[ This is the original Ice Breaker readme, archived for your viewing pleasure. ]

Getting Started —

By now you should have Ice Breaker successfully installed to either your school’s network hard drive, or your own personal computer. The next step is to add yourself to the school’s list of Ice Breaker instructors. All this involves is opening Ice Breaker (double-click your shortcut or the application itself) and clicking on the button that reads “New to Ice Breaker” (underlined in red, at right). Here you will be presented with two options : “New Student” and “New Instructor”. Select “New Instructor” (follow along by click the “New to Ice Breaker” button in the image at right).

The next window to be displayed asks you for several pieces of information which include a serial number, your first and last name, your username (the name you will login to Ice Breaker with), and your password. The serial number can be found on the back of the CD case that Ice Breaker came in (remember to keep your serial number in a secure place). Your first name and last name are what will appear on printed reports and at the top of your classes. Your username and password, however, will never be printed or shown anywhere, so feel free to choose a clever name that only you will know and remember.

Once you have correctly entered your information, click “Continue” and a new window will be brought up regarding your password hint. A password hint is a question you will be asked if you have forgotten your password. If you supply the correct answer to your question, you will be reminded of your password. It is vital that when you enter your password hint, you use a question that only you know the answer to. Also, if you wish to not have a password hint, go ahead and enter one for now, and once you have logged in you will be able to disable it from the options menu (see image, right).

After you click “Continue” once more, you will be finished adding yourself to the Ice Breaker list of instructors. You are now able to log into Ice Breaker with your new username and password, and start adding students.

Adding Students —

At this point you should be registered with Ice Breaker as an instructor and have your own username and password. Enter these at the Login Screen and you will be brought to the main menu. From here you have the choice of working on your classes, adding new students, or configuring your personal options. (In the upgraded version of Ice Breaker, test creation and administration are available from this menu as well.) For now, click on the button labeled “Students”.

You will now be viewing the student menu screen which contains options to add students, edit student information, and delete students, as well as a list of all the students who have already been added to Ice Breaker. If this is the first time your school has used Ice Breaker, this list should be empty and you most likely would like to start adding students. To do this simply click on the “Add” button.

The “Add” button will bring up a dialog asking you to enter the students first and last name, as well as their student ID. Although it is important that you enter this information correctly, you will be able to fix any errors later by clicking on the edit button located in the student menu. It is important that students know their IDs because this will be their username for the first time they login to Ice Breaker.

Once you have added a student, you will be returned to the student menu screen, and the student will have been added to the list. Continue to add all of the students in your classes, then return to the main menu. (Students only need to be added to Ice Breaker once, therefore sometimes you will find that many of your students have already been added by other instructors to the Ice Breaker list, and your work is done!)

You can also add students through a more advanced feature in the options menu. To do this, you will first need to place your students’ one-word names and IDs (separated by spaces) into a text file named students.txt and place it in the same directory where IceBreaker.exe is located (if you need more help on the syntax involved, take a look at the sample students.txt file that was placed here when you installed Ice Breaker). Next, go to the options menu and select “Load Students from File”. If you’ve set up everything correctly, Ice Breaker will automatically load these students directly from the file, saving you repeated trips to our dialogs.

Creating a Class —

Now that you have added your students to the Ice Breaker list, it is time for you to create a class. To create a class, click on the “Classes” button on the main menu. This will bring you to the class menu screen which contains options to open a class, create a new class, or to delete an existing class. Begin by clicking “New” to create a new class.

The only information you need to enter for a new class is the class’s name and the period at which you will teach it. If your class has a course number, or a “call number”, you may wish to include this in the class name. Additionally, the period is shown exactly as you enter it, so if you teach Math during 2nd period, you may wish to enter exactly that: “2nd Period”.

Once you are finished, click “Continue” and you will be brought to the class editing screen. This screen provides a lot of information about your class, including lists of students, assignments, and tests in your class. From this screen you have the ability to open this class’s gradebook, as well as print the gradebook, edit the weighting system, and switch over to another class. At this time you should probably begin by adding students to your class from the Ice Breaker list. If instead you would like to look around for a bit, feel free (it is nearly impossible for you to mess anything up).

When you are ready to begin adding students to your class, click the “Add” button located below the list labeled “Students currently in class”. This will bring up a screen with two lists. The list on the left is the list of all students who have been added to Ice Breaker. The list on the right is the list of the students currently in your class. To add a student to your class, select a student from the list on the left and click the “Add” button. This will add that student to the list on the right (the list of students in your class). Once you are finished adding students to your class, click “Done” to return to the class editing screen.

Now that you have added students to your class, it is time to add some assignments. To add an assignment, click the “Add” button located below the list labeled “Assignments in Gradebook”. This will bring up a screen that asks you to enter the assignment’s name, the number of points the assignment is worth, and to select the weighting type that this assignment falls under. If you have not yet configured your weighting types, the only option that will be available is the “Default” type. The Default type is completely safe to use if you do not wish to configure weighting types. If you do wish to configure weighting types and you havn’t done so yet, go ahead and select “Default”, then change the type later once you have configured weighting types.

Once you have finished entering your assignment’s information, click the “Add” button to add that assignment to your gradebook. Continue to add as many assignments to the gradebook as is necessary. Once you have finished, you will see that these assignments have been added to the list “Assignments in Gradebook”. Now that you have added both students and assignments to your class, it is time for you to give your students some grades.

Entering Grades —

To open your class’s gradebook, click the button labeled “Gradebook” located on the left side of the class editing screen. This will bring up the gradebook screen which provides you with the ability to enter grades for each student. There are several ways to enter grades for students. The easiest way to enter grades is to merely click in one of the gradebook’s cells and enter the number of points that student has recieved in the corresponding assignment. Notice that when you have clicked in a cell, information about the corresponding assignment is displayed in the upper left corner of the gradebook. This shows you the name of the assignment, the weighting type used, and the number of points it is worth. Also notice that assignments are not added into the student’s average until they have been given a grade. This means that to give a student a 0 on an assignment, you must specifically enter a 0 into the corresponding cell.

Along the top of the gradebook are buttons labeled with numbers. These numbers represent assignments that you have added to the gradebook. To review or change information about an assignment click on its button at the top of the gradebook. This will bring up a screen where you are able to change any information about the assignment. Also on this screen is another method of entering grades. If you click the button “Enter Grades” you will be sequentially prompted to enter the grades each student recieved on this Assignment. An option similar to this is also available if you click on any of the student buttons located along the left side of the gradebook.

You may notice that the option to “Add or Remove Tests” has been grayed out. This is because you are using Ice Breaker Grading. With the upgraded version you will be able to create tests that Ice Breaker will grade for you, and automatically enter into your gradebook. To upgrade to the testing version of Ice Breaker, visit our website at www.IBDConline.com.

Printing Reports —

Once you have entered some grades into your gradebook, it is time to show your students and their parents how well they are doing. To do this click on the button labeled “Print Gradebook”, located on the left side of the class editing menu. This will bring you to the print gradebook screen which provides the option to print an entire class summary, each student’s average in the class, or individual reports for each student. You can also choose to include either the student’s name, the student’s ID number, or both, in the printed report. If you would like to print a report for only one student, select the very last option, as well as a student from the drop down list. After you have made all of your selections, click “Print” to finish.

Taking your work Home —

If you are the kind of teacher who is always taking their work home to finish (who doesn’t?), you are in luck. It is simple to take your Ice Breaker data with you, when all you need to do is select “Save Files to Disk” from the options menu (the options menu is available through the main menu, shown at right). You will then be prompted to enter a blank floppy disk. You may also use a disk with which you have previously saved Ice Breaker data. Please note that disks cannot be shared between teachers.

Once you get home, it is necessary that you install Ice Breaker on your computer. To install Ice Breaker at home, double-click on the file IB.exe and install Ice Breaker to any location you like.

After you have installed Ice Breaker on your own PC, open Ice Breaker and click “New to Ice Breaker” from the login screen. Select “New Instructor” and enter your information exactly as you entered it at school. This will enable you to login to Ice Breaker the same way you login at school (by entering your username and password at the login screen). Once you are logged in to Ice Breaker, return to the options menu and select “Load files from Disk”. Once you have done this, you are free to edit your classes and input grades. Remember, however, that any changes you make to the student list will not be saved on your return to school. In addition, remember to save your files to disk again once you are done, otherwise you will return to school without your changes. At school, login to Ice Breaker and load your files from disk to update your changes.

Backing up Important Information —

By now you will have a lot of important information saved in Ice Breaker and you will be happy to know that Ice Breaker encrypts and hides all of its data. Although, if anything were to ever happen to this information, Ice Breaker also keeps backups of all important information and will load these backups if any of the real files have been tampered with or become corrupted.

However, computers are still prone to error and unforseen events may damage Ice Breaker’s backup information (such as a lightning strike or a computer virus). This is why it is vital for you to save your own backup information to disk. The good thing is that this is very easy to do with the features Ice Breaker provides you. To begin with, any disks you have made for transport between home and work will also act as a backup disk in the event of lost information. In addition, there is a feature available from the options menu that will always save to disk when you exit Ice Breaker (see image, below). With this option you can keep a floppy disk in your computer’s A: drive and never worry about forgetting to backup your information. Note: Backing up to disk only saves your information so, if you are a nice person, remind your fellow instructors to backup their information as well.

Ice Breaker Web Grades —

With all of the effort you put into helping students learn, wouldn’t it be nice if you could get their own parents to work with them as well? Ice Breaker finds that parents who are involved and know how their children are doing become much more of a help in getting students to do their work. Ice Breaker’s Web Grades are a feature you can use to encourage parents to take an active role in their child’s education. Every time you exit out of your gradebook, Ice Breaker updates web pages for all of the students in your class. To let parents see their child’s progress, all you have to do is add a link to Ice Breaker Web Grades on your school’s web site. From that point on, Ice Breaker takes care of the rest. If your school does not wish to use Ice Breaker Web Grades, simply ignore it and it will remain inactive. If you are unsure how to add a link to your school’s web site, contact a person involved in maintaining the school’s web site and politely ask them to add it for you. The web page that you should link to is called IceBreaker.html and is located in the same folder as IceBreaker.exe (if you do not know where Ice Breaker was installed at, simply search for IceBreaker.html).

If you are adding the Ice Breaker Web Grades link yourself, open up the source code to the page in your school’s web site that you would like to add the Ice Breaker link, and insert the line:

<a href="Directory\IceBreaker.html">Ice Breaker Web Grades</a>

where “Directory\” is the pathname of IceBreaker.html. You may also replace “Ice Breaker Web Grades” with any text you choose. This is the text that will represent the link.

If you have any questions or concerns with Ice Breaker Web Grades, please feel free to contact us. In addition we have a website at www.IBDConline.com that may already have the answer to your question.

Troubleshooting —

If you are reading this section after experiencing a crash or a bug, we encourage you to report your problems at our website www.IBDConline.com. Here you will also find a current list of any problems experienced by Ice Breaker users as well as the current solutions to these problems. If you do report a bug, please include an informative description of what you were doing at the time and how to recreate the bug, if possible.

Uninstalling or Re-installing Ice Breaker —

In order to thoroughly protect your information, Ice Breaker does not come with an uninstaller. If you decide you would like to remove Ice Breaker from your computer, delete the folder in which you have installed Ice Breaker. This will remove all of the files that Ice Breaker has placed on your computer. If you are about to upgrade to a newer version of Ice Breaker, please read the installation instructions for the newer version before you delete anything. If you need to re-install Ice Breaker for any reason, make sure that all teachers backup their information before you remove Ice Breaker. Once you have deleted Ice Breaker, re-install Ice Breaker to any directory. Now, all instructors need to add themselves to Ice Breaker again, with the exact same username and password. Once they have been added again, all instructors will need to load the saved information from their disks. We strongly suggest that you contact us at www.IBDConline.com before you re-install Ice Breaker mid-term.

Upgrading Ice Breaker —

You may have noticed that your current version of Ice Breaker has several buttons and options that are disabled. These are the features that are available only with the testing version of Ice Breaker. Although your current version of Ice Breaker is a fully functional and powerfull gradebook application, you are still missing out on all of the incredible testing features that we provide with Ice Breaker testing. With the upgraded version, you can create a variety of self-grading tests from a simple form. Once you have finished creating a test, you can either print out copies to use in your classroom or you can choose to let Ice Breaker administer the test for you. To let Ice Breaker do all the work for you, your students simply login to Ice Breaker through your school’s networked computers. Ice Breaker presents the test to your students in an easy to read format, and then it even grades the tests for you when they are finished! Afterwards, Ice Breaker will enter these grades into your gradebook and save a copy of each student’s answers for you to review. Additionally, you are able to customize these tests for each class with an array of options, including random question order, random questions from a question bank, extra credit questions, timed questions, and dozens more. Upgrading to Ice Breaker is inexpensive, and we discount prices to schools who are buying Ice Breaker Testing for all of their faculty. For current pricing information as well as a list of features, visit our website at www.IBDConline.com.

Also, look forward to our next upgrade to Ice Breaker: Ice Breaker Scheduling!

Conctact us —

We welcome any questions, comments, and concerns you may have about any of IBDC’s products. We will try our hardest to respond in a timely fashion with answers that are informative and relevant. To contact us, visit our website at www.IBDConline.com.