Free Online Animated Books

Another free and useful online resource!  I found out about this via Mo Willem's Twitter oddly enough.  I will say that without the link it was hard to search for on it's own.  Barnes and Noble has this great free resource on the kid's section of it's website.  B&N has a collection of stories read by celebrities, frequently the book's author.  Each month features a new book but you can access past stories by using the scroll bar on the bottom.


Here's the link so you don't have to hunt it down!
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/storytime/index.asp




Enjoy!

Parent- Teacher Conferences Schedule Manager!

Hey teachers out there! How many of you have wished you had a personal assistant to do some of those little jobs like scheduling conferences? I'm thinking, "hello! personal assistant- sign me up!" Sorry to say, personal assistants are still not in your school's budget. However, the latest trend with P-T-C's is online scheduling. I searched a bunch of sites and found one that does not require membership and does not require the parents to sign up for anything either. It is designed to manage volunteer events and also includes a link for teacher use.

The site you want to use is called Volunteer Spot. It took no more than 10 minutes to set up two days of conferences with time slots and sign up limitations. After completing one day I was able to copy that format to the next day. Once I established my event (P-T-C's Spring 2012) I had the option of generating a link, which I did. I emailed the link to my classroom distribution list and was done. This site lets me track who has signed up and provides an option for a schedule print out. The one option it doesn't do (at least not that I have found yet) is stalk, erm, 'remind' parents to sign up for a conference.

Volunteer Spot is a great tool and I highly recommend it. Short of getting that personal assistant we are all longing for, this is the most stress free conference scheduling I have done.

Link: Volunteerspot.com

Here's to a well planned Spring conference season!