I just finifhed reading Teacher Man by Frank McCourt. There’s a lot in his book that holds true for me as I work with teachers. I had a conversation with a teacher recently after a class that I held. Really what I do now is help teachers with instruction, my tool just happens to be technology. Sure, I still do a lot of “click here” instruction, but I’m still trying to influence instruction and help kids learn and succeed.

It’s an interesting position to be in and a little bit of my struggle with my new role.

Anyway, if off to NCTE. Got a flight to catch.

The biggest reason I began to consider a smartphone is the crazy schedule that I’m about to undertake. I have about 200 k-12 teachers spread over three buildings to support in their use of technology. Beyond that, my kids activities take up their own calendar and I want to be able to sync all of those things into my new phone. Here’s the problem… my school calender is kept on Novell’s Groupwise and needs to be accessible by a couple of people. I don’t necessarily want to put my entire family calendar on my school server. Luckily, Novell has thought of this and created an app called pdaconnect that allows me to pull my calendar from Groupwise, but not push my personal appointments to it. Yippee!!! Now I can sync my school calendar without inserting all of my personal contacts and information.

However, my next step involved wanting to share a calendar with my wife so that we could both update a common calendar and I could still sync that to my phone. Enter Goosync… an online app that allows me to sync my phone to a Google Calendar that I can sync. Problem solved.

Now if I could only get it to sync via Bluetooth, I’d be all set.