What I've been doing at school this week: 2/7/14

If you read my previous post, you know that I returned from being out almost the entire month of January.  For the first few days back, business was slow.  Most of my work had to do with troubleshooting problems or resetting passwords.  This was fine, as I was still getting back into the swing of things (a luxury I have that classroom teachers do not).

By Wednesday, I was getting antsy.  It's easy to be out of sight, out of mind.  This is why -- especially when I'm away -- I try to communicate regularly by e-mail.  Whenever things slow down, I take the bull by the horns.  On Wednesday I sent out two e-mails, one to my kindergarten teachers and another to my 5th grade teachers.  It's a scatter shot approach, but it works! 

At MVES, where I have only three kindergarten teachers, I have been working with them and their students on a weekly basis.  When students are getting targeted technology skills introduced and reinforced (at least) weekly, they show tremendous and rapid growth.  I wanted to be able to do this with my TES kinders, but there we have five classes.  Still, I made the offer, and depending on the responses I get, I'll work it out somehow.

My offer to the fifth grade teachers was to teach one or more in a series of lessons I developed on using Perspective.  This is a website where students can go to learn more about how their writing SOL test is scored.  I have been doing this for years, but I am at two new locations with eight new (to me) teachers.  Although it's late, I had to get the word out.  I can't rely on using the same materials as last year because both the test and the website have changed.  I am currently working on adapting my materials to these changes.

Response from teachers are streaming in, so happily my workload is picking up.  Of course, today is Friday, so it's hard to think about that now.