Top 5: Ways to Share My Stuff!

After almost 20 years of teaching, I have learned one thing.  I have too much stuff.  Stuff in my desk drawers.  Stuff in my closet shelves.  Stuff on my hard drive.  Stuff in my head.

There must me a way to share this STUFF with others before I drown in my clutter!!!

So I have come across several ways to SHARE THE STUFF in my most appropriate Top 5 list!

First, Craiglist is my first line of defense.  I have both sold and purchased items on Craigslist and have had some very positive exchanges.  It's great to have a local resource and as long as you do your own research and contact, you can find someone who wants YOUR STUFF!  I have purchased a great repurposed coffee table, closet shelving, sturdy bookshelves and some great Halloween decorations at very reasonable prices.  It's an online tag sale where you can find exactly what you want!  I also have been able to sell off extra roofing shingles, paint, a Pinball Machine, several bikes, a couch, car replacement headlight bulbs (for a car I no longer have), Cub Scout books and uniforms, and computer manuals I no longer need but a college student wanted them for $2 each!  It's all cash transactions, but someone's trash is someone else's treasure.

Secondly, Ebay has been my second line of defense.  This is for specialized items, that may not be for the general public.  I have posted several subject specific books, teaching manuals from my personal collection, DVDs and VHS tapes (yes, people still want VHS - especially old Kid Cartoons!) and Fisher Price toys and clothes after my kids had outgrown them but they still had lots of life left.  I also have been able to find specific items, either antiqued or collectible, for both personal and gift-giving.  It can be quite addictive.  But if you are willing to investigate shipping methods and costs, it can be quite lucrative.  I have gotten burned, however.  Mostly due to my own poor calculations.  The worst one was an antique movie projector I had gotten for free, that I sold for a reasonable price, but didn't specify additional charge for shipping overseas.  My customer, in SPAIN, was the recipient of a great item, with me having to eat the additional cost to ship to him.  Lesson learned.

Next, is TeachersPayTeachers.  This is a relatively new find for me, but something that I am excited about the ability to share my KNOWLEDGE and PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT with my colleagues.  This is something I've done within my own school and district before, but not on a larger basis.  I haven't even done a presentation at a Regional or National Conference, but feel like I have 'been around the block' enough that I should be able to!  Maybe this is the stepping stone I need.  TeachersPayTeachers is a marketplace where individuals can post their work electronically for purchase by others.  This is a HUGE resource for me - a simple search on the site for Interactive Notebooks got me TONS of resources and allowed me to take the leap that I had wanted to for so long (can you tell I'm psyched!).   I have my own store now, with a few items uploaded awaiting other eager beavers to find them and give them a try.  The toughest thing for me with this now is getting the packets/worksheets/assessments that I've made over the years into a streamlined, uniform format that will represent me.  And have a key for everything.  I think that's my downfall - I ALWAYS recreated my answer key every time I gave a worksheet.  That way, I had to think about the questions from my student's perspective.  However, I don't seem to have answer keys for anything!  Might have to search for more... Check out my store HERE!  I think the challenge is going to be throwing the paper copy of something away once I get it digitized...



An off-shoot of this is Pinterest, but not so much as an income possiblity, but from a sharing-of-ideas way to share my stuff.  Though this is VERY EASY to get sucked into and not have much to show for... but I do get a lot of cool thinks pinned for later (when I have time...ha ha).  I've pulled out my past craft, scout, and school pictures and posted a few.  It's a great way to share ideas without having to have all the directions, materials, or procedure (unless you want to).  Although I don't know how much clutter I really am getting rid of with this one, it sure is FUN!

And to round out the top 5, I've jammed the rest into the STAND-BY category.  I still have the old stand-bys of a tag sale (or yard sale, barn sale, garage sale, flea market or whatever you call it) and our Town Dump has a 'Swap Shop' where you can bring something and swap it out for something else rather than throwing it away (I've gotten LOTS of dishware and garden pots here, my kids used to like looking for toys).  Goodwill and Salvation Army also are helpful for clothing and other linens that still have lots of wear in them.  Our local Boy Scout Troop just had an Electronics Recycling Fundraiser where, for a small fee, residents could bring their old/broken appliances and they would haul them to the scrap metal yard.  I was able to finally clear space in my garage from a broken dishwasher, a dead air-conditioner, and an old washer and dryer that had been there for over 9 months!  Yay!  Of course, this is helpful to get stuff OUT OF THE HOUSE, which is part of the idea in the first place.  I would like to reclaim my garage, my basement, and my dining room table from the chaos that is my life.  It's a step in the right direction.

What is YOUR favorite method of sharing your goodies?

Visual Timer - my favorite clock!

One of my most favorite finds is my VISUAL TIMER that I use both at home and at school.  It has become a HUGE time management component of my eighth graders as well as the contingent I had during July in summer school.  It's sitting across from me RIGHT NOW as I type this as well!

I first saw this from Alejandra's YouTube site  http://www.youtube.com/user/HomeOrganizing and her own website.  She has some great ideas and I needed to find ways to structure my own time at home and in the classroom - to fight off those time vampires (Facebook, Email, etc) to put myself on a schedule to get things done.

My timer can be set up to sixty minutes by just sliding the plastic disk to the desired time.  Unfortunately, my students enjoy setting and resetting (especially when they're NOT supposed to!) but it since it always 'beeps' four times then stops, you don't have to stop what you're doing to turn it off. That makes it convenient to wrap up stuff and then reset it to the next option.  I like that better than other types of timers that keep going until you turn them off.  My colleagues like this one over my 'bus duty' alarm on my phone that sounds like the fire alarm.  (If I leave my phone on my desk in the morning...it continues to go off...oops!)

I also like the fact that it's NOT an overhead model.  I can prop it up on the chalkboard tray and kids in the back of the room can see it.  It also shows the time remaining in an ANALOG way... something that my kids are quite week at in this digital age (It's depressing how many fourteen-year-olds CAN'T tell time on my analog clock!!  I also still use the timer app on my phone, both this type of version and a digital version, but I'm in LOVE with this timer!  I hope to post pictures of it IN ACTION during my lab stations this year.

I bought my two from Amazon, but you can also find information about timers like these at Timetimer.com 

Enjoy! - Stefani

QR Coding! Smart phones to the rescue!

In the last several years, technology has taken a stronger hold of both our students as well as our own lives.  Our district has both an online grading system and school/teacher pages in which homework and other assignments are documented in real time.  This has been both a blessing and a hindrance to my student's (and my own) organization.

Firstly, when we were 'forced' to use the online grading book, I tried to maintain my old 'paper and pencil' system, but found it difficult to do both adequately, so I abandoned the traditional spiral gradebook.  WHAT A MISTAKE!!!  Doing everything on the provided computer system didn't allow be to color code items as I wanted, sort items as I wanted, or tab things as I wanted... and I found myself spending MORE time following through on grading and making MORE mistakes than I care to admit.

What was helpful was being able to email an entire class at once that grades were updated, or individual students with their progress report.  It also was helpful to refer parents to this program (unfortunately, most didn't access it regularly, but those who did it became a valuable resource).

Looking ahead to next fall, I found a QR code site (http://barcode.tec-it.com/) where I could create my own codes that can be scanned using an app on a smart phone or ipod that could take students and parents DIRECTLY to the page I want.  This is quite helpful for both the grading program, but also for the classroom webpage, and even in the future, on worksheets or labs for video or other support material online.  I plan on distributing both of these graphics via business cards and address labels that I had created at Vistaprint will be added to my students Interactive Notebooks and handed out at Open House and Parent Conferences.  Conveniently, I had some great discounts that I could get a TON of business cards for a very low price.

Some battles we as parents and educators will need to tackle, of course, is appropriate use of said smart devices.  Etiquette with these devices have, in my opinion, taken a nose-dive in the last 10 years to the point that my current students don't have any role models of what might be deemed as appropriate behaviors.  This sometimes is just swept under the rug as a 'NO ELECTRONICS' policy thoughout the entire school.  However, with the use of electronic readers and the large array of age-appropriate academic apps available, it seems as though we should be modeling usage rather than condemning it.  This, certainly, is a much more difficult battle, but one whose time has come.

Regardless, I'm super psyched about these QR codes and what I will be able to do with them in the future!