Dropbox

After school today, I led a professional development session on Dropbox for interested staff members. Dropbox has saved my life this past year, and I wanted to share its capabilities with everyone else. I sent an email about the session last week to let people know in advance so they could make plans. When I sent the email and coordinated plans for the media center (still no wireless in my room...bummer!), I did not remember that the night before was Back to School Night. There are only so many days that all of this can be coordinated, so I stuck with the day and time. Consequently, I only had four people show up today. My principal stopped by to check on things, and he was excited because this is what he has wanted from the beginning. Most of the people who came today came to the first session for the staff; my principal wanted a small group of staff members who were excited about technology, and who wanted to utilize it with their students.

I was really excited because two of the women work collaboratively as a team and team-teach every day, so they can share files and folders through Dropbox. Most of the people who came today have also lost documents and/or everything on their computer due to a virus or some other issue. Everyone was really excited!

Earlier in the day, I had a one-on-one session with the principal's administrative assistant, and I helped her set up her Dropbox and get all of her documents together. Now, my principal and her can share anything they need. He lost everything on his computer over the summer, and it did not go well. I'm hoping that Dropbox will help them both!

Although the session was small, it went really well, and it was nice to be able to walk around and help everyone. I had a moment of panic the other night and I was not sure if I knew how to run the program on the Mac side of the computers, so I played with that yesterday to make sure I was ready. I was glad that I did because it is a bit different from the Windows side of our laptops, and one person was using Mac! Everyone who came was very appreciative.

I am offering two more sessions to my entire staff, and I may provide some incentive for the next one. I won a wireless mouse for our laptops at a technology conference over the summer. I do not need it because I LOVE my track pad, but I think I am going to give that away to someone who attends the next session.

I know that it is ambitious to complete all of my internship before the holidays, but I know that I can do it. This also does not mean that I will stop leading PD for technology or continue to be a technology leader in the building. My principal already has other ideas for continuing this, especially with our new CMS, ASPEN.

Overall, today went really well even though it was a small group. I am excited about the collaboration going on already even with just PlanbookEDU and Dropbox. Next up...Study Stack!