The school has moved. This ought to be interesting. Everything is new and shiny and I am hoping to keep it that way. My room looks so different from the place I taught for 12 1/2 years. The students and parents have been helping move in a lot of different parts of the building. The one area that has been off-limits so far has been the gym. That will be unveiled on the first day of school. I imagine there are going to be a lot of ooohhs and aaahhhs at that point. The first days is going to be so exciting but is going to be a major change for everyone.
I excited overall but probably most excited about the new way that I am going to be able to use technology in the building. We are going to have a cart of chromebooks for check out for the upper school and middle school classes. I can see myself using those just about every day in my 7th Grade History class. Now that the Internet will be much more available with a server that is actually designed to have bunches of kids using the internet at the same time (not like the old building) I am planning on developing much more for the wiki for each of my history classes. I am still trying to figure out how to invite the kids to become members and will tackle that this week. My plan is for each of them to have a page to put their projects stuff on and then have topics for each of the major areas we are covering. They then will be able to add stuff. I spent one day looking for different media to add to my 6th Grade (Western Civilization) and 7th Grade (Non-Western Culture Focusing on Asia and Africa) pages and added probably 25 videos and another 2050 links just to show the students how it is done. Hopefully I will even be able to have the students blog about what we covered in the class on a weekly basis on the main part of my webpage.
I have some work to do on math so I can finish putting lessons up on the first half of the book. That should not take me too long since I only have a bout 3 more to go. Hopefully the kids remembered how to do percents over the break.
Starting to prepare for my talk at ICE on Flipping my classroom. I borrowed the IPad from the school and have started to experiment with using the Educreations and ShowMe apps. Still trying to figure it out but will over time. My gift to myself this year was a document camera. I am planning on using that to show how to record lessons using that system. I figure it is probably more likely for someone to have access to a document camera or an IPad than a Mobi board. I have a lot to do to plan for this but it should really keep me on my toes for the next couple of months.
No matter what these next few weeks are going to be some of the most exciting in my career.
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