Reflecting on My Goals

In March, I completed my first 100 blog posts. As a way to acknowledge this, I wrote a series of blog posts focusing on ten new learnings or inspirations I had through my blogging journey thus far. 10 posts. 10 inspirations in each post. 100 new learnings. My final blog post of the series focused on ten things I wanted to learn about or focus on in the near future.

After almost two months since the final post in that series, I thought it was time to reflect on how I have done with the goals that were presented in that post.

1. Evernote – I’ve used this a lot more. While I do have a lot more to learn about Evernote, It has become my go-to note-taking app.
2. Dropbox – I’ve set up a school account and created folders for all the teachers and support staff in that account. This has allowed students to work on the iPads and save their work to Dropbox (if the particular app they are using has ths option). Again, while I have figured *some* things out with Dropbox, I know I have a lot more to learn.
3. Cloudon – Other than opening a few documents in this app, I have not explored it much at all.
4. Blogsy – Ths blog post is written using Blogsy. :-). I am impressed by how easy it is to use. It is very user-friendly. In fact, I think it us easier to add a photo using this app than using the regular WordPress site.
5. Podcasts – This is still on my to-do list.
6. More Webinars – I am still working on watching more Webinars. I signed up for some during the day, however, being a vice-principal in a very busy inner-city school made it virtually impossible to attend these Webinars. Kids always come first. What I really need to do is find some archived Webinars to watch in the evenings. Do you have any suggestions?
7. Incorporate Technology into Staff Meetings – We are planning our Administative Professional Day with our staff to take place this coming Monday. Part of this day will include reflecting on the current school goals, discussing this year’s school data, and then collaborating to decide on goals for the upcoming year. I am going to incorporate technology into this part of the day. We will use the web 2.0 tool, called edistorm to brainstorm ideas independently and as a group. Here are a few screen shots to demonstrate what we will be doing.

There will be one topic / focus area written on colour-coded stickies in each corner of the edistorm. Staff members will use an iPad (or a laptop) to go to edistorm and add stickies in each area. In the top right of the screen shot below, you can see the zoomed out version of the edistorm. There should be enough room for staff members to add stickies in each area (Reading, Writing, Numeracy, Social Responsibility, and Other). You can see below how we have added the actual data to the stickies so the staff members have the most recent data visible for them to reflect upon.

Here is another screen shot. It is really quite easy to manipulate and move from one topic to another. When using a laptop, you just use your mouse, click and hold to move around the page. On the iPad, you move your finger on the page to scroll to other areas. You can see where you are on the screen by watching the black rectangular box in the blue zoomed-out view of the edistorm.

In about two months, I have been able to focus learning about half of the items I wrote about in my final post of my 100 Blog Post Series. That’s not too bad. I look forward to learning more about these and the others I listed. I may have to wait until the summer to really concentrate on going deeper with these though.

It’s all about learning.

What have you learned lately?