Happy Labor Day!

Most schools in North Carolina have only had one week of school, so it has been so nice to immediately have this long weekend. Hopefully, you have taken some time today to think about all of the work and labor that goes into making things run as smoothly as they do. Especially in schools, we always have opinions on how things are not working all that well, but there are people who are working harder than we even realize, without whom, things would just fall apart!

If you're like me, just because we have a day off does not mean that I'm taking a day off of thinking and planning! There is always more to be done, especially at the beginning of a new year that we want to make better than last year.

I haven't worked too hard today: I've just done some general things that will enable me to use technology more efficiently this year.

• I typed in all of my students into classes at www.learnzillion.com Learnzillion has common core-aligned videos that you can assign to your students. There is also guided practice, slide notes, and other resources for the teacher or for the students to practice further. The setup is the hardest part because each student has to be typed in individually. You then get a code for each one that they have to enter. You can print out a page of the codes and give each student their own slip... we'll see if it is that easy!
• I created an Edmodo group for the sixth grade math teachers at my school. On there, we can create folders of resources that we can each access and edit. The reason we're doing it this way is because Google docs currently don't work that well on our computers, and emailing everything gets messy. We thought about livebinder and other sources, but we all use Edmodo so regularly that this sounded easy! 

I'm sure I'll do more planning later... it's been hard to think too far ahead when we've had to spend a lot of daily time and energy planning for how we can use our tablets and working out the kinks that we currently have. I've only had about two days of instruction, and that was on divisibility rules- not even in our curriculum! When we get back tomorrow, I intend to have all of my students create Edmodo and Learnzillion accounts, review divisibility, and then get ready for GCF by assigning a couple of videos for homework as preview.

OK! My labor is done!

I'll leave you with the other work that I did today...

Working hard on the water of Smith Mountain Lake, VA!