Saturday, October 08, 2011

October Already!?!?!?!

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Where has the time gone? More than a week has blurred before my very eyes and I haven't really had a spare moment to share any of it with you.

School seems to be humming along. My class is really a great class this year (and I am STILL saying that after 30 full days of school...lol). We seem to get much more done than in past years and I am very pleased with how all my students are doing. In fact, our last math test saw a rise of over 10% in the class average! That is very exciting.

My goal this year has been to communicate better with parents as well. I was thrilled that 11 of the 18 parents were willing to provide their e-mail address at Back-to-School night. I have been able to send out weekly e-mail updates to the parents letting them know of events/test/activities/suggestions for the coming week. I have also been e-mailing individual parents to let them know of successes and challenges for their student.

I realized that I hadn't posted in a while as I was working in my DropBox account. Boy did it need to organized. That idea could be a whole post on its own. If you don't yet have a DropBox account yet, you NEED to get an account. Scan the code in this post to be taken to the sign up page. You get 2GB for free. If you sign-up under me, we both get an extra 250MB. Heck, even if you don't think you will ever use it (which I didn't at first), sign-up and download the program. As a teacher, I hated trying to e-mail myself files, or easier, but still a pain was all my thumb/jump drives. With my DropBox account, I simply save it to the folder on my desktop, and then when I arrive at home, the computer lab, my iPod, and more, I simply open the file I need and I am ready to go.

I also thought that 2GB would be gone in a heartbeat, but I am good about saving files to my desktop that are larger and I don't really need all the time. Plus, if lots of people help each other out, we can all get lots of free space. One other bonus is that you can log-in from any computer and you don't have to download the software on those computers to use the site. This is nice when I am working in the school computer lab. I log-in to DropBox and then use what I need right from my web browser. Anyways, enough sales-pitching this awesome free site. If you don't have an account and you are reading this, I urge you to get one and take it for a test drive. You will find that it really IS worth the time to check it out.

Home life has been good. We decorated for Halloween as a family last Monday. It is amazing the amount of decorations we have accumulated over the past 13 years. But, everything looks spooky, and the kids really enjoy seeing the decorations. I really love the door monster my wife made a few years back. My wife was kind enough to make one for my classroom door as well (which, because it is NOT outside in the weather is fairing much better than our front door one). My classroom is also decorated. Over the past 11 years, I have slowly whittled down the amount of decor I put up. It is a negative view, but every time I decorate something anymore I think about the fact that it will just have to be taken down in a few weeks. That thought process ensures that I only put up the "good" stuff and spread it out to look like there is a lot of it up. Heck, I figure students are NEVER too old to enjoy some holiday spirit around them.

Well, I guess I better get back to being lazy. Haven't really had a Saturday to chill out on for a few weeks. I don't want to miss another second of it.

Later...




1 comment:

  1. Bummer, I already signed up with DB with my brother...ah well. It is nice though. I will also put stuff up on my server from time to time as well if I want to share a file with somebody and just give them the link. It saves a lot of hassle if they don't have DB.

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