It's that time of year again, back to school. As part of my new back to school outlook, I have decided that I am going to use my blog not only as a means of sharing new technology tools with my audience, but also as a journal of projects I have been spending time on so that I have some documentation at the end of the year. I do not know how this documentation will be used, but it will be nice to reflect on my activities as they occur.
So, this is the third day of school, which makes me behind already.
On Thursday, August 28th, we had a Teachers' Workshop Day. My principal asked me to give the staff a quick review of Infinite Campus. This was a little stressful for me in that I did not have all that much experience with IC. After a quick immersion from our SIS Coordinator, I felt much better. I then created a little cheat sheet for the staff that they could download and use. I also created another instruction sheet for staff to use so they could access their documents on our new file server.
On the first day of school, September 2nd, I spent a good chunk of my day troubleshooting issues staff had with printing, connecting to FirstClass or Infinite Campus etc. I was thrilled though to be asked by the Kennebec Team to do something that actually had to do with integration. In years past, this team would have students do a desktop publishing activity using AppleWorks called Kennebec's Most Wanted. They asked me to take part in making this activity happen again, but possibly updating it. I immediately thought of using Pages instead of AppleWorks and instead of the teachers using a digital camera to take all of the students' pictures, transferring them to a computer, and then making a web page from the pics and posting it to their site, I would have each student plug in an iSight camera and then use Photobooth to take their own picture which could then be put right into iPhoto. I created a Pages template of the activity and then made it available to the students through an activity blog in iWeb which I put on the Kennebec Team's site. I ended the day with a Technology Integrators meeting where we made plans for the year and set goals.
On the second day of school, September 3rd, I presented the new and improved activity to the Kennebec Team. We made plans on the logistics of the activity. I also spent a bit of time transferring some staff files from the old file server to the new one.
That finally brings me to day Three. I started out this morning reading my email and found one from the folks at Nettrekker. What was intriguing about this email was that it was letting users of Nettrekker know that they have free access to hotmath.com from 5AM to 5PM. So, I checked that out right away. OMG! What a cool site! Check it out if you get a chance. The next thing I worked on was the issues that the Saco Team was having with their homework calendar and the Lang. Arts teacher wished to do the same Pages activity that the Kennebec Team was working on. So, I set her up with that, created an activity link on their team page, and then fixed their homework calendar as well. That is about as far as I have gotten. It has been busy, busy, busy.
So, if you have a moment, you may want to check out some of the links I have added to this post.
