Plans for 2012

As I do every summer over the holidays I think about the coming year and what I want to aim towards.  As I found last year, as well as setting those goals, I need to be open to what just suddenly inspires me and follow that track as well, it can take me down surprising paths.

However for now I am thinking just about from February to April - our first term. Term two will be a sabbatical term, and who knows where I will want to track after that.  I find that writing and publishing my goals helps, it makes me more accountable.  I have said it, and now I want to live it out.

At this time of the year this picture shows  how my brain feels,  getting something written helps to put some shape on things, and the picture more complete!

School goals


1. Read children's books, during school term at least one a week - leading to at least 52 in the year.

2. Encourage some of my students to join Goodreads where they can discuss books among themselves and keep track of their reading.

3. Teach students how to write once a week a reading response in the form of a letter that will provide ongoing discussion between them and me about what they are noticing in their reading. (see" Guiding Readers and Writers", Fountas and Pinnell.) My goal is to respond to each, one from each student each week. This will be rotated - 5 students per night.

4. Sharpen up my skills with conferring with reading conferences first and then writing conferences. At present I am reading "Conferring: The Keystone of  Reader's Workshop" by Patrick Allen.  I have used his form to make my conference form.

5. Use Evernote for recording notes from reading conferences.  I am not sure at this stage whether I will revert to paper and pen, which for me is a lot faster, however I like the organisation that will result with Evernote.  I have already drawn up a page for it.  I was very pleased as once I had a master done I was easily able to put a copy in each student's notebook.

Screenshot from my ipad.

6. Give my more able Maths students more control over their own learning.  So I am going to trial using a Maths Daily Five type schedule with them but modified to suit us.  Hopefully they will be able to work at what they set as their goals and I will conference them individually once a week, and meet with them in smaller groups as needed.

 I am going to give five options that they will engage in:

1) Maths problem solving and writing an explanation of how they solved it.

2) Maths with a partner - I will have some options for them, I think our Figure it Out series will be a good  beginning.

3) Maths work by self - I will have a variety of text books that they can choose to use to practise whatever they believe they need within Number and Algebra for Term One.

4) Maths using technology - I will have some digital pathways from Digistore set up for them as a start. NZ Maths have it all well set out. I will set up a wiki where the students can easily access these learning objects. This slot could also involve making Showme type videos as tutorials for others.

  

5) Maths game with one or two others.

I have another group of students who will need a lot of hands on from me, and that is where I hope to spend the majority of my time.

7.  Track and meet the commitments made for global connections.  I have already made myself a page where I can see easily what projects we are involved in, who is running them, what we need to do when and a link to the web site.  Now I am not holding it all in my head.  I need to visit the plan at least twice a week to keep on track.

8. Improve the quality of commenting on blogs in my classroom.  See my previous post. 

9. Settle into a new classroom space. Adapt it as we need, explore the possibilities of it.  Just moving to it has been a big job. Still not settled in there yet.  However I am organising it more thoroughly than I ever have before.  Organisation of things etc is not my strength - it doesn't come naturally.

What are your goals at the moment?  Do you set goals or are you more of a let's see what happens person?  Personally I think there is merit in both ways.

Evernote - Teacher Helper.

Evernote is a free web tool that I recently came across through reading Richard Lambert’s blog . Later I listened to a prerecorded webinar given on Wednesday eT@lking by Graham Clark. 

Evernote is for

            PC

            Ipad or Ipod Touch

            Iphone or Android.

If you have it on two or more such devices it will sync automatically and notes you put in using your PC will be found on for instance your Ipad when you next open it up.

Evernote allows you to keep notes that include text, photos, and audio. I cannot see any way of easily creating audio on your PC, however on the other devices it is in the toolbar and is very easy to add a voice to the note.

 If you pay $5 a month you can include all kinds of documents and video.  At present I am only using the free tool, however as I begin to collect information I may move to the paid version.  The free version allows you 60mb a month.

While I will use it to collect, sort and tag a variety of information I want to use it to collect data about students in one place so that it will help me to track what they are learning through the year.  For example the class has just finished a Science Fair project.  I have photographed these and put them in students’ notebooks.

Evernote can be downloaded from their website.  Apps are downloaded from the app stores.

There is a web clipping tool which should also be downloaded.  It sits on your tool bar and gives you the option of clipping the url, the whole article or the page.

If you set your preferences under Tools you will also be able to choose from a drop down list which notebook you want to put the note in.

A clipping tool is also added to your email and if you want to save a special email you can put it into you notebook.  For example I just did it to remind me of a password I want handy for a website.

If you are on your ipad you can also clip to your notebook using the email address assigned to you by Evernote when you join.  The following video shows you how to do this. I haven't yet mastered this aspect!  Clipping from your PC is far easier.

If you are starting a new notebook this can be done from the tool bar at the top. Once the new notebook is made you are ready to start adding notes to it.

The new note can then be clicked on, a title given to it and it can be tagged. Some teachers choose to tag by student name within a notebook.  I prefer to set up a notebook for each student.  I then tag as well, so that I could for example find all science information if I wanted.

If students had their own devices they could have Evernote on say their Ipod Touch and they could track their own work e-portfolio style. 

I like this free tool and I can see that it is going to be very useful.  I am looking forward to using it next term when I return to my classroom.

If you don't already use it I suggest you give it a go.  There are many uses for it outside of education.  Try it.