February 26, 2015

This afternoon while kindergarten was in the lab working on Compass Learning, I was walking past one of them when this very animated girl came on his screen. She always makes big gestures and must enunciate very well because I can easily read her lips and tell what she's saying. I've never actually heard her but she looks annoying. And apparently she is because when she came up on screen the boy put is head on his hand and in a very exasperated tone said “Not Bethany.” It was hilarious.

Coming back to the present for a second, I'm going to jinx myself saying this, but it is late so this will be a short entry.

I helped out with literacy centers in kindergarten this morning and had a yearbook club meeting before lunch. There aren't any pictures loaded up on the website yet for the kids to play with but we did have them log into the site and play around with the design features.

Throughout most of the day I worked on transferring the information on testing schedules we came up with yesterday into my spreadsheets and calendars and then printing those off. Near the end of the day we learned they were moving the MAP window up a week, which is nice, but it is still in the middle of State Assessments. That had me double-check the MAP window and I saw that it actually only goes through the first week of May. Not good at all. I was assuming it went later than the State Assessments, and I think everyone else did to. The way we made the schedule would only leave that last full week, which has an early release day in it, for uninterrupted MAP testing. That isn't nearly enough time. The State Assessment window goes through the second week of May so we will probably try to move some of the assessments back, into May, and try to start MAP testing in April when the window opens. This is all ridiculous. Starting next month we're going to have two months of wall-to-wall testing. Good thing the point of school is to test kids on what they're learning, and not teaching them new things so they can actually learn. We're nailing it.

Tonight I got completely distracted by the Neebs livestream and it took me the entire night to write my discussion post about metadata. I didn't even attempt to write responses because it took all my distracted focus just to write my post. I am happy with it though. I had a bit of insight at the very end that came to me right as I was about to call it good.

And now it is bedtime. I'm looking forward to sleeping in on Saturday. And Sunday. And maybe Monday because we all have our fingers crossed for a snow day.