Hi everyone. So I have been completely absent from this community for the last while due to some unforeseen personal and professional circumstances, however I am excited\u00a0to fill you in on the new direction\u00a0I will be taking with my action plan.<\/p>\n
Before I dive into my new plan, I just want to take a moment to mention how amazing our Cohort facilitators have been at\u00a0making me feel supported and accepted throughout this process, especially regarding my absence. I have the utmost respect for this community and I hope to engage in a deeper way moving forward.<\/p>\n
Our school is currently looking into the possibility of switching our email system to Google, and I will be looking at some of the pros and cons of this idea before we make a decision. Currently we are using the First Class system for all of our communications between staff members and parents, and First Class has many important features that we rely on, including our conference groups as well as our document archive.<\/p>\n
A very important aspect of our\u00a0school culture is how we communicate about supporting specific students and about different trends we are noticing inside and outside of the classroom. The conference feature of First Class is extremely useful for this task. For example, if a teacher out on duty is noticing\u00a0that a particular student seems to be alone at recess day after day, this may be a topic that would be posted on our conference system for discussion. All teachers who associate with this student will see the posting, and have a chance to add any information they may have about the particular situation. The conference system also allows us to keep an archive of these discussions for future reference as the student advances through the grades. I have been experimenting with Google Groups as an alternative to the conference system, and still have a few questions about it. I have figured out how to set up the group so that everyone is emailed when a new post is made, and I have figured out how to archive the conversations and tag them, however I am wondering if there is away to file the archived posts in a way similar to Gmail with folders for each classroom or student.<\/p>\n
I will keep you posted once I experiment more. I am also hoping to visit some schools who have currently switch to Google Apps for Education in the next few months and see how they manage this system. We are also currently deciding how to effectively make this switch with a staff that would need extensive PD\u00a0to feel comfortable with the Gmail system as well as google drive. A great suggestion was to have a small pilot program with a few staff involved next year before a major switch in 2016. Many many questions to come!<\/p>\n
Laura<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Hi everyone. So I have been completely absent from this community for the last while due to some unforeseen personal and professional circumstances, however I am excited\u00a0to fill you in on the new direction\u00a0I will be taking with my action plan. Before I dive into my new plan, I just want to take a moment … Continue reading “Complete 180”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,1],"tags":[3,8,7],"class_list":["post-14","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-action-plan","category-uncategorized","tag-action-plan-2","tag-cohort21","tag-google"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/laurajohnson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/laurajohnson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/laurajohnson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/laurajohnson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/laurajohnson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/laurajohnson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/laurajohnson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/laurajohnson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/laurajohnson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}