PD Day

Student Free Days, PD days, warm up days, call them what you like they are the busiest days for me.

Every time one rolls around I start getting requests to come over to do a demo for the whole staff. While this can be a great way of spreading the word it usually ends up with me visiting 3 or 4 schools in a day and having to regretfully postpone about the same amount for another PD day.

So tomorrow I go to 3 schools to spread the word and get people excited about technology in the classroom.

I suppose for me it is a bit of a rude shock as I have had no school for two weeks as well so I'm a but rusty in front of a crowd. I'll have to pace myself tomorrow - I have a meeting with the DET executive committee on the Tuesday and I want to be in top form for them.

I have recently come across a great piece of software to help with my productivity. We are supposed to fill out time sheets for all the tasks I do in a day - the trouble is that I multi task and get interrupted so often I loose track of what I'm doing and then have to spend 1/2 an hour trying to figure out what I have been doing and logging it - Tomorrow is obvious, but days in the office are hard to track.

The program is called rescuetime from http://www.rescuetime.com/ . It polls your computer to find out what you are doing every 5 seconds - it then produces reports on what you have been doing - automatically. It only reports on the window that is active so you can have stuff running in the background. You then set productivity levels on activities - IE working on a word document is productive - opening you personal email is not. You can also set goals on what you want to concentrate on and it nags you to keep up with your goals. You can compare different days/months/weeks on how productive you have been.

I just hope the boss over east doesn't get the work version then he can spy on what I am up to....