Technology in Education: Notes from the Closet

  Coonley Hour of Code Lesson Plan 2016 by Nicole M Zumpano on Scribd

In November 2016 my colleague Sam Carpenter and I presented at the Illinois Education Technology Conference on Active Learning and Tweeting in an elementary school.  Below is our presentation.

It's an anniversary, of sorts- my 100th blog post!  I thought it would be a good time to reflect on this blog and my purpose for it.  I was a classroom teacher for 15 years.  I absolutely loved it.  But after technology crept into education, I came to love that as well.  I was an early adopter and found that I enjoyed having my colleagues come into my classroom and ask me to show them how I was using technology with my students.  When the opportunity became available to become a coach, I jumped at the chance.  It hasn't always been easy, and hasn't always been as rewarding as I would have liked. But in year nine of this next chapter of my career I still hope that I am impacting students and education like I did when I was a classroom teacher. I began this blog in 2012 when I was asked two weeks before the school year to be a teaching coach. I would be a part time computer lab teacher and coach at the same time.  Receiving a new teaching assignment at such a late date allo

This fall several of our teachers participated in The Global Read Aloud , working with classrooms across the United States to read the same books and share our thoughts and ideas about them.  One such partnership was with Ms. Cain, a librarian in North Dakota who is working with one of our kindergarten teachers, Ms. Thomsen .  Our collaboration takes places mainly through Seesaw where we share pictures and thoughts on the books we have read during this project. Ms. Cain suggested doing a BreakoutEDU activity that was created specifically around our Global Read Aloud author study. BreakoutEDU with kindergarten?!  I had only done this with adults (and Ms. Thomsen had never even heard about it)!  Luckily, I had recently purchased a kit which made this the perfect opportunity to dive right in with students. While the instructions for We Are Readers  were well done and thorough I still modified some to make the activity run smoother for our little learners.  Following are the accommod