Welcome everyone to this year's technology experiment. I'm your mad scientist/English teacher, Kelli Stair, and I'm about to use my masters degree in technology integration as well as the extensive work I've done finding and creating practical classroom uses for free technology tools to teach some freshmen!
It's a few weeks before school starts, and I'm making it my mission to record daily (school day-ly!) the use of technology in this year of teaching. I'm starting at a new school, so there may be more of a learning curve than I anticipate with regards to things outside my tech control, such as filters and availability of student passwords, but I am confident that with the setup I'm walking into--a class set of laptops and a SmartBoard--that I'm going to be in ed-tech-topia!
The purpose of this record is to give other teachers a template for technology use in their own classrooms. This journal-style blog-book will help me break down the act of writing into daily manageable chunks. My goals are simple. First, my students will use technology meaningfully every day. Second, over the course of the year, my students will become confident and adept at using not only the tools I model for them but tools that they discover and figure out for themselves. Third, the use of technology will increase student participation, quality/rigor, and quantity of student writing as well as self-management strategies and independence in learning.
For me, my goal is simple: to create meaningful assignments for students to use technology everyday and to record faithfully in this journal. We have 180 student days and I'm adding 20 planning days into this log of technology activities. My hope is that it can serve as a roadmap for teachers to incorporate technology into their classrooms. I do not have all the answers and I anticipate not only epic wins but massively epic fails. This is reality not fan fiction. I'll have good days and bad days, the internet will on occasion seek to destroy my sanity, and sometimes the most amazing ideas will fall flat on their faces. I promise to record fails and wins, to report honestly, and to cut myself some slack since this is the first year I'm working this way. I know some days will be learning experiences--for me, not students.
After a year of writing and presenting about using technology in classrooms, I am so blessed to have an opportunity to put my ideas into practice. I'll be recording lessons and sharing them here. I'll be gathering survey data from students and sharing their products. I'll be talking to parents and other teachers about what we're doing and polish up the ideas. I'll be course correcting when things don't work as planned and scrapping ideas that don't meet my rigorous expectations. Most importantly, I'll be using this space to reflect upon all of these things, tweaking and crafting them to be the best they can be. This is going to be a busy, productive, exciting, exhausting, fulfilling year, and I'm happy to share with the world.
