Closing One Chapter, To Open The Next

Well, I've had a hiatus from teaching and blogging, but I'm excited to get the ball rolling again. I've moved over to Adelaide in South Australia, and next week I start part time teaching here. I'm looking forward to learning a new curriculum, and being back in the classroom! The New Zealand teaching journey is likely to continue in the future, but for now I need to get used to people pronouncing h as 'haych', and learn the rules of Australian footy! 

Closing the first 5 years, 2 schools and country of my career encouraged me to check out which posts had the most views. Although this blog is a place for me to store my reflections and an artefact for my teaching evidence, it's also for me to share, connect and learn with others. Therefore, I do like to follow the statistics behind how many people view my posts and where they view them from. According to my view count, these are my top 10 most read blogposts to date. I'm intrigued to see what the top posts from my Australian chapter will be!

1) Engaging Students From Afar!

2) We Like to Move it, Move it!

3) A Seesaw, A Wheelbarrow and An Arm

4) Co-Teaching Celebrations

5) Lockdown Learnings

6) A Day In The Life Of A Learner

7) Assessment - More Than A Test!

8) Student Opportunities To Respond

9) Keeping Up With The Teacher Load

10) Restoring Relationships Through Restorative Conversation

Keeping Up With The Teacher Load

After losing some work because of restarting my computer, and forgetting some ideas I had for future lessons - Dorothy suggested I download Google Keep. The next morning I was listening to Carl's podcasts and he recommended for all teachers to have Google Keep. To be suggested the same application within 24 hours sold it to me!

And now I cannot imagine being without it!

Google Keep was created as a note taking service, to capture your thoughts, ideas, images, websites in one place; such as recipes you would like make, lesson ideas you want to jot down without losing the piece of paper, to do lists to cross off, links to come back to without bookmarking... The options are endless, which has been so great for me trying to juggle so many balls in the air. 

There are several features I am yet to experiment with additional features of Keep including labels, colour-coding, sharing notes and using my phone to add notes. These features will be great once I have more on my Keep, in order to organise and easily access notes of similar themes/ideas.

I have found Keep to be a useful place to jot things down for my future studies especially. I am going to be writing my dissertation next year, which is going to be a huge task to tackle. Keep has afforded me to keep an ongoing list of ideas I have as soon as they come to my head, rather than trying to remember everything next year. Similarly, if I see cool lesson plans online for topics/units I am not currently teaching, I can save them in Keep to come back to in the future, rather than try find the link again later.

If you are interested to download Google Keep - check it out on iTunes! Highly recommend.