My Summer To-Do List

Oh my gosh, it's now July!!! Back to school aisles and sales are popping up all over and I have NOTHING done!! So, thanks to some inspiration from some blogger/twitter friends, I decided I had better put my to-do list down on "paper". There is just something satisfying by crossing things off of a list!

You will note that my to-do list is not something that easily lends itself to crossing off items. Most of these are a work in progress that will continue through the year. The idea behind this list is to help me focus on what I need to work on, rather than the nitty-gritty details. Some (most?) of these will not get done by August 15th, but I can make headway on putting together a plan for them.

• Read. I am working on UbD, but have several others in line as well, including some on Habits of Mind. Need to do some personal reading too:)
  
• SBG. I need to figure out how to make it work for AP, which isn't as skills based as Alg2. I also need to do some minor tweaks to Alg2.
  
• WICR. I really want to work on incorporating Writing, Inquiry, Collaboration, and Reading in my math classes. I usually start off the year fairly well, but need to keep this going throughout the year.
  
• Active Learning. I did this in AP and was mostly pleased with how it worked. I need to do some revisions in AP and increase this component in Alg2. I am in the process of going through and finding labs to add to my binder of ideas.
  
• Warm-Ups. This year, I really struggled with Warmups and I really need to go back to them. In AP, I think I am going to do formative assessments using parts of AP problems. I'm not sure on Alg2 yet.
  
• Cumulative Work. This has been a goal for several years, but it often goes by the way-side due to time crunch. I want to make a consious effort to have assessments and assignments that have previous knowledge involved.
  
• Technology Integration. Supposedly we will have access to laptops in our new building, so I would like to beef up my class website to be more of a learning portal. I would like to integrate tools like Flubaroo (Thanks Fouss!), G-Docs, Wiki, etc. However, until I have full confirmation that this technology really is going to be available, this is kind of low on my priority list.
  

I'm sure there are more things to add. I've worked a bit at most of the ideas listed, but I don't have anything concrete yet, which is a bit frustrating. I have a jumble of ideas floating in my head and lots of dreams of what to do, but the nitty gritty details just haven't settled down yet. *sigh* I need July to go slower than June did :)