Opening Day Meeting With New Teachers

Source: jillshalvis.com via Patrick on Pinterest

Thanks again to all of the new teachers who took part in today's new teacher orientation. We are so excited that you chose BPS and we look forward to supporting you as you work with our students. We hope that you will find that Burlington is a place where you can feel comfortable continuing to take risks and grow as a learner. Because if our teachers do not feel this way, we will also rob our students of the opportunity to reach their full potential.

Get Connected

We encourage you to take advantage of the resources you have available to connect and collaborate with educators both within and outside of our school district. The United States Department of Education as designated August as Connected Educator Month and there are a number of great resources available at the Connected Educator website.

There are a few ways you can get started. The easiest way is to start following this blog. Please enter your e-mail address in the box on the righthand side of the blog. This will ensure that you get a daily e-mail with any new blog posts from the BPS New Teacher Blog. that you can get started.  You can also use your google account to start following blogs through Google Reader which you can access under the more tab at the top of the page when you log into your Google account. We'll talk more about this soon!

Finally, I encourage you to join Twitter and start connecting and sharing with other educators all over the world. Here is a link to a document to help you get started that was originally created by George Couros (a friend who is an administrator in Alberta, Canada).  Please be sure to pay special attention to the following hashtags #bpschat (Burlington Public Schools Chat), #ntchat (new teacher chat), and #1st5days (a conversation for getting your year off to a great start).

 As I mentioned I will also lead a session on getting started with Twitter during next week's opening Professional Development Conference.  You can access the entire conference schedule at the conference website.

Employee Benefits

Here is the employee benefits presentation that was reviewed by our Human Resources Director Joanne Faust.  If you have follow-up questions you can e-mail Joanne at faust@bpsk12.org and her extension is 1774.



Teachers' Union 

Thanks to BEA President Diana Marcus for taking the time to meet with new teachers this morning. You can contact Diana via her school e-mail marcus@bpsk12.org.

Below is a copy of the Teacher Orientation Handbook



Finally, please check below for our list of dates for module training for our new teachers who have not completed an induction program in another MA district.



Please don't hesitate to contact me at extension 1804 or my secretary Rosemary DeSousa at extension 1989.   You can also contact me on Twitter @PatrickMLarkin or call me on my Google Voice number at (559) 245-2757.