Highlights
- 2 New Maker Rooms approved for the school. The rooms will be split up K-2 and 3-5. The rooms will be used for creative projects and such.
- One Culvers night is worth 2 CiCis night. That was an interesting tidbit. I was thinking that the CiCis night would be worth a lot more. PTA only clears about $250 bucks per CiCis night, which I thought was pretty low
- A teacher gave a presentation on the 7 Highly Effective Habits Kids edition. This was pretty interesting. She also talked about this book: The Leader in Me, Second Edition.
- Long discussions about Friday Folder communication methods
Maker Rooms
I will be interested to see where they take this over the next few months. Maker is a hot buzz word right now for various tech/creative projects kids do. You can check out the following links for more information:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maker_culture
- http://makezine.com/
- http://makerfaire.com/
Some hopes were dashed when someone mentioned we needed paper towel and TP rolls for the new maker space. I was hoping for a little different investment such has coding classes, Little Bits kits, or other more technology driven type projects. TP rolls sound a bit more like Art specials instead of Maker room type setup. Anyway we will see how that goes.
7 Highly Effective Habits
The Leader in Me presentation was pretty interesting. The teacher presenting had a passion for the topic and you can tell the topic and technique was important to her. The ideas sounded interesting and it seemed she was making some awesome progress in training the young leaders of tomorrow. It was encouraging to see the level of passion this teacher showed. I think a lot of times we miss this among all the other topics of education: common core, standards testing, budgets, blah blah. These more heartfelt boots on the ground type reports would go a long way, in my opinion, on putting a more positive spin on what is happening in the classroom.
Smore this Smore that
The principal is very high on the Smore service. It was Smore this Smore that. I check out the service and it seems pretty cool. It looks like a glorified re-branded blogging platform. The site mentions creating flyers which again seems like a blog post. Throw in some cool templates, mobile ready design, and some analytics about clicks and such and you appear to have a winning combination.
Don't get me wrong the service looks pretty cool and I am all for teching the place up a bit. Maybe I was just not jiving with the name and/or the use of the name in the sentence. Examples "Yeah I will just put that on my smore". "Yeah just check my smore." "I can add pictures and stuff to my smore." The push to call it smore was successful because by the end of the meeting some other members were asking will that be on the smore?
Friday Folders
Warning small rant forthcoming.
Friday Folders contain a set of informational flyers, upcoming school events, and other information the school sends to the parents. Last year the Friday folders were actually folders that contained printouts of this information. This year the decision was made to move Friday Folders to an email.
I applaud this decision 1000%. Why in the world would it make sense to print these flyers, waste a ton of volunteer hours sorting, stuffing, organizing these folders in all but the most extreme (no internet no computer) cases. A member of the PTA, inexplicably requested we go back to the paper system.
I had to speak up and try to put the brakes on this disastrous idea. Sure the email system is probably not the most optimal due to the flood of email people receive, however its by far better than the hard copy version. I suggested as another enhancement to the solution to use a central public Google Calendar that people could subscribe to.
Send out the ICAL link and let people import the calendar into whatever smartphone platform they run with. Then you make a single update on the calendar and it is pushed to all who subscribe. There was mention that teachers embed the calendar on their web site. Double bonus. Now they can just grab the embed HTML and include it on their site. The calendar is updated as needed and the changes are reflected on each teacher's site.
Someone brought up that people do not like to look at calendar's on the school website. Of course not, I don't want to look at your calendar, I want to look at my calendar. Someone added people don't like the month view calendar they want the calendar in a list. Well yeah, you know why they want the list....It is easier to enter the dates into my calendar if they are in list format. The Google Calendar solves all this with the Month View, Agenda view (list only) embed-able options, etc.
Again I understand that some folks (fewer and fewer) do not have a smartphone, computer, or internet. For these people just send the paper home with the kid.
0 comments:
Post a Comment