Today was an exciting event!  I hosted a site visit for some school districts interested in 1:1 and eChalk.   Participating in the visit were our eChalk sales executive, our client manager, and the CEO of eChalk.  I truly enjoyed sharing our story with both the visitors and with our special guests.  eChalk has played such an important role in facilitating our 1:1 environment and it was wonderful for them to see it first hand.

The day was filled with great conversation about student engagement, 1:1 learning, curriculum, common core standards, and the future of education.

Institute/Election Day

Today was crazy!  Institute day was done "in-house" at each school, with the iCoaches traveling to different buildings to support teachers.  I spent the morning at Hiawatha working on some eChalk basics with a few teachers, then made my way over to Heritage.

I spent an hour working and planning with all of the middle school PE and Health teachers for the Fitness Gram application.  THEY ARE FANTASTIC!  They cannot wait to have some data to help support their student's health and wellness.....knowing full well that they will held accountable for these scores in the coming years.  They want to jump right in and get this program implemented district-wide.  They have so many great ideas!  John has been a great leader of this group.  He is really pushing to make this happen and make it happen soon. Cannot wait to see where this goes!

I then spent some time training Piper teachers to use eChalk Lesson Planner and wrapped up the day at Emerson helping some teachers with some ideas for how to implement iPads more efficiently.  I showed them one of my favorite apps, Sight Words (FREE!).  It has sets of sight words that included recordings of the words so kids can listen to the words.  They can also create their own lists and add their own recordings.  It now has a new feature that allows you to share lists across a Dropbox account.  This will make it easy for teachers to create their own custom sets of words for a class!

Bivariate Data Day 1

So excited to help Meagan and Colleen start today!  They are excited as well.  We have been working on this unit for at least a month and they are finally ready to start.

Today they are giving the pre-test (as a discovery ed probe).   We still have some things to finalize and they are working on getting all of the lessons into eChalk tomorrow.  They already posted the intro activity in eChalk and you can see from the picture below that it has students curious for math class Wednesday!

Picture of the eChalk Class Page

Student taking the Discovery Education Pre-Test

Getting closer!

Last night Meagan emailed me with the "finalized" versions of the bivariate data unit we have been working on.  She spent most of the day Sunday finalizing things and adjusting things.  Everything is looking good!  I stopped by her classroom today and basically walked through the guided/flipped lesson to see how it went.  All the links work and tings look good.  I made some suggestions on clarifying directions for students and using common vocabulary.  She is going to look at things tonight. The next thing to do is to add more questions to the Think Link probe (the pre-test).  We may have to write some of our own questions for this.  

I am continually impressed with Meagan's knowledge of her content - she is fantastic!

We are both excited to start the unit Friday!

I also spent a little time helping our Literacy Director figure out how to post reading resources for the whole district on eChalk.  His literacy team is doing good things.....it will be great to get them shared district-wide!

eChalk Site Manager Training

I spent the entire day with the 8 site managers and our trainer from eChalk.  Although it was not ideal to pull secretaries out of their places or teachers out of their classrooms, there was no other way to get us all together.  The day was very productive and we learned so much that can help us communicate more effectively with teachers, parents, and the community.

We completely re-organized all 8 school websites and the district site too.  We decided on common tabs so families will have an easier time navigating sites and finding information.  We learned how to post announcements internally and externally as well as how to keep calendars up to date.  

We all still have a lot of work to do to get everything just right and in place, but the time was spent well.  Another next step is to decide who is responsible for what as we move forward.

My next big goal is to get all of the resources our district as (the Intranet, employee documents and forms, Web 2.0 resources, etc)  all in one place to teachers and staff.  We have been relying on everyone attempting to save important emails and links, but with no way to keep them organized. 

I am amazed at how much I have learned about website infrastructure from both this training as well as from just trial and error myself.  Although I don't want to spend my time behind a computer screen, I think it really helps for me to understand how everything works so that I can make it work better!