Tool #4

I'm signed up for my Diigo account and will hopefully start to play around with that through the remainder of this week. It looks like a cool tool to use and according the website, Diigo is, "a next generation social bookmarking and annotation service where you can highlight, tag, add sticky notes and comment on any webpages. With emphasis on collaboration and the power of the community, Diigo greatly improves how people discover, remember, collaborate, and share on the Internet." 

Tool #3

So this a bit belated, but in response to tool #3 Google Forms, I can see how it would be useful in many ways. For coaching it's a nice, paerless way to organize times, voting, and get feedback on the season. In teaching, it's a great way to check in with students to get their feedback on what they know so far.  The feedback from my 6th hour on what they knew by the end of tri 2 was very positive. They all expressed confidence in the fundamental grammatical concepts and varied degress of comfort with the more complex grammatical structures. This let me know that I"m doing my job right; that the basics are being mastered and the trickier things will get better as we go. When the chaos of coaching settles down, I am going to make a concerted effort to utilize more Google Forms in my daily teaching.

Google Docs Rock!

I've chosen to use Google Docs to help make the end of the coaching season easier.  This year, with 76 skiers on the team, I was sorting through a TON of paper, trying to tally up the votes for captain and the other awards on which the kids get to vote.  Since the second tool is working in Google docs, and this mess was just BEGGING for organization, I convinced the head coach to give me the stack of papers and went wild :)  I put this year's current votes into a spreadsheet, then made a document to record the various questions we chose to ask at the captain interview, and finally created a form so that next year all voting can be done on-line, and, we can save a couple trees.  It was really easy to create all of the things I did and I hope to do a similar thing for synchro in the spring. I'm feeling much more comfortable in Google Docs now and am glad I had the opportunity to get so much practice.