Greetings from Virginia!

Hi everyone!  My name is Tamara and I am an instructional technology resource teacher (ITRT) from Mechanicsville, Virginia.  I am thrilled to be a guest blogger on the site this week!  For those who are wondering, "What is an ITRT?" my main responsibilities include leading professional development sessions on technology integration for teachers in our district and at local/state conferences as well as collaborating with teachers in the classroom for additional support with implementation.  I get ideas from teachers about lessons they want to teach, then I either create or find resources to make their teaching more engaging! 

For those of you with SMART Boards, I am a SMART Certified Lesson Developer and you can find several of my lessons on the SMART Exchange for FREE! (create a free account - then search "tletter" without the quotation marks.)  I am looking forward to introducing blogging and the flipped classroom approach to my teachers next school year (If you are interested in classroom flipping, check out the wiki I made for a presentation I gave at a local conference recently - lots of good stuff here!)  I am also passionate about using Edmodo in the classroom for a safe, social media alternative which allows me to communicate with students and parents as well as post quizzes, polls, videos, documents and more!  (Click here for my Edmodo training wiki.)

But enough about school!  I'm on summer break - how about you?  How are you spending those dog days of summer?  We are entering our third week of summer break (we don't go back until the day after Labor Day), so my brain is just now shifting from "work mode" to "stay-at-home-mom" mode.  I have three children in ages ranging from 3-14 (crazy, I know!) and when I'm not working with technology in my professional realm, I'm using it for my personal joys, too! 

One thing I LOVE to do are Random Acts of Kindness.  Last year in celebration of my 40th birthday, I did 40 Random Acts of Kindness and documented all my adventures on a WordPress blog.  Once I completed 40 acts, I realized I couldn't stop - doing nice things for others made ME feel great, too!  So I'm still RAKing and blogging as opportunities present themselves.  I even made a Random Act of Kindness Card you could use in the classroom to encourage students to do RAKs, too - click here to download it for FREE!

I also love to cook for my family.  I wanted to make an online cookbook for my daughter, but the thought of having to type out all my favorite recipes made me want to cry.  So much work!  So I found a website called Snapguide (that also has an app for your mobile devices and iPads - yay!) and it allows me to make a visual how-to guide for anything I like!  Click here if you want to look through some of my recipe guides - I have over 113 posted!  (And, of course, they are all FREE!)

I'm also blogging about my family and all the fun things we do in the summer.  Last week I introduced a "Snack Shack" where my children have to "pay" to eat snacks.  Oh, what an adventure it has been already!  Click here if you want to read more!

 

Let me know your thoughts and plans for the summer, too!  Thanks again for allowing me to "jump on board" and blog a bit about my world!

Be blessed!
Tamara  :-)