Planning

I spent the day today at the Army's Training and Doctrine Command.  Since I have just been appointed a new duty of coordinating for the documentation of training, I have been educated today on what that entails. I have found that the main theme today is to PLAN... Planning is not really a thing that all of us do well.  We can plan to a certain extent, but the long range plans always seem to get put off  because of the more immediate issues that demand our attention.  The irony in this statement is that those immediate issues could have likely been avoided had we taken the time to plan properly.  The planning of training, the planning of the supporting documentation and even planning for anticipated changes and the implementation of those changes are all very important tasks that seem to get put off. They say that there are different types of people in all organizations. There are the good idea people that come up with the great ideas but no concept of execution or the details... there are those who will plan to the -nth degree but never actually start anything and then there are the finishers...  I believe that over the years I have been conditioned to be a finisher.  I don't do so well thinking out of the box and I rarely have an epiphany about how things should be done... but if you can present a half-baked idea with some value, I can tell you what it will take to execute and line up all the resources to make it a reality.  The executor.  The enforcer, if you will.   Now I have to become a planner... this should be interesting...

Student Response System

I have recently been researching a tool for use in a classroom.  It is the "clicker", otherwise known as the student response system or audience response system (ARS).  I know some of you more seasoned instructors out there may have been using these little buggers for a while now, but I am new to the idea.  I really like the concept behind the system.  It is advertised to be easily integrated into PowerPoint and seems to be relatively inexpensive to implement.  The average cost of an individual clicker is about $40 to $50 depending on the system you use and the receiver can range from $250-$500 depending on the brand you purchase.  I have done estimation and determined that for a 30 person classroom (which is about average for us) it would cost roughly $1800 per classroom.  I do not know what the budget is for a K-12 school, but for a government institution, this is not a deal-breaker.  I think this is a reasonable expense for the payoff.  These little buggers can be used for formative evaluation, feedback from students and will let you know as a teacher if your message is being received.  I know in a larger classroom, it is difficult to get an answer or interaction with every student, this is one way to get that interaction.  I am including a couple of links to different clickers.  This is not an endorsement, but just the ones with which I am most familiar!! 
TurningPoint
Qomo