From Relaxation to Innovation: How do you prepare for the upcoming school year over the summer?

With summer upon us, many of us will be taking some well-deserved time to relax and recharge. If you are like me though, summer is also your time to reflect on the last year and make plans for the upcoming school year. I love how creative my rested brain can be!

This summer I will be working on various professional learning opportunities for our teachers to help them prepare for the upcoming school year. A couple of those include:

Engaging Secondary Learners with iPad

In these workshops teachers will experience low-lift, high impact strategies to engage secondary students. The goal of these workshops is to give teachers quick templates and strategies they can use to increase opportunities for creativity and critical thinking in their classroom.

An example of one of the templates teachers will work with. Participants will sketch their ideas and add audio to explain. They will then spend time brainstorming ways to use this in their classroom.

Vanguard Team Kickoffs

Each summer our district ITF team hosts a kickoff event for our district Vanguard teams. These teams are teachers who have applied to be part of regular professional development focused on Apple's Five Elements of Learning and integrating iPad into their daily teaching and learning. Our kickoff events are meant to prepare teachers for the work they will do during the summer to think creatively about student learning. This year's event will take place at a local park where one activity they will do is to catch bumble bees. Teachers will collect data and use their learning to create a comic strip. These trainings allow teachers to see creative integration of iPad into learning tasks and build their comfort with the tools we want students to use.

These are a just a couple of the things I will be working on this summer that will prepare teachers for teaching and learning with iPad this fall. I will build off of these workshops and follow up with coaching cycles in the fall.

How will you prepare for (or help others prepare for) the upcoming school year over the summer?