It's August, and many of you are readying your classroom in anticipation of welcoming your new students. Welcome back. Hopefully, your summer was fun and refreshing.
This year, I have chosen to trade the excitement of the first day of school for a new adventure. After ten wonderful years teaching Third Grade at Alta Vista, I have assumed the role of Tech Integration ToSA at the District Office.
My mission is to be available to USD teachers to help you integrate technology into your common core lessons and to help you with the introduction of devices and tools, making technology seamless in your classrooms.
One of the tools I've chosen to help facilitate this is this blog. I will post a weekly tool or tip, in response to teacher questions or needs, or to tell you about something cool I've learned about.
This week, I want to tell you about a great tool for keeping in touch with parents. Remind, provides a way for you to safely send a one-way text to parents. Just use an iPad or Android app, or the web version, and send a quick text message off to parents. Parents easily sign up by texting a unique code to a phone number created for you by Remind. Here is a short screencast I made to show you how easy it is:
While you can introduce this tool anytime, Back-to-School Night might be the perfect opportunity to have them pull out their phones and join. Click here to read more about using Remind in your class.
This video, and other screencasts I've made as a result of conversations I've had with teachers, can be found on the USD Instructional Videos YouTube channel found at http://goo.gl/CbjdKF
I'm looking forward to visiting your school sites and getting to know you and how I can help you introduce digital tools into your lessons. In the meantime, feel free to contact me through my e-mail address at lynchm@unionsd,org
Thanks for all the support I have felt already. I can't wait to see what we can accomplish this year.
