On June 7th this little one, Temperance Brooke, came into the world-- no joke one day after my last post. Between a rough start and enjoying every moment I could with her, the blogging fell by the wayside. Let's be honest, all work things fell by the wayside.
But I am now back at work and returning has been quite the experience.
Since I'm a digital learning coach, they didn't get anyone to fill in for me while I was on leave. That also meant they started the school year without a coach.
Now, normally I would say, not that big of a deal, but we rolled out brand new devices K-12 at the start of the school year (totally not here for that) and a ton of new programs that we purchased this year in lieu of paper/pencil.
So... I return to a whole lot of programs needing to be set up and teachers that have just been waiting for me to come back. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE that they want me in their rooms and that they want my help; however, the list is long and so I continue to slowly work my way through the Google Form of teacher requests. I'll get there; it just might take awhile!
On a side note, our FAV new programs we are using this year! (And yes, some are paid.)
1. Storia--Scholastic stories leveled by Fountas and Pinnell or Lexile. You can put them in reading groups in the program and then provide different shelves and stories to each group based on their reading ability or skill set.
2. USA Test Prep-- yes, it's test prep, but it is also great for standards review and remediation. We started out only using it at the high school side and now we use it all the way to 3rd grade. It is also fairly reasonably priced for everything you get.
3. Flocabulary-- We've always loved Flocab but with more of our teachers taking advantage of the class features, it has to make the list!
4. STEM Fuse-- We are just getting started with this one but it has pre-created units for different grades that allow teachers to incorporate math, science, literacy, critical thinking, problem solving, and 3D printing into their standards easily!
Okay, there are tons more that I love but these are the ones that teachers are asking for set up, like ASAP so I thought I'd share!
And, now I'll share one more sweet pic just because this being back to work stuff--even though she's the third--is still tough!
Congratulations on your lovely lady!
ReplyDeleteI'm very familiar with Flocabulary - loved it in my old middle school. I am curious. What type of devices did you get? Are you 1:1? Were you or is this all new? What are your expectations for the devices? Does the school or district have specific expectations? Good luck getting to your new normal with children, baby, work, blogging and anything else that comes up.
We went with the HP X360 for 3-12 and ipads for K-2. All of our students, including K, take home their devices daily. We keep our devices for 3 years so we are just now starting year 4 of 1:1 for K-12. Previously we had Dell 11 and Samsung Galaxies. We are working on streamlining teacher expectations in terms of using but we do have certain programs that all teachers must use. It has definitely been a learning experience for us!
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