeds from one computer (or risk having them be out of synch). There are many client aggregators, but Thunderbird (http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/ - from the makers of Firefox) is a highly recommended one.

If you are just getting started with RSS, we would recommend trying Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com/ ). Once you get more experience with RSS, then you can better evaluate your choices. (All of the above choices are free – although Safari only comes with Mac OS X).

Once you have your aggregator, start subscribing to feeds – each aggregator has its own method you need to figure out, but it’s usually pretty simple. Find the site feed URL by clicking on that orange XML button, or the words RSS Feed, Site Feed, or Atom Feed. That will take you to a page that may or may not look like something to you, but all you care about is grabbing the URL and adding it to your feed list in your aggregator. For example, the AHS Weekly Warrior blog is located at http://ahsweeklywarrior.blogspot.com/ . If you go there, you can view it like a normal web page. But if you then click on the button that says Subscribe - RSS Site Feed, it takes you to this URL - http://ahsweeklywarrior.blogspot.com/atom.xml . This page is not as readable, but that’s okay – because you’ll never actually see it. You just use the http://ahsweeklywarrior.blogspot.com/atom.xml URL to subscribe to the feed in your aggregator – and your aggregator delivers a readable version to you.

RSS is an extremely useful and exciting new technology – we encourage you to explore it further (and, of course, to subscribe to the AHS Weekly Warrior and the AHS Daily Announcements (http://ahsdailyannouncements.blogspot.com/ ). This will be the next to last issue of the Weekly Warrior that will be delivered via email (it is also posted on the new blog). We will send the next issue via email as well as post it on the web, then go exclusively to web delivery. If you subscribe to the website via RSS, the Weekly Warrior will automatically get delivered to your aggregator. If not, you can always visit the website – but you’ll have to remember to check it for updates.