iPads in the classroom

After having to sit through 2 full days of professional development back to back, I've come to the conclusion, that maybe not ALL professional development and meetings are bad.  For once, our administrators actually listened to us!  Instead of having district-wide PD, all of our PD was on site and just with our school, for one day.  The information was definitely more relevant to us than it normally is.  Today, we got to listen to a very animated speaker about how to keep us out of the court room or due process.  He was really good and it was oh so very relevant.  Much better than spending 4 hours straight of going over the TLE evaluation stuff, like we did last year.

In one of our meetings, we found out that ALL of our kids would be receiving iPads sometime between September and Christmas.  I certainly hope that this will be awesome.  HOWEVER, they don't even have the wireless figured out at our school yet, so I don't know how we're going to be able to get a whole lot done with iPads without an internet connection.  Granted, I'm not even sure how I'm going to use the iPads in the classroom at this point.  I'd like to try switching my interactive notebooks over to online portfolios, but that's definitely not happening this year.  I'm thinking of having them do research over different topics on their iPads.  This will definitely be an interesting year to say the least.

Here in OKC, we have this awesome teacher store that is run by Feed the Children.  We get to go once a month and fill two bags with different supplies.  The best part is that it's all free!  We get two bags, a red one for supplies and a blue bag for books.  Today, I learned that you can get a box and fill it with class sets of books.  After all the shopping that my neighbor and I did, this is what we walked out with:

That is 3 boxes of books, 2 bags of books, and 2 bags of supplies!  I know have 3 more class sets of book, including the Wizard of Oz!  I can't wait until I can start reading these books with my kiddos.  This is looking like it's going to be a great year.