Back to School!

I hope that all the teachers out there had a great first week back at school! I am happy to report that both my students and I have made it through the first week of school despite malfunctioning lockers, the odd/even room wings and a transition from a small elementary school to a very large middle school.

ClassDojo

In my 2 previous blogs, I wrote about ClassDojo, a classroom management system that I would be trying in the classroom this year. As part of my classroom rules and expectations, I went over ClassDojo with my new students...and they loved it! After reviewing the attributes that I would be tracking (both positive and negative), I let each student pick their own avatar. End result? Students both vested in and excited by a behavior tracking system! Thank you ClassDojo!






Classroom Booksource

Another web20 tool that I recently began to use, but have not blogged about, is ClassroomBookSource.  As with most of my blog mentions, this is a free web20 app. Classroom BookSource is an online program that allows teachers to inventory, maintain and track their classroom libraries. Book titles can be input into the program via ISBN. For those who have access to a bar code reader, you can scan the titles into the program. Unfortunately I do not have one, so I entered the ISBN's manually. It took me approximately 10 hours over 3 days to input all my books, but it was time very well spent.

I now have my entire classroom library on line, in a system that allows my students to check out and return books electronically. It also allows me to track who has what. What I didn't anticipate about this was the reaction from my 6th grade students.

Once I showed them how they could check out books on my smartboard, at least 3 students immediately went back to my library and started looking for a book to borrow. I had underestimated the ability of this system to encourage literacy among my students. Needless to say, the hours I spent entering ISBN's was more than worth it, just to see the excitement in in their faces and hear it in their voices.

I will blog about more about this program next time, but please check it out! Is is FREE and EASY to use!


The Last Word

A friend of mine at school emailed me the following link last week, and it is just too good not to share. It is a blog entitled "You might be in the first week of school if..." 

Enjoy, and as always, let me know any comments, feedback, suggestions etc! I would love to hear from you.