700 Follower Celebration - Win a $25 TpT Gift Card and 70 Products from TpT Sellers

My TpT journey has been incredible and I can't believe I have over 700 followers now!  It is time for my monthly TpT gift card giveaway and time to celebrate 700 followers!  I have teamed up with an amazing group of TpT sellers to not only give the winner the gift card, but 70 products as well!

In addition to the items above, you will also win 8 items of your choice from my TpT store!



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2014-2015 Classroom Reveal and $25 TpT Gift Card Giveaway!

We started school last Monday and it really knocked me out! I am finally *almost* back to feeling human again!  In all the mad rush of back to school I almost completely forgot this month's TpT giveaway!  Luckily I remembered and you can enter below.  Thank you for not throwing stones at me for being late!

I also wanted to share my room for the year - I was trying to match the blog a bit - do you think it comes close?

This is the view from the door.  Yes those are tables - adult sized tables.  I have had them for the past three years and I have grown used to them.  Not sure that I love them completely, but they work.  The best part is that they don't have messy desks to clean out.  Everything gets cleaned off each day before they leave.  They keep their things in buckets from Really Good Stuff.  (I just realized I didn't take a picture of those, so I will update the post when I do). The students sit on both sides of the tables, and we have a large whole group meeting area for mini-lessons.

I also don't have a desk, but instead work from my kidney table.  I have two drawers underneath where I keep my supplies.  You can see them along with my mess of bags and junk.  Don't judge - it's the first week of school craziness! 

A close-up shot of the shelves behind my desks (And another bag!  I swear I was a bag lady in a past life!)

Our very well loved library - along with reading buddies!

A close up of the READ sign - I painted the pics last year and couldn't take them down.  

The Whiteboard.

Whole Brain Teaching Rules.

Student computers.  I plan on using the hula hoops for giant venn diagrams - hubby thought that would be a good place to store them.  The fabric backgrounds are brown sheets from Wal-Mart.  I think they might look black in the picture, but they are brown.

Close- up of storage containers.  The OCD in me is irked that they aren't straight and not in alphabetical order - but at least they are ready to go!

I really love this color scheme!

I am linking this post up with:

and
Blog Hoppin'

And now, to the part you are waiting for!  The giveaway!

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The Together Teacher Chapter 3 - Create an Upcoming To Do List

We are already at Chapter 3 in our Book Study of Maia Heyck-Merlin's The Together Teacher.  It is phenomenal if you are looking at ways to become more organized!

If you missed our previous chapters, you can find them here:

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Today our guest host is Laura from Luv My Kinders!

Head on over to read her take on chapter 3 and to enter to win a $20 Amazon Gift Card!

My take on chapter 3:

Do you ever feel like your to do list is scattered everywhere with scattered post-its, random lists, and stacks of papers to go through?  Yeah, me too, which is why I love that Maia has suggestions for us to corral our to-dos!

She says the first thing you need to do is create an Upcoming To-Do List which is a long-term, sorted list of all of your to-dos.  Throughout the chapter she gives various suggestions and ideas for how to create this to-do list from a list organized by month in Word to a more traditional to-do list in Excel. Once you have determined the best method for you, she gives you different ways to use your upcoming to-do list with examples for:

* Stuff we need to do eventually, but don't have the mind space to deal with now (PD book suggestions from your principal)
* Stuff we need to do that needs a longer lead time (think big projects)
* Stuff you may want to do someday but you can't assign it a month right now  (reorganizing your classroom library - as long as its not a hot mess on the floor).

Just like previous chapters, I love how she shares real world examples from other teachers at all levels.

So time to get started, slog through those post-its and get everything out of your head, and down on paper!  If you are following along with us, please link up or comment below.  If you don't have the book yet, you can order it on Amazon, or win a gift certificate to purchase it!  Enter below!

Don't forget to visit next week's host, Jenny from Owl Things First.

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The Together Teacher Chapter 2- No More Missed Deadlines & Arc System Giveaway

Today is all about Chapter 2 of our book study of The Together Teacher by Maia Heyck-Merlin.  If you missed chapter one, you can find it here.  Every Wednesday, we will be reviewing each chapter on our quest to be more organized "Together Teachers".  I also have a giveaway for you this week!  Read on to find out more!

Chapter 2

This chapter is all about making sure you don't miss any deadlines by using what Maia calls a Comprehensive Calendar.  In this chapter we learn how to determine what type of calendar to keep (you will have a chance later in the post to win MY calendar of choice), how to put the calendar together using the Ideal Week Template we created after reading chapter 1, and finally how to maintain that calendar so that it can sufficiently guide us from month to week to day!

The Multiple-Calendar Dilemma
How many of us are guilty of this one?  Having a calendar for school, a calendar for your kids' activities, a calendar for your non-school related issues, a calendar of deadlines for classes you are taking, calendars in your cell phone, calendars on your computer, calendars, calendars, everywhere?  When you have multiple calendars it is so easy to lose track of everything you have going on.  Maia says that this can lead to collisions (such as report cards being due on the same day as your Master's thesis - not that I've ever been guilty of that!).  She says that this is the result of the fact that most of us do not take the time to put all our our time commitments and deadlines into one place.

The best way to deal with this is a Comprehensive Calendar, which is a place that lays out all of your time commitments and deadlines in one easy-to access location. It can be paper or tech based. Whatever works better for you.  At minimum, it needs a monthly view where you can keep the following:

• Deadlines (one time and recurring)
• Special events
• Standard meetings (grade level collaborations, PD, etc.)
• Personal events (doctor appointments, kids' practices, birthdays, etc.  

You can take it a step further by scheduling time blocks from your ideal week into you calendar.

 Ideally, this calendar should be set up for at least academic year ahead of time in order to see what events or deadlines lay ahead on which you must make early progress.  Now is the time to put in all of those grade deadlines so that you can plan mini-sessions to work on them rather than panicking at the last minute as you stay at school until midnight the night before they are due getting them ready.

Maia gives detailed examples from real teachers' calendars to show you what this might look like using both paper and tech based methods.  She also gives pros and cons of each ones so you can choose the option that is right for you.

I personally use both.  I ALWAYS have my phone with me, so I will make notes or plan appointments using it.  But.. and this is the big but, I will ALWAYS match it up with my paper calendar as soon as I can so that I don't miss anything.

The Up-Front Investment: Creating Your Comprehensive Calendar

Setting up your calendar really is an up-front investment.  Just like putting money away for a rainy day, taking the time out of your day to plan your calendar will save you from those embarrassing moments of missing a work deadline, or disappointing your child when you miss a big game.

The Steps are:

1. Rounding up your calendars (all of them - school, sports's schedules, unit plans, pacing guides, syllabus, etc.)

2. Put in the hard deadlines (tax day, lesson plan due dates, grade due dates, etc.)

3. Add your soft deadlines (things you want to accomplish but don't have fixed dates - organizing classroom library, bulletin boards, etc.)/

4. Events

5. Meetings

6. Don't Forget Your Personal Stuff!

Once this is complete (celebrate!  Buy yourself a Starbuck's and marvel at how much more prepared you will be this year!)


Then you need to think about what this preparation is going to look like through the year!  Maia gives tips for adding to your calendar throughout the year as you:

• Process incoming emails and memos with deadlines and events
• Process regular or routine communication
• Deal with "day of" deadlines
• Deal with deadlines that require work prior to the due date (those darn grades again!).
• Deadlines that you receive via phone
• Deadlines that come up in meetings

So, now that your calendar is set up, you are good to go and no deadlines will be missed, right?  Not so fast, Maia says, once you set up your calendar, you must review it regularly (she explains how in a later chapter).

1. Get a copy of the book if you haven't already.
2. Choose a calendar ( you can win the one I use in the giveaway below)
3. Take an hour or two to plan out your comprehensive calendar for the upcoming school year. (If you are posting along with us, link up below, or just add a comment when you have finished this step to let us know you are working along with us!).

Don't forget to visit next week with our guest host - Laura from Luv My Kinders.  She will be hosting a giveaway for a $20 Amazon gift card (so you can order the book or other organizing supplies!)  

I have chosen to use the Staples Arc System for my Comprehensive Calendar.  I love it because I can completely customize it to fit all of my needs.  Using the special hole punch (which the winner will receive) I can add any paper that I need to so I don't lose it.  I keep not only my calendar, but also my lesson plans, my pacing guide, and my standards inside.  Along with this, there is a place for me to keep notes from meetings or thoughts that pop into my head.  No more lost sticky notes!







The winner of this giveaway will win a flexi-arc notebook along with the special arc punch (approx $60 value)  Good luck!

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Teachers Pay Teachers Conference July 2014 Session 2 Notes

Thank you so much for all of your positive feedback about my posts!  Honestly, I am learning even more as I process my notes to write these posts so it is a plus for me as well! If you missed my previous posts you can find them here:

                                                               Day 1: Keynote notes
                                                               Day 2: Session 1 Notes 

All of the presenters uploaded their session handouts to TpT for free.  You can find the handouts for this session here.

I wish I was able to share some great pictures with you from this session, but this was my view.  The room was packed!

I did learn a ton during this session, so I will share that with you! Ryan opened up the presentation with this really cool Mario Brothers themed app of some sort that would go off every time someone in the room made a sale.  It was really neat and I wish I could have shown it to you!  He did give us the average earnings for everyone in the room.  It was pretty amazing!

That number is $6,899 if you can't see it.

Being the "Data Ninja" Ryan gave us some helpful tips on how the search ranking works at TpT along with a few other key tidbits.

Search

Search is personalized for each buyer based on items they have looked at and purchased.  That is one of the reasons why we don't usually see ourselves in the featured seller page (we don't buy from ourselves!).

When a person searches for a certain term, the algorithm factors in the buyer's past purchases along with the sales performance of the items. Top sellers' items might come before items that haven't sold as many.  You can see the exact details in the handouts with the (scary looking to some) page with the equations.  It is under the heading How Sorting Works.  The next page shows how items that are sold more have preference in the rankings using the conversion rate which is the # of times a product is sold divided by the # of product views multiplied times 100.  The higher percentage this is, the higher you will rank in the search.

If you don't read any other handout from the conference - read this one!

29% of users search right from the TpT website itself.

How Can I Optimize My Products For Search?

Product titles should be descriptive and simple.  Save the cute names for the covers.  For example, if you title is Dunking Time (a basketball themed division game of some sort) it might not get as many hits as a product entitled Division Review Game.

Ryan pointed out Kelley's Good Morning Work products that garner top page views when searching for good morning work.  Did you know that there are over 185,000 searches for morning work?

If you want to know what buyers are searching for, look at the top bar where you search.  If you click in this box a list of suggestions comes up.  These are the top 5 searches from the day before. I just took this screen shot as I was typing this post.  I had also peeked at it Friday night (the words were the same), so I think it would be safe to check it out weekly if you wanted to know what buyers are looking for.

He suggested putting the parts that will most likely be searched for in the front of your titles.  I already fixed  my own products Kicking It Math - I changed them to have the fact fluency in front instead of the Kicking It Math.  These products are for helping students master their math facts, and that might not be obvious from the name.

He assured us that changing the name does not effect any previous links you may have had anywhere else.  What do you think of the title change?  Is it more descriptive?

Tagging

As of right now, the common core standards that you click on are not included in search.  Keep clicking on them because it is coming, but you will want to list them in the product description as well if you want them to come up in the search.

Don't over tag grade levels.  Don't put K-12 on letter recognition items.  It isn't fair to the high school sellers when your item comes up and it really isn't fair to the buyers who are looking for something else entirely.  Just use the tags that truly fit your product.

Goal Setting

Next up was Kelley Dolling from the Teacher Idea Factory. She told us a little but about her story of turning lemons into lemon-aid when she was forced to take time off her teaching job because of a surgery.  During her recovery time she turned to Teachers Pay Teachers to keep her busy and keep her mind off of what she was missing at school.

Kelley is a pro at ranking high in the search engines at TpT and in tracking her data.  In the handouts are samples of the sheets she uses to track her goals.  Kelley says that she keeps these goal sheets posted on her wall near her desk to keep her on track. She can look up at it and see if there is anything she needs to tweak to meet her goals.  She says it is also helpful to be able to see the growth from quarter to quarter and year to year.  I started keeping a similar goal sheet and I have to agree it is fun to see the growth, especially on those slow days.

Some Tips:

* Track data from many sources (sales, followers, votes, Facebook, blog followers, etc.)

* Put goals where you can SEE them.

* Make changes to products where you don't rank high or areas where you aren't ranking high

As I was commenting on blogs this morning, I noticed that Jennifer White from First Grade Blue Skies has shared some notes and handouts from her presentation.  I did not get to attend her session, so I was excited to see this and wanted to share the info with you as well! Her session was on making your products pop!

I have donated items to a few giveaways going on right now, so you will want to head over and enter to win some amazing prizes.

The first one is in honor of Searching for Teacher Balance's 1st Blogiversary.

The second is our Hot Summer Giveaway where we are giving out a ton of gift cards!  Just in time for back to school!

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