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