Simplifying Looking Back

Part of today's department meeting was getting together with our content groups to reflect on the year. Last year we made curriculum maps for Algebra and Geometry and this year we tried to stick to them, to varying degrees of success. We wanted to decide what units to move, which to shorten and which to lengthen. We'd been having this conversation throughout the year but today was the day to hash out the details. Hashing out details that included first quarter is difficult to do. Luckily I've developed a system where I save my smartboard files for each class in a public google drive folder with the date. The goal is for kids to have a place to check if they're absent or forget to write down the homework or need help with their homework. But it worked great today when we needed to figure out how long we'd spent on each unit.

All of my geometry notes for the year, in order, in one place.

I sent an email to the high school tech person after I found out about Classrooms because I want in, and more than that, I want us to switch over to google apps for education because it would be soo much easier than what we currently have. We use FirstClass for email and last month got an email telling us that we wouldn't be able to email anyone outside of our domain for a while. There was a spam issue they couldn't solve. Teachers are starting to use Drive and expect kids to submit assignments online, but kids don't have email addresses through the school and don't have google accounts. I have to wonder if the district used google apps, would the students look back at their google drive as they studied for finals? That could be a cool assignment that I can technically do because my drive is public... Some of my classes are small enough that each kid would get a month to summarize. I'm going to ponder this idea further...