One Day at a Time

Admittedly, I'm not much of a blogger.  I enjoy reading what others post, but I just can't seem to keep up with my own writing.  (And I was an English major!)  The other day, I was driving home, and I thought about my job.  My title is Educational Technology Facilitator.  I split my time between two elementary schools in the upper part of York County in Hampton Roads, VA.  I am tasked with helping teacher use technology in their instruction.  This can take many forms, but my favorite is planning and teaching lessons with other teachers.  As a 34 year veteran in elementary education, I need my "kid fix".

So back to my drive to school.  I was thinking about how different it is being an ETF.  When I was still in the classroom, my schedule was relatively routine.  As an ETF every day is different.  I could be teaching a group of kindergarteners how to draw with Pixie in the morning and training a group of teachers how to use iPads in the afternoon.  That's when this idea occurred to me.

I'm going to post one thing I did in my job each day.  I'd like to think it will be my favorite thing, and I'll try to be positive.  We'll see where that takes me.

So here's my entry for last Friday.  I was supposed to leave early to drive up to NY for my father's 90th birthday.  Long story, but my departure was delayed, so I took the time to work on eToy.

My colleague, June Jones, turned me on to this idea several years ago.  Modeled after eBay, eToy is a project/website where students can earn money and bid on gently used toys.  Originally, she used a database created by someone else.  I wanted to do my own thing, so I created forms in Google Docs (now Google Drive) for the students to make bids.  These forms are connected to a spreadsheet.  Students first check the online spreadsheet to see what the current high bid is for any given toy and then go to the form to make a bid.  What I did on Friday was create a template for the form, submitted it to the Google Docs template gallery, and created forms for each toy.  Then I copied the links for these forms on my eToy website.  There's still a lot more work to do, but that's my "thing" for last Friday.