The fact that two weeks of school are already over is mind boggling. I feel as if I just read 10000 books back to back to back.
In any event, it has been an up and down few weeks. While the students and teachers are learning, we are hard at work, keeping the infrastructure up-to-date and making sure everyone has what they need. Even when we do room checks over the summer, there are always a bunch of little things that we need to fix - and that is okay with us.
The media centers are bustling with students at all times of the day. Since our office resides right in one of the media centers, we get to hear and listen to the learning and excitement that is going on. We have over 50 iPads in the Media Center and students are always using them. They are using them to take Accelerated Reader quizzes, access their Ebackpacks, check out information, or just play a game or two. It is really quite something and it makes me feel great that we are going to embark on a BYOD initiative pilot program later on this year (but more on that later).
We held two, really great training's this week for our staff as well. One for OnCourse and the other for E-Backpack, which has been in our district for now going on three years.
I love the team over at https://www.ebackpack.com/ . They are helpful and always willing to lend a hand when it comes to how to use the program.
Our students love using the iPads with eBackpack and the integration with Google Drive and Dropbox make it so that students can truly access their items anywhere, at anytime.
Finally, there are some really good conferences (or unconferences) coming up. One such is:
This PD event will be held on October 12th - more information can be found at http://www.edtechnj.com/
Check it out! Really great keynotes by +Jeffrey Bradbury of Teachercast and +Angela Maiers of the Passion Driven classroom are planned, so make it a priority to come!
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