Today begins my first full week of summer vacation. I’m working for a few hours at my part-time job, which is tutoring at Huntington Learning Centers, but mostly my week will be free. I love time off, but for me it always takes a little time to transition into summer. Teaching is such intense work, that during the school year, even when I’m not at school I always have a long list of things I “should” be working on for school. Then you hit that time when you really don’t have to go to work for a couple months. I always find myself double checking the calendar, just to be sure that I didn’t read it wrong.

So here I am, 9:40 in the morning, sitting sipping my tea, still in my nightgown, and contemplating how I want to spend my time this summer. For me, that means lots of projects for school, that I really don’t have time for during the school year. I also have a long list of household projects that I never get to when I’m working two jobs, and of course there is yard work. It’s also a great time to learn a few new things, and read!

One of my big tech projects this summer is to build a new classroom website. For the past two years my class website has been with Iowa Pages at Ms. Day’s 4th Grade. I pay a fee for this website, and I am very limited in the space I am allowed before I have to pay for additional space. To reduce the expense last year, I removed most of the photos, and I love photos, so I’m looking for a different solution. I recently learned about Weebly from my PLN. I plan to give that a try.

It’s also time to weed out my Delicious account, and maybe finally learn how to use Diigo. I have over 500 bookmarks in Delicious, many of which I bookmarked so I could come back later to read. As I read and weed, I will Tweet out the good ones. I did this last summer too, and it was a good review for me as to what was in there and some great resources to share.

This summer I also want to play with Voki and Voicethreads, and figure out how those work. I have seen projects that others have used with students, and these are things I want to try next school year.

I’m really glad that Twitter chats like #4thchat are still going on. I’m sure I’ll continue to learn a lot from that this summer, and get more ideas for the fall, and then there is an Iowa TweetUp to look forward to on July 30th. If you’re in or near Iowa, you can learn more about that here.

Now I guess it’s time to actually get off the couch and get started, and I will . . . . .   right after another cup of tea. So what are you doing this summer?