Technology

“Lauren is progressive in her technology, both in her classroom and while coaching. … She is always looking for creative ways to keep her students active in their learning.”
–Susan Jystad, Peer Coach

“Lauren brought new ideas, sharing
differentiation strategies and the integration of technology into classroom instruction. She also looked for ways we could integrate our curriculum across subjects, resulting in greater support for students and colleagues.”
– Jeffrey Fague, Teaching Colleague

Twitter can be a great tool for communication in the classroom, including for professional development reasons. Beyond that, as a teacher I can remind students of assignments or due dates and communicate general class information to parents.

Tweets by @MsKnuttila

Students in my 8th grade English class created Public Service Announcement videos in a project-based unit for developing research skills. This project, while teaching valuable research and copyright laws, also allowed students to be creative and learn 21st century technology skills.

Additional videos for the PSA project:
Stop Bullying
Theft

I have created several different webquests to use within units in my classroom. A webquest is inquiry based activity, sending students on a journey to discover something through the web. A webquest can be an actual website with links, or a document with websites to visit. Below are examples of both.

Children in Conflict Webquest
World War II Webquest
Of Mice and Men Webquest

Students and I often used Google Drive to share and collaborate on documents. One unit required students to create an essay using Google docs, collaborate with classmates using comments, and submit to me for collaboration and assessment.

An example of teacher/student collaboration on an essay using Google Docs.

I used Prezi to make interesting presentations for students. Once I had shown them my example, students were excited to use a program beyond PowerPoint to represent things visually for presentations in the classroom. Asking students to use Prezi challenged them to take their technology skills beyond the simple use of Microsoft Office.

I used Turning Technologies audience response clickers in the classroom to gather real-time data to formatively assess students and whether they were understanding a lesson's content. Below is an example of a question embedded in a PowerPoint presentation, with graphs ready to show data. Using the data collected, I could stop and reteach clarify confusing concepts on the spot, instead of waiting until after a final assessment had been conducted.