It pours.  It totally pours.  I am a planner.  Anyone who knows me, knows that I plan.  But when working with technology, plans can easily go out the window or worse awry.  For example, I was pushing for our school to get access to Google Apps for Ed from our district back in April.  My principal got involved in June and continued the fight all summer.  I waited to get the green light before developing anything with GAFE.

Well, we finally got word that our school is the designated pilot school at the intermediate level for GAFE.  We received that tidbit a little over a week ago.  School has been in session for over two weeks.  If I had it MY way, I would have had the parent letters set up, translated, and ready to be sent out the first day of school.  But now I’m having to scramble to get the letter ready.  Luckily for me, I know colleagues in other districts who have already paved the way…so I’m literally following their trail of bread crumbs.

Normally, this task wouldn’t be a big deal…except that I’m also working on getting the iPads ready for deployment.  I’m putting together a brief overview of how to take care of our iPads to show to students (and teachers).  And I’m also working on revising lessons so that students can work on the iPad using collaborative tools such as GAFE.

This past week our CRA finally finished uploading one iPad with the suggested apps.  He gave it to me on Wednesday to try out with my classes.  No problem, right?  Except…the school wifi isn’t strong enough to run Reflector which is what I was going to use with the iPad.  I always do a trial run at home to make sure that things work, but when I come to work, it’s always a crap shoot.  Needless to say, I didn’t “try” out the new iPad this week.

Working at a public school, I never know if our wifi will be able to handle the traffic; I don’t know if our laptops have the latest OS; I don’t know when our district is going to run our security program which coincidentally kicks us off of the Internet with no warning.  Talk about working on the fly.  Good thing that my students and I are pretty flexible.  But this juggling act is getting a bit tiring and it’s not even the end of September.

But here’s the BEST part…our school population is larger than projected.  So we’re getting two new teachers.  On Monday.  And I have to write lesson plans for the world history classes since we’re starting with subs until we can get a permanent teacher.    I suppose I can get everything done if I don’t sleep.  Sleep is over-rated, right?