Staying with this year’s personal device trend, part two of our app series is all about apps for administrators. Here’s our list of the top ten app picks for administrators:

This certainly is an exciting time with the start of a new school year! It’s another opportunity to build relationships with students and truly make a difference in their world in ways we can’t even fully imagine. As an educator for 22 years, I have always loved the beginning of school—especially when I have the opportunity to have a fresh start. It’s a lot of work to get the ship ready to sail for the voyage ahead, but I truly enjoy it. Whether it involves creating the perfect lesson plans for an exciting new project, making curriculum tweaks to provide the latest great resources, or finding new ways to integrate teaching tools to make learning more interactive and fun, I find this hard work really satisfying.

As we look at our classrooms to arrange them for the start of the year, we should ask ourselves this reflective question: “What type of classroom do I want to create?” Or even better, “What type of learning environment do I want my students to experience?”

There are different answers to these questions, and multiple answers are correct. As a teacher, you must first teach from the heart—from your own heart, and not someone else’s opinion of what teaching should be. The environment that is created should not be gathered from Pinterest, but should sprout from your own philosophies about teaching and effective learning.

Whether you're a building principal, department head, or member of a grade-level team, there's a good chance you'll be working with new teachers as you start the school year. Being strategic and systemic as you meet with the teachers can be an important first step to starting the school year off right.

Using personal devices in the classroom continues to be one of this year’s biggest EdTech trends. Whether you have a smartphone, tablet, or laptop, apps are the best way to take advantage of everything your device has to offer. However, with over 2 million apps and counting to choose from, finding apps to download can be a daunting task. To help you decide which apps can be the most useful to you, we’ve compiled a list of our top ten app picks for teachers:

I guess you would call me a creativity junkie. I like to take science concepts and give them a little twist and tweak to fully engage my high school students. To start the process, I set the stage: Upon entering my classroom, students may walk into a simulated rainforest with vines and leaf canopies draped from the ceiling, or go into a human cell with 3D organelles hanging within the classroom’s cytoplasm. I also use a lot of props when teaching. For example, “DO NOT OPEN” envelopes are hung from the ceiling that are only opened when I request a student to do so. The envelope may contain a bell work question, quote that is relative to the topic at hand to stimulate classroom discussion, or a clue to use their cell phones to locate a QR code within the hallway or classroom that provides further instructions.

Each year, we plan a theme for our school. We use this theme throughout the year for many things around the building: bulletin boards, locker tags, the newsletter, and individual student displays in the classroom. Some teachers are “all in” with the theme and their classrooms are completely decked out, while other teachers don’t decorate as much.

Over the years, I have found—and there is research to support this—that there is a power to a common language and common behavioral expectations across a school building. If teachers, secretaries, paras, and custodians are all on the same page when it comes to expectations for behavior, the school runs more smoothly and unwanted behaviors decrease.

Lives are busy and people are busy, so we have to make sure we plan in advance if we want parents and patrons to be engaged in our schools. Parent engagement can take on many different shapes and sizes—for all the different parents we encounter, we receive varying preferences for how they like to communicate.

As summer begins to wind down and the first week of school approaches, we often find ourselves losing sleep thinking about all of the things we need to do to get organized. Before that first week approaches, here are 18 steps to organize yourself with technology: