Back to Work: My Goals For Using Tech

Believe it or not, the summer of 2015 is over and boy was it not very summer-y. Besides getting away with a broken sprinkler system thanks to all the rain, I managed to take one of my final classes (Designing Online and Blended Learning) at CU Denver, started and sputtered on a kitchen renovation, repeated the phrase "blow more bubbles!" to all my swim lesson kids and...oh yeah, traveled over to Europe for a week or so!

Now that that's over and done with, I'm starting to think about my tech goals for this year:

Create an online course for students...and get them to understand and use it!

I created a grammar unit for 8th graders during my summer college course. The Art of the Sentence is designed to help kids be better writer of sentences. This seems small, but I have been thinking the past few years that it really all comes down to sentence writing. I'm going to use discussions, video quizzes from eduCanon, and peer/self revising activities to move my kids above and beyond in the art of the sentence!

Keep my students and parents better informed

Always a struggle for teachers. How do I get my kids to remember their homework assignment? There really is no easy answer, but after a several years of experimenting, I think I'm using a combination of two great tools plus one new one. 

• Google Apps (gClass folders, Doctopus, Calendar) for my Weekly Agenda
• A virtual base camp a la Weebly
• Remind App (this is the new one)

I feel more confident than ever that students are going to keep up with the work this year! (Cue WiFi meltdown...)

Chill Out!

This one isn't particularly ed tech related, but it's an important goal for me because stress always seems to be skyrocketing in the educational field (what?). I want to make sure I take good care of myself and have fun. Of course, I'm telling you this as an entire kitchen's worth of cabinetry sits in my garage waiting for me to figure out how to wrestle them in!

l&l

JJ