Today I finally took the plunge and purchased a domain name for my class website.  I’ve had a class website since 2007 and it’s been hosted on a variety of sites, but since I didn’t want to pluck money down to purchase a domain, I always had a url with a company’s name within it.  Normally I didn’t really care except last year when I had to move from MobileMe.  My department and I decided to move our sites to MacMate which seemed to be fine but like other sites our urls included “macmate” within it.  Truth be told, it’s just way too long of a url for students to type in…especially those who don’t know how to bookmark a site.

This summer I decided to move my website to Weebly so that it was cloud-based instead of dependent on where my iWeb domain file was.  I love it.  Weebly is easy to use  – sure it had its quirks – what site doesn’t?  But it only took me about three hours to move everything over.  I’m still toying with the idea of purchasing the PRO plan because then I can password protect certain pages which would come in handy when posting pictures of students or student work.  I’m going to table that for now.

The other thing I did this morning was purchase Evernote Premium.  =D  I’ve spent the better part of today organizing all of my files between Evernote, Dropbox, Google Drive, and my MBP.  And even though one can’t easily see the progress…believe me, I’ve done quite a bit of work.  I’m almost ready for the school year to start.  No, I haven’t done any lesson planning, but I’ve spent a good deal of time looking over the reading and writing literacy skills for history; grabbing any an all information about DBQs and the DBQ Project; and of course rebuilding my class website.  My work laptop has been fixed and it’s almost ready to go.  The next item on my list is to download Reflector so that I can be ready to roll out PD to my staff and students on how to use iPads.  This is a very exciting time for me!  I love technology, but I also love getting organized.

Now it’s time to do what summers are best for…napping and relaxing.  Two more weeks…….