Celebrate Monday

Ahhhh... today is the official last day of Summer Break for those of us in Central Virginia. Tomorrow begins a brand-new school year with smiling faces, happy children, and joy, joy, JOY!

Have I mentioned lately how much I love my job as an educator? :)

This past week has been a flurry of activity as teachers have set-up classrooms, organized folders, and prepared to meet students and parents at Open House. I, too, have been busy, playing more of a behind-the-scenes role helping teachers with creating parent surveys, setting up computers, and planning for tech integration lessons and projects to come.

But right here in this moment, as I sit on my back deck snuggled under a lightweight fleece blanket listening to the early-morning sounds of summer chirping around me, I want to take a moment to #CelebrateMonday.

For those of you who are new to the Twitter scene, #CelebrateMonday and #FlyHighFri are two of my FAVORITE educationally positive hashtags to follow. They begin and end my work week with joy and help me find other positive thinkers in the sea of Twitter followers.

Today I am celebrating the progress on my Tiny Tech Cafe.

If you know anything at all about me, you know I am PASSIONATE about education, educators, and children. But I am also passionate about random acts of kindness. My vision for turning our sterile and stoic computer lab into an engaging Tiny Tech Cafe is starting to gain momentum as friends, family, and community members join together for a shared purpose.

It really is mind-blowing to see how it's all coming together!

I've written several updates throughout the week on the progress and wanted to share them with you as well:

Post 1 - Tiny Tech Cafe

Post 2 - Coffee, Anyone?

Post 3 - When You Wish

Post 4 - Making Progress

I am humbled to see so many people supporting this project! It is incredible! Best of all, I can already see an increased engagement of conversation with teachers, students, and parents who want to know more about the Tiny Tech Cafe.

In a recent post by 4 O'Clock Faculty, we were asked to share our goals with the world. Here are my goals for the Tiny Tech Cafe this year:

Together we can achieve great things!

If you would like to join in and be a Tiny Tech Cafe Supporter, please click here! We would love to make our vision a reality through a fully-funded campaign!

I am excited to see what the first week of school holds for us at Mechanicsville Elementary and I hope your week shines with brightness, too! What are you doing today to #CelebrateMonday?

ECSE Personalized PD

This week I joined in with ITRTs Jamie Mullenaux (@JamieMullenaux) and Jen Hicks (@jenhicks) to provide personalized PD for Early Childhood Special Education (ECSE) teachers in our district.

Training was limited to an hour and fifteen minutes, so our challenge was to provide personalized PD in a limited amount of time. We knew there were varying numbers of available hardware in each class (iPads, SMART Boards, and SMART Tables), but we weren't sure who had what or which area they wanted more training. We decided to offer time for conversation, learning, and reflection as shown below:

We offered three stations focused on creative uses for iPads, SMART Boards, and SMART Tables, allowing teachers to choose the training they wanted to receive. We prepared digital guides for each session along with targeted questions to encourage active participation.

Our introductory conversations showed that many were comfortable using basic apps on the iPad, but were looking to learn how to use SMART Boards and SMART Tables. We still offered three stations, but found that providing flexibility for teachers to choose what interested them most made the greatest impact on learning.

As teachers interacted with the SMART Board and SMART Tables, they shared ideas for implementation, including which features they thought would be most appropriate for their PreK students. They also shared suggestions for troubleshooting common issues such as editing templates from the SMART Exchange and moving the SMART Table for naptime.

It was great to have all the ECSE teachers together to share in the learning experience! A special thanks to Solita Wilson for allowing us to use her classroom for training.  We learned quite a bit in such a short amount of time!