It seems that for the past 3 years, I’ve had various jobs to do at our school. I am thankful for the opportunity to try new things and to be able to say, “This one is not for me. Yes, I could do the job, but it really is not using my gifts and passions to my best ability.” One of these jobs that I am passing on is the textbook coordinator. I am grateful for everyone’s patience last year and as this year began and we were missing some items. Last year, I wanted to set up a spreadsheet or system for tracking, but fell short of using what I created for the whole year. This week I sat with the person who will be textbook coordinator from now on. She had a lot of questions and asked how I kept track of things, sadly I admitted not as well as I should have. But what was extremely interesting was after our meeting, I had an idea. I’d like to share it and hopefully get some feed back of possible pros and cons.

Let me begin by explaining our present system for ordering. There is an online textbook order form that generates an email that goes to an email account for textbooks. That is helpful and much better than receiving many slips of paper. From the email I tried to put the information into a spreadsheet where I could also track if I had ordered something and when it arrived. That doesn’t seem complicated, but getting all the info into the spreadsheet can be time consuming. The idea that formed yesterday, was instead of the online form, use a Google form that puts the information directly into a spreadsheet. I could also add my own columns to show when and where the order is in process.

This is my first draft. I know that for a teacher it means completing multiple forms instead of one, but it doesn’t ask for any more information than was on the original form. It would also save the textbook coordinator a step and hopefully some paper. When the original online form was created we didn’t have Google forms or at least we weren’t using them with any consistency. What do you think? I’d love some feed back.

I do think it is interesting that as we step back from things, we can often get an inspiration and new and better idea of how to do things. Maybe you need to step back and think outside of the box this week.