New Year's Resolutions

For teachers the new year doesn't start on January 1st, it begins when summer ends and the new school year commences.
At my school most of the teachers have been coming and going for over a week already and we will be at school this week preparing our classes and lessons and sitting in meetings and learning through organized professional development activities, but the real first day is when we get to meet the children we are about to spend the next 10 months with. For me, that is September 3rd.
This year there are few things I would like to try in my classroom and will be attempting to blog about them weekly:

1. iPads - Last year a colleague received a BP A+ for Energy Grant and he bought 20 iPads for his grade 7 class to complete the project. This year we have decided to use these iPads for the grade 9 Knowledge & Employability (K&E) class. I use an iPad in my personal life and I am very excited to show students how these devices can be used to enhance their learning and to help them demonstrate their understanding. I have been downloading apps that I think will be useful for students (thank you Apps Gone Free) and have begun thinking about how I will incorporate the iPad in meaningful ways.
2. Exit Slips - One of the criticisms my student teacher received from the university facilitator was about not doing exit slips or some kind of closing activity. This has always been an area of weakness for me and this year I hope to make some significant changes. I have done some reading about exit slips as a method of formative assessment and I think that it will be something I can do with my students regularly. It will be especially helpful for the science 9 K&E class I am teaching for the first time to help me figure out student strengths, weaknesses, lesson pacing and what concepts I need to spend more/less time on. On the iPads, Socrative will be a great site/app to use for this purpose. I would also like to use more than just pen and paper for the responses though, maybe a video or voice recording, drawings, pictures, etc.
3. Interactive Student Notebooks - I hadn't heard about these until this summer. I don't have my students take a lot of notes but I could see a lot of benefits of this type of notebook. First, they are very well organized and many of my students need assistance in this area. Some of the activities students can do for the notes section of the notebook are things I have tried already (like foldables), but this just gives the students one place to put them all. Second, I love that students will have a place to express their personal connections to what we are learning. It is like a journal in that respect. This seems like it will take a lot of planning and class time so I may only try it with my grade 8 and grade 9 K&E classes. This notebook could also be used as a formative assessment tool to see how students are thinking about the scientific concepts