Where do you find the majority of your teaching resources?
The majority of my teaching resources come from my colleagues. We are required to complete four collaborations in a six-day cycle with our peers. It is such an important part of finding new and useful teaching resources. This morning, I had a collaboration that involved our technology coordinator. He provided us with many tools that we can use to help our readers. For example, he showed us how to place graphic organizers into Seesaw (our online portfolio we use with our students) and allow students to answer comprehension questions about stories read, along with sharing those ideas with their parents. Our tech coordinator also demonstrated using Google Slides to type phrases and have students practice reading those phrases to improve their fluency. Finally, he demonstrated Toontastic for summarizing and retelling, along with Voice Record Pro for students to record themselves reading fluently.
Who do you look to for support and research for new ideas?
I truly look at my current Wilkes University classes as a way of support and research of new ideas that are innovative to try within my classroom. I use discussions and blog posts of my peers to learn about new games and activities that have worked with their students. One virtual simulation game I learned about via a Wilkes class was Prodigy. I learned about this math simulation game last year and I am still currently using it! The students absolutely love it and it provides accurate and informative data that I can use at conferences.
Do you follow any particular blogs? If so, please share.
Currently, I do not follow any particular blogs. However, I am definitely open to suggestions so if anybody is following someone who has excellent ideas to use at the elementary level, I'd love to know!
What challenges do you face as you try to incorporate new ideas and research with your students?
Some challenges that I have faced in the past is the technology we are given for our students is not always compatible with what I'd like to complete with my students. An example I have of this is Storyboardthat. I learned about this website in my last class and played around with it a bit. I have a pretty good grasp on how it works and decided I would have my students create a storyboard for a narrative writing piece. I had my students get a laptop from the cart and probably about half of them did not even turn on. When they did turn on, they were incredibly slow and my students became frustrated. I decided that I would have the students use their iPads as we went 1:1 this year. Students accessed the website, but it crashed on them due to our iPads not supporting the site. So, once again, I decided to scrap the idea even though I thought it was extremely beneficial and downloaded Comic Maker on their iPads instead. This worked well and we created a comic instead of a storyboard about their narrative writing. This is frustrating when I find something incredibly cool to use with my students and the technology we have just does not support it.
