hi gailene, nice to have you as a friend. hope we will all do our best to help spread our visions.bye!

I guess it's hard to describe how much time is spend on planning and teaching. I guess a good ratio would be 2:1. The time spent on planning makes the teaching part smoother. Also after each lesson is created and posted on the wiki, it can be adapted, tweeked and used again. Hopefully it will decrease planning time in the future. I also now have an on line tool called curriculumn crafter that allows me to look up grade level content expectations . This has been a huge time saver.

Grading 400 kids is very time consuming-setting up grading rubric's ahead of time helps, but the current need of parents to having 3 week progress reports means may late nights.

As a computer teacher, the other huge drain on my time is the role of tech support and technology helper to fellow teachers. I teach 6-8 classes everyday. I have a 45 minute lunch hour, a planning period on Thursday for 45 minutes and 1 hour of planning time on Friday. (The Thursday planning time is usually taken by a classroom that needs lab time-.)

So I try to use lunch hours and an additional 1 hour 1 1/2 after school to take care of tech support. (Cleaning out temp files, restoring programs, fighting virus, helping with their Excel grading programs, meeting with teachers to coordinate content for instructions) Teachers also drop by on their planning time (during my insructional time) to ask a quick question ect.As for grading, I take all the studentsprojects home on my flash drive. I usually grade between 9:00-11:00 pm each night.

I like to call it a high tech juggling game! So A typical day goes like this: Arrive at school at 7:30 a.m. Make sure I have paper, printer ink ect. Pickup work order from my mail box. Take care of as many work orders as possible before 8:00. 8:00-8:30 I have zer classes with the Junior high kids who do not have scheduled computer classes first sememster. I teach another three 45 classes and then have lunch. I usually each at my desk as teachers like to send students in to take AR tests. (Two days a week I leave the building for lunch so I can have a few kid free moments). After lunch 4 classes. 3:15-4:00 tech support for staff. Drive across town to pick up my own 10 year old from extened care after his school gets out. We gethome around 5:30. I sart dinner, laundry. from 7:00-9:00 I help my son with homework. He is off to bed at 9:00 From 9:00-11:00 I do school work. Update the wiki page. Post any completed student projects, grade, and get organized for the following day!

I know my teaching day is NOt typocal. As a computer teacher I have a unique role. I am both instructor to students, tech support, and the go to person for all thing tech.

As an aside my district still has no teching contract and we have not had a raise in 3 years, The most discouraging part of teaching right now is the fact the district wants us to pay % of our health insurance and we are told we have easy jobs since we only work 6 hours a day and have summers off! I love teaching, love my kids -but their are times that the lack of respect is disheartening!