Technology Reflections

I’ve hit the two week mark for time left in summer vacation. I am in full school thinking mode now. I’m constantly thinking about what I can do to start planning and organizing to make the transition less chaotic (yeah right!) Here’s what I’ve done so far:

1. I went into school on Thursday to check my schedule (seems like it will be exactly the same as last year – YAY!) and my room (furniture was moved around for me in order to accommodate a cupboard that had to be moved in from the hall due to some construction) and all was exactly like I wanted – YAY!
2. The Grammar Books that I talked about in this post arrived and they look great – YAY!
3. I revamped the Newsletter Information sheet that I send out on the first day of school for each of my classes (Reading and Computers)
4. I revamped the wiki that I use for writing lesson plans. Computer Wheel classes will have plans written by week of the quarter since I do the same thing (pretty much) each quarter. That will cut down on lesson writing for those 2 classes (6th and 7th grade). 8th grade computers is now organized by what topics I will cover each quarter. I tweaked the topics a bit too and I am pleased with how it looks. I moved all of last years plans to new pages. The Reading page is ready and waiting – this is the only subject that I write traditional daily/weekly plans for.
5. I added Standards and Skills to my Gradebook program. I’m going to try to link standards to my assignments in the gradebook. There is a feature that will allow me to track mastery of standards and skills through grades.
6. I have started creating new magnet titles for my whiteboard. Since I teach 4 different subjects (Reading and 6th, 7th and 8th Grade Computers) I use the sides of my whiteboard to organize lesson info, homework, etc for each class. The left side is for Reading and the right side for Computers. Additionally, I need to separate the different grades for computers. I do this by creating titles using WordArt for everything that I need and printing them on magnet sheets. The Magnet sheets stick to the whiteboard and I don’t have to write them over every time one gets erased.

There’s still plenty more to do – some can’t be done until I’m actually in my classroom (August 10th), but I’m sure I’ll find ways to keep myself busy.

Oh – and while doing all that I still managed to read the new Harry Potter Book in two days

Wow – my summer is almost over. I have just under three weeks before I go back to work. I woke up one morning last week realizing that I had been dreaming about school for the first time in a long time, and I have not stopped thinking about it since then. I sure sign that my summer is almost over.

One thing that Reading teachers have been asked to do this year is to cover a bit more grammar, freeing the Language Arts teachers to concentrate on more of the stuff they need to cover. I have found a resource that looks like it will be a great thing – easy to implement, doesn’t take a lot of time and looks to be fun for the kids. The books are Caught’Ya !: Grammar With a Giggle. I plan to get the two books. There is a third book as well, but I will wait to see how these books work out before I get that one. I plan to do these as a warm up 2 – 3 times a week. I have other things that we need to do as warmups, as well; silent reading and a computer fluency program.

I’m also thinking about my Bulletin Boards. I have four in my room. One I make as an information board. It has a large printout of the Bell Schedule, a school calendar and a some other things. Two others will each be a generic Computer and Reading board (the two subjects that I teach). The last one changes from year to year. This year it will track the books that my reading kids read and the points they earn using the Reading Counts Program.

OK – that’s enough for now – I am still on vacation…..time to hit the beach…….