As the school bells ring out to end my first 3 weeks of teaching as a secondary school teacher within my local community High School, I feel the sense of pleasure mixed with disorganisation.
There are so many papers on my desk, I have run out of category names for them all. I have fished out so many resources, ideas for resources and gifted resources for lessons. Trying to organise all the theoretical and experiential advice flowing around me and within me is oh so daunting. How do I sieve them into my lessons, I need a framework to store them all.
How do I keep good secure notes of my students and classes. Where do I put my lesson plans to keep them fluid and growing. How do I get myself organised.
I jumped online looking for some advise and tools to help ease some of these concerns. Stumbled onto
www.learnboost.com, I jumped in and began poking around. The faculty had also organised an in-house made diary book. Three days later the faculty received an order of teacher diaries from
ITC publications. Being a "computer nerd" I had been ordered an online diary from ITC publications called the ecompanion,
www.ecompanion.com.au.
The ecompanion offers an online date driven Diary/Timetable/Lesson repository for teachers. I was able to set up my 6 classes and subjects, my timetable and produced an active diary for 2012.
The Lesson repository lacks the ability to upload and store resource files as of today. Though I have been assured that system development on ecompanion is focused on providing this functionality.
"At the moment you are only able to paste material from "word". The reason for this is that, because the ecompanion is hosted on an external server we have to be careful with the file sizes of some documents. As you can imagine 1000 teachers create a lot of lesson plans and if each one has an image or pdf attached this can make for enormous file sizes. However; we do recognise that this feature (the uploading of images and pdf's) is an important component of the lesson planning requirements of teachers and so we are currently working on a system of changes to the ecompanion whereby we can facilitate the uploading of images, pdf's and the like, while at the same time limiting the file size by putting an uploadlimit."
Lesson creation is assisted through a webpage template which prompts the user to fill in the curriculum standards, lesson objectives, literacy strategies, differentiation accommodations, homework, assessment, reflection section, and a side tool for inserting many of Blooms taxonomy verbs and partial sentences.
The lessons can be shared with other ITC ecompanion users, though I have not had the opportunity to. I described and demonstrated this tool to other teachers in my faculties at school, and many are interested. I wonder how useful it can be at encouraging teachers to develop and store lessons for reuse/redevelopment and collaboration, and whether the collaborative tools built into the software can true facilitate collaborative functionality.
My iRiver IHP-140 (40 Gig) is coming to its final days. It lasts about 1 hour on battery now oh how I will miss it. What a fine piece of engineering, it has been with me for a good 7 years now. Still it offers things that new devices don't give you. 
