Preparing for the Staff Development Lesson

    Since my last post, I have spent a lot of time preparing materials for the staff development lesson that I will teach this week.  I created a PowerPoint to introduce the topic of blogs and their use in education.  I also created a wiki of resources for the participants to use for more information on blogging and using blogs with students.  I developed a training evaluation form for participants to complete at the end of the session, and I made a "Ticket out the Door" prompt for them to turn in as they leave the session.  I had not thought of a sign-in sheet until today when a fellow teacher mentioned it, so I came home and prepared a form for that.  It crossed my mind to have some candy (miniature chocolates, peppermints, etc.) on hand during the training.  Even the smallest gesture seems to set a better tone for a meeting after school.  Right after school today, I went over to the middle/high school computer lab to practice using the SMARTBoard to show my PowerPoint.  I wanted to make sure that my PowerPoint would work, and it did.  I hope things go as smoothly on Thursday as they did today for the dry run.  One kink that I was able to work out during practice was finding out how to type in the colon in a URL when using the keyboard on the SMARTBoard.  It took a few tries to learn how the shift key operates. 
   After working on my staff development lesson, I went down to the middle/high school media center to put in some more hours.  I worked on the artwork for my display, and I hope to get it put up this week.  I was using the theme of football, but due to the late hour of getting it up and football season coming to a close I changed the theme to basketball which will be starting soon.  I worked on putting the non-fiction shelves in order, and I pulled some fiction books that need new spine labels.  As I was working with the fiction books, I noticed some books that looked new in terms of the cover and pages.  When I looked in the back of the book, however, sometimes there would be a stamped due date of 2005.  These books have obviously had very little use, and I wonder why. 
    I've also been working on the memo for the evaluation of the media center and some plagiarism posters to share with the teacher and students from my collaborative lesson.  I summarized the important points of our plagiarism lesson and included some examples of plagiarism.  I plan to laminate the posters and give them to the teacher to display in her room for the remainder of the year since the students will be conducting research for various writing projects. 

Hours Spent Planning the Staff Development Lesson:  2
Hours in the Atkinson County Middle/High School Media Center:  3