First meeting: personal goals

Wow, is my head ever spinning! Our guests from around the continent during our first meetings were phenomenal. Aviva Dunsinger, Josh Allen, and Dennis Grice each shared so many wonderful ideas, resources, and points of view. I'm thankful that our Team Agend Template supplied us with a place to be organized about our goals so I don't shoot off into a dozen different disconnected directions : )
And while I'm on the subject, I'm also thankful for my team members. We seem to be a great mix of personalities and ideas. Some of us are still getting to know each other BUT we seem to have a lot of common educational goals. I think the prospect of having the time to work with colleagues whom I can both admire and respect is the very best thing about our new PLC focus here at Randolph Central Schools.
Back to the goals...we've worked together over the past two days to develop a broad set of goals for the group, but we've each set our own personal goals. I'm going to work on using different types of technology to contact my colleagues over the next few weeks. In addition to email, I'll be experimenting with Skype calls using my wonderful new webcam and Snowball microphone (many thanks to the RCS powers that be), and I'm going to make an honest attempt again at using Twitter in a meaningful way. Was it Sheryl Nusbaum Beach who said that you really have to use the technology personally before you can teach it to your students?...well here goes, Sheryl! I'm also going to try to continue to post to this blog about how I make out with my personal goals.
One goal I have for my students is to teach them about VoiceThreads: what they are and how to make them. Many of my first graders are coming to me as children who are in the very beginning stages of reading and writing. Some are even non-readers and writers, SO we'll use our webcam, snowball mic, and other tools to help them express their thoughts orally through VoiceThreads as we're waiting for those reading and writing skills to develop. Mrs. Moritz has strongly encouraged us to not just use technology ourselves, but to get it into the hands of our students. I'm also going to continue to work hard to incorporate technology into my literacy and math centers. I have some really great ideas after working in my PLC group for these past two days.
Now I'm going to wrap this up but you have to know that I have many other even more lofty goals that I'm not going to list, they have been moved to the back burner for now. Please understand that I'm not promising to accomplish all my goals overnight, but with the support of my colleagues and my school district I think I stand an excellent chance of accomplishing them by the end of the year. It's going to be a wonderful adventure...want to come along?