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Teaching is stressful, but it’s not unprofessional to have a life.

https://www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/2011/dec/07/teachers-work-life-balance

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“I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration, I can humiliate or humour, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated, and a person is humanised or de-humanised. If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming.”

Haim Ginott, from the book Teacher and Child.

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For our Term 3 Staff Development Day I have been asked to give a session on IWB Tips and Tricks. I reviewed some surveys the Technology Committee asked the staff to complete at the end of Term 1, with my colleague Annie. Annie and I found that many staff were wanting to know how to better organise themselves with all the stuff they were finding on the internet AND how to find good resources. I mentioned to Annie the use of del.icio.us to save, organise and discover favourite websites, and how this could help staff so we decided to run a session introducing staff to del.icio.us.

While this isn’t exactly a tip or trick for using the SmartBoard, it should help staff organise and save their websites, which currently can’t be saved in their individual server user accounts for some reason. It should also enable staff to find other good resources and time efficiently.

So anyway, here’s the plan of attack:

• Show video – Social Bookmarking in Plain English
• Talk about the benefits of using Social Bookmarks
• Discuss organising bookmarks using Tags
• Brainstorm some suitable tags for use on the school’s del.icio.us account
• Step staff through how to bookmark a site
• Show staff how to find the bookmarks they’ve saved, using the Tag Cloud
• Touch briefly on how to find other people’s bookmarks and networks
• Then split into groups (K-2 & 3-6) for staff to share some websites they’ve found useful and practise bookmarking and tagging them.

These are the resources I will be using:

The Video – Social Bookmarking in Plain English, available from CommonCraft or YouTube.

A PowerPoint for staff to use, a Poster for staff to display in the classroom, and the icons I used in the PowerPoint and Poster (with thanks to FastIcon and downloaded from here).

Other Links that were handy:

• TeachingHacks.com page on Social Bookmarking
• Web2Tutorial Wiki page on Social Bookmarking
• Thirteen Tips for Effective Tagging
• The Several Habits of Wildly Successful del.icio.us Users