It is official because I received the yearly “welcome back to school!” letter from my district’s central office. School will start soon!

I have a lot on my mind as I plan on making a number of changes this year, many of which I’d like to blog about to help get the community feedback. Among them:

1.) I am teaching one less prep this year (just three different classes: AP European History for two periods, World Cultures for two periods and Newspaper Workshop for one period) and I couldn’t be more thrilled with my schedule. I am a little sad that my non-AP European history elective is not offered next year, but it makes my day so much more livable!
2.) Our school is converting to PowerSchool from SASI. I was okay with SASI, but I hear that PowerSchool is accessible from anywhere via the web. For me, that means real-time upgrades as I grade papers at Starbucks! Woo hoo!
3.) I am going to go paperless in my World Cultures class and NEAR paperless in my AP European History class. I will be blogging about those initiatives in more detail here as my planning progresses, but, I am thrilled at the adventure of this project. For my World Cultures courses, this is only possible because, after years of trying, my social studies course will be assigned to a computer lab so we can use the computers as much as we want.
4.) Although I am unsure of the date, we have been promised open wireless in my building next year, which means that I can FINALLY put my laptop on the network, along with my students. Our district has a strict “no personal machines on the network” rule, which I used to ignore in my younger days. They now enforce that with a MAC address check but in exchange for that strict rule, they are planning to have internet-only access available through our wireless network. That means my Mac can finally join me in class (sorry Blackberry tether) as well as my students and their laptops. Woo hoo!

More as the year progresses. 15 days! Yay!