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Another must see Mastery Connect is both an online standards tracking tool (parts of it are free) and a free iPhone/iPod/iPad app. Because the app is truly free, I'll start with it. The Mastery Connect app is a handy way to keep the Common Core standards accessible while you teach. The app sorts the common core standards by grade level, subject and strand. This is REALLY nice for quickly locating and referencing standards. Mastery Connect the website is the real gem. The site is brilliantly designed, easy to navigate, aesthetically pleasing and best of all, it works the way you think it should. With the Mastery Connect Master Tracker, teachers can assess core standards, monitor student performance and report student progress to parents and administrators. Master Tracker makes formative assessment that is standards based manageable to keep track of. Rearrange standards in the Master Tracker based on the order that you teach them in. View only the standards you are currently assessing, and view the entire standard as a pop-up. Within Mastery Connect, teachers can create and share common assessments. Similar in feel to other social networks, Mastery Connect lets you connect with other educators to share assessments, interact and offer each other support. It is easy to expand your PLN into the space, just find teachers with similar interests and goals and start sharing! And now for my VERY favorite part- bubble sheet scoring. Mastery Connect uses GradeCam technology to make assessment about as quick as it could be. Just hold up bubble sheets to your webcam or a document cam and it is instantly scored and entered into the Master Tracker associated with the student it belongs to and the standard it is addressing. Seriously cool. I am not a big fan of multiple choice testing (mostly because I think it is a lazy way to find out what a student knows and doesn't give a true picture of what a student knows or can do) but I think I have figured out ho

Activity TV could be a fantastic resource for people who provide after-school care to elementary school students and are looking for hands-on learning experiences to share with their students. Activity TV also has some activities, such as are found in the science section, that could be used during the school day.

How to integrate Pegby into the classroom: Pegby is one of those tools that I get totally geeked out about. I love the 3×5 note card look, the columns, the tagging, the associated calendar dates. A recipe for edu-love I tell ya! Pegby is a great tool for organizing your teacher self this year. Add ideas for the school year, tasks, lesson plans, to-do items, etc. to your board as cards. Create columns that make sense to you and organize to your heart's content! Want one better? Share your board with colleagues so that you are all on the same page and can share lessons/resources/task responsibilities. Older students can keep their school year organized by adding assignments, tasks, uploading work, taking/keeping notes and sharing their board with Pegby. As students work on and complete tasks, they can move items from one column to the next. Those unit tests won't be a problem because they can tag pertinent information and easily study and review tagged information. Pegby would also be a great tool for organizing research projects (even collaborative research projects). Students can decide how they want to organize their research and notes, tag information and attach documents. All of the research is in one place and tagged for easy reference when it comes time to compile the research. Does your school use standards to keep track of learning? Why not create columns of Standards headings, and associate each standard with a note card? Students can upload any files or work associated with the standard. OR instead of making each column a standard heading, columns can be associated with mastery level of the standard. As a student moves through levels of mastery, they can move that standard card from one column to the next making stacks out of the standard subject. Students can keep track of their own learning, share their "Standards" board with teachers and parents. Is your class collaborating with other classrooms? Create a collaboratio

A comparison of Skydrive and iCloud side by side. There's Google apps, Skydrive, and iCloud as the big three of online cloud-based word processing and since we do so much writing in schools, it is likely that your school would select one of the three. If you haven't selected any, then you have a big problem unless you've got a masterful way of syncing locally. This is how we work in the 21st century and it is time to get with the program. Microsoft gives all SkyDrive users 25GB of free storage space. That's a whole lot of bang for absolutely no bucks.

This is the ideal place for teachers and students to share videos online. Create your own channel for your school or share videos with other students and educators. Instructions on how to load, create, and compress videos as well as how to create video contests and TV shows for your school. It's all here in SchoolTube.

Pinterest is a great way to organize yourself as a teacher. Gather up all those ideas you see online and then share them with other teachers (who may or may not be Pinterest users…it really doesn't matter). Because you can share Pinterest boards with non-Pinterest users, this is a great way to share things with students. The resource could be anything- pictures, a website, a video. Create a board for every unit that you do and share those boards with students so that they can continue exploring and learning. Students can use Pinterest too, invite young students to help build boards in a class Pinterest account. Create a board for every letter of the alphabet and let students add pictures that they come across to the letter board that it matches. Pinterest has a bookmark tool that you can put in your bookmark bar to make this as easy as one click! Students can put their first name in the description so you (and other students) can keep track of who found what. Like a year-long web scavenger hunt! Older students can create their own Pinterest boards. Pinterest would be a great place for them to collect images that they feel say something about them-an identity board. These boards can be shared with others and added to all year. Not only will you get to know your students better, but other students will find connections they didn't know they had. Pinterest is a nice visual way for students to share their web findings. Pinterest even lets students decide if they want to be the only contributor to their board or if they want to open it up for collaboration so others can add their findings to the board. Way cool. I have two Pinterest boards that may be of interest to you, one is Classroom Inspiration where I am keeping ideas of things I want to do with students or for our classroom. The other is School Design where I am collecting inspirational designs that I want to see in our school when we build our own building.

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You cannot wait until you "feel like it" to get ready for next school year, here are some things you can do now.