#15 Post of choice - organization part two

So I really went over my organization today - I thought about it when I started modules five and six and wrote my original blog posts, but I focused on how disorganized my email was, and not how organized everything else was. My email may be a well managed disaster, but my website, blog and files are a dream. I am not sure why I love folders everywhere by my inbox, but I am looking forward to taking what works about the rest of my organizational plan and putting it to work in my inbox.

#14 Excited about weaving !

I have been re-writing my middle school weaving unit for the last module, because my students strongly did not desire to do our traditional middle school weaving unit. I am getting so pumped - I have been pinning like a mad woman, and I am excited to get my students pinning. I use pinterest all the time ( I love it as much as google) but I was looking for new ECE weaving ideas, when I came across tons and tons and tons of good stuff for older students. It is such a great way to introduce bookmarking tools and I should be able to get a huge variety of projects that the students are really excited about. I know that I can barely wait, and we have at least two weeks till we are ready to start. Pumped for student focused differentiated learning and research to start!!

#8 Screen Cast

Screen Cast to come, it is slowly loading on to youtube as we speak. Once I started playing around with the quick time player, I decided I really liked it. I look forward to using it for screen casts in the future. Great sound recording, easy to use, clean looking, and nice playback - the only downside is that it takes forever to load with our current connectivity.

http://youtu.be/hdPkqCumm6k

#13 Email organization.

My email is a disaster. I totally rely on the ease of the search functions to find what I am looking for. However, right now, with about 8 million emails pouring in for online learning - I wish I had a system. I'm not sure how I want to organize my email, so I just don't. My personal email had folders and I use gmails' tagging system. With my work email I just don't. I am not sure why. I think student folders by class and parent folders would be a good place to start. We shall see.

#12 Shared Materials

Right now we have two places where students and staff can share materials. It can be confusing at times. We switched from having just the Tdrive to still having the tdrive and also having google drive. I use both, and I think we are not quite ready to switch to one. I love google drive but it does have limited formatting options, so I still use the T drive. I also use the t-drive for organizing and storing lessons and materials, so it would be hard to give it up. It might be good to transition to all sharing being done on google drive, and file storage left up to the individual user. This is a tough one, because each person has a system that works for them. I would not want to be forced to use a system if it didn't work for me.

#5 BONUS Google Awesomeness

http://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/project/art-project


So, bonus Google awesomeness that I happened to stumble upon while searching pinterest for color theory reviews. This Google cultural institute is a gold mine of high quality art images with slide id information, and you can create your own gallery - this is like a combination of exactly what I want my high school students to do for their ISP using a bookmarking tool and more focused web searches. So excited to have wandered upon something so amazing!!!

#10 Past and present presentations

I am very aware of my presentation weakness. I keep adding a little more, and a little more, and a little more to each slide, and then magically the neat, fast, easy to read and comprehend bullet points have become a 10 pt. font paragraph. Those presentations, have been and continue to be unsuccessful. I have done a great job keeping the formatting, fonts and colors clean and simple. The formatting definitely has improved my presentations, but I do have to continue to make sure I edit the content, again and again.