(CMS/GMS) Update for Week of 10/20/14

We want to start out this week's update by saying how excited we were to spend the day with all of you yesterday at our first unconference!  It was great to see so many teachers sharing ideas with one another. It seems that at both middle school locations, CMS and GMS, many teachers had very productive mornings...and what is really exciting, is that those conversations will continue to carry on beyond the professional development day.

If you are interested in attending or presenting at another unconference, remember that EdcampNJ is November 22nd at Linwood Middle School in North Brunswick.  For more information about it, visit this link.  There will be 500+ educators from the area to learn with that day.  (And there are usually really great door prizes, too!)

CLASSROOM VISITS
Earlier in the week, the Teacher Resource Team got to visit some of the classes at Village School to see the 5th graders using the Chromebooks. We are excited to be visiting middle school classrooms at GMS, on Monday, next week.  Thank you very much to all the teachers who volunteered to open up their classrooms - we have a packed schedule that morning!

RESOURCES
Here are a few links to resources we think you may find helpful.  You can save the items in Google to your own Drive so that you have access to future updates, and bookmark the other webpages.

In Google Drive:

• Resources Folder
• The Schedule from the unconference at GMS (contains a document from each session - check out the notes that your colleagues wrote, and add to them to keep the conversations going)
• The general Backchannel Doc for sharing ideas, resources, etc. 

From our blog:

• Chromebook Shortcuts
• Troubleshooting Tips for the Chromebooks

Please continue to reach out to us with your lesson ideas and other questions.  For the next few weeks, our weekly 1:1 trainings will occur during grade-level department meetings.  Please reach out us with the dates and times that your grade level departments can meet, if you have not already done so.

Have a great weekend!
~Allan and Melissa