have been busy

I don't think management just know how busy we are at the moment.

I spent the first two hours on Friday in a meeting looking at hour senior subjects in our department, most of this meeting was looking at what the various course offer as well as where things are going next year. With the change in standards happening it gave us an opportunity to start looking through them and deciding what to do with these subjects and students. We have also been told to cut the number of classes on offer and this has lead to even more meetings and discussions with other department and a trading of teachers. I still have to write schemes for next year as the standards have changed, as well as what I plan to teach or have been told to teach has changed as well. I am thinking of the barista competition happening again that the students could do an assessment for. Thinking about balance and harmony which are the new in words for design in the standards. But do you think I can find a document which describes these.

I have also been busy getting all of our e-asttle logins and assessments sorted out. We are about to throw 770 students through a e-asttle maths test, which we will be able to compare the results with the one carried out in the first term of school. Issues surrounding this have been the reset of every single year 9 and 10 account. Luckly we didn't have to do this, instead this was handled by the provider of the service, who has not assured me it will be written into the updated code, I don't think he liked reseting all those passwords individually.

We are also playing around with KAMAR's web portal for students, a great addition to what is already a great product. This is on the first step of the SMS-LMS interoperability that we are working on. The product that we are playing with currently is provided by KAMAR, but we are looking at implementing the parent portal from knowledgenet. Playing around we it, we were amazed at he instantness of the updates, and what it will provide students, parents and caregivers. Issues surrounding pastoral care still need to be sorted out. But parents looking at the attendance of their students live could be interesting.

The other part that this has opened up as well is the iphone app. KAMAR have produced an iphone app that means that we can get down to basics. Though at the moment we can only read what is in the system, we cannot put anything in yet. Though I wait with baited breath on when the attendance function will be written so I can get these things out to all the PE staff so attendance can be done live throughout the school.

I have already been onto KAMAR with a couple of bug/features that could be added to both of these systems. I will see what the response is on Monday.

Project 72 is going ahead quite nicely, I have most of the caches setup and ready to go, though will need a couple of days in the city just to finalise day three, the amazing race. though I did not realise how far the ferry was from north head, this may factor into one of the puzzles. Saturday was spent at the auckland domain walking around the cricket players trying to find puzzles and locations for caches to go. 8 need to be planted around the domain for this to work.

I also have reports to write. These are due on Wednesday. I have one class and the form class comments to write up. though I do not think staff realise that 1.3 errors for all the comments for all your reports is where things need to be at. I know myself that even when writing code you get more errors than that.

Where do I find time to do all the stuff that is required of me.