Welcome Back!

Welcome back to school and welcome to Spartan Thinking! I will use this blog to share ideas, questions, resources and information periodically throughout the year. I will always send out a link to the district to let you know when a new post has been made, although you can subscribe to the blog and be notified automatically of new posts in a number of ways.  I will also be asking some of you to guest blog here as well. If there is something that is on your mind and you think it may positively benefit our school community, feel free to drop me a line...

Opening Day- I wanted to follow-up on the opening day assembly with some resources and a few quick words of thanks...

First of all, thanks to Christy Multer for her tireless work behind the scenes. I know that it was driving Christy crazy that I didn't have my remarks in to her last week! Her attention to detail is incredible. Many people may not realize the kind of time and energy Christy puts into this Opening Day- and every initiative she gets involved with.  Her passion and love for this district is contagious. Thanks Christy!

Thanks to Kate Gurley and the entire Opening Day Committee as well... Tim, Ellen, and Nick Sinnenberg made organizing the music a family affair! Thanks to the kids and faculty who helped out with the song.  Thanks also to John Capano, Ann-Marie Mueller, and Chris Lombardi for organizing the technology and audio to go off without a hitch. Thanks to Chris Abdoo for making the trip to recognize our long-tenured staff. Finally thanks to Rick all of the introductions and for way that he has provided a solid and encouraging consistency throughout this whole transition period.

Here are a few resources from this morning:


Poll Everywhere-  www.polleverywhere.com- the polling site. You can embed the polls into powerpoint, websites, or Prezis. Accounts are free for polls of up to 40 respondents at a time.

Prezi- The Zooming Presentation Editor- www.prezi.com-this site just keeps getting better all the time... its cloud based, so it archives all of your presentations online. It takes a little investment of time to watch the trainign videos and stuff, but i could see teachers developing some really cool interactive lessons with this. And they are all available online to your students outside of class. They have an educator plan that you apply for and you will get a lot of extras. 

Spark Institute- http://www.search-institute.org/sparks - This was an interesting site I came across the other day and mentioned today. It talks specifically about helping kids (and adults) find their spark... their passion... the interest, joy, or activity that really inspires and excites you. Might be worth a look.




Here are the two videos i mentioned that should really inspire us to STRIVE:

Finally.. i thought you might enjoy seeing a Word Cloud of where we all vacationed this summer. This was generated in www.wordle.net using the answers you gave to question #1.  (The larger the word, the more it was used in the answers given.)

I hope you have a great start to the 2012-12 School Year!