Not that I have ever managed a public transport system, but I imagine that co-ordinating the comings and goings of teachers and their replacement staff must be a bit like managing trains. The whole system needs to run like clockwork or else it comes to grinding halt and plunges the world into chaos. (And there have certainly been times where it has near plunged into chaos!)

I am fortunate that my school isn’t too large but I can only image what it must be like for larger schools. Below is my process for managing staff absences and replacement staff.

One of my first tasks when I became Assistant Principal was to create the timetable. Nobody ‘teaches’ you how to do a timetable or what you need to think about when you do it, so for me, it was initially a steep learning curve on top of everything else I was trying to get my head around. I hope that this post and the resources below help you if you are taking on the challenge of timetabling for the first time.

Ask anyone working in education what they never have enough of and the answer generally is always time. It frustrates me to see people working ‘harder’ but not ‘smarter’ when there are so many better and quicker ways of doing things.Text Expander is just one tool that can save you countless hours by reducing the need to type long strings of text over and over again.

There are many who spout the benefits of an effective morning routine.

In a previous post, I wrote about how I am currently tracking the activities and work that occurs each day. I started this task as I wanted to see what I was doing each day and where I was spending my time. Whilst I went into each day with a plan, I was noticing that the day rarely went to plan. I was frequently being interrupted from my work and wanted to see if there was any pattern or theme to these interruptions.

I remember once having this idea that I wanted to start the year with a totally empty classroom.

No furniture. No chairs. No desks. No displays.

Nothing.

With school set to go back in a few days in Australia, I've been busy preparing my classroom for the start of the school year.

It's also been interesting to read a few posts from others who have focused on how classroom design and layout impact on pedagogy.

My process for setting up my learning space at the start of the year begins by moving all of the furniture out or into the centre of the room and starts with cleaning: wiping away the dust that has settled over the holiday break, removing pieces of old blue tack, taking staples out from pin boards... so that I have a 'blank canvas' to begin with.

In earlier posts, I wrote about the challenges our school was facing as we continue to grow in size and deal with the issue of timetables and our response to this by moving towards a 7 day timetable. One of the issues I encounted was around the use of calendars (specifically Microsoft Outlook and the Ultranet) to schedule events and create my work program:

Thanks to the wonderful world of twitter, I was made aware of a great free online resource the other day called minutes.io  that I thought would be a great resource for student councils to be aware of.

This site allows you to generate minutes from a meeting using an online template.After entering the headings you then need to enter the details of those present. Minute.io allows for sub-headings and topics down the side and breaks these into categories of TODO, OKAY, INFO, and IDEA.

One of my (many) goals for 2011 is to keep a clean desk both at home and work this year. Whilst I'm pretty good at managing the digital stuff, it's the offline hard copy stuff that I tend to be drowning in. Anyone who has seen my desk or pigeonhole at work will attest to this statement.I started reading "PaperFlow" by MaryAnne Bennie and Brigitte Hinneberg. I was instantly taken by the beautiful photo at the beginning of the book that showcased the incredibly clean desk and the matching red, white and dark brown stationary and storage options. This image symbolised what I so wanted to achieve for myself.

Reports. Graduation. Student Council Elections. Preparing to pack to move classrooms. Yearbook. New computer purchase. Buying furniture for our new BER Building. Christmas Parties. Christmas Concert. Booklists. Grade Lists...And there's how many weeks left till holidays?

One of the great jobs I have at my school is to be the staff advisor to the Student Leadership Council. Student Leadership has always been, and still is, a passion of mine. (I could easily write a whole seperate post about how I got into it and the work I have done over many years)

This Tuesday, I had the Student Leadership Council present their action plans to our principal team for their feedback and approval. This gave them a real audience to present in front of and a purpose in getting their plans completed.

These plans have been almost a month in the making. They commenced work on them at our Training Day earlier this year and they have worked on them during our subsequent meetings