PORTFOLIO

Working through my Masters of Education program, I've had the opportunity to take some really great (and fun!) courses. Each time, whether for my Leadership focus or my Technology focus, I found I would start the course with hesitation or a completely different expectation than what I ended the semester with. Below you will find a few of my favorite projects from this program. I began the program six years ago with a three year break in between, so I have only included one project from that first group of courses. I love to see how much my technology abilities have changed from those first three courses when I had not taken a Technology class, to those in my last courses.

To take a look, select the items below for a brief overview, then select the link at the bottom of the description.

Formative Assessment

Some former colleagues recently mentioned they had received new iPads to use for the classroom and wondered how they could be used in the classroom. They were very excited, but were struggling to see how it all could be integrated into their lesson plans. I decided to help fill the gap by creating an infographic for English Language Arts classrooms on different forms of formative assessments, some digital tool ideas along with suggested assignments to connect them.

Minecraft has been increasingly used as an educational tool for formative assessment. I designed a small “world” in which I envision students to use as a way to assess their learning of William Shakespeare’s, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. This screencast walks you through “Athens” with my idea of how it could be used as formative assessment.

This is a multi-modal formative assessment and technology based Midsummer Night’s Dream unit plan for a 9th grade English Language Arts flipped classroom. The entire unit will last for roughly 5 - 6 weeks. The essay will be a 5 page expository essay, and the second part will be a group project building one of the scene locations from the play in MinecraftEdu.

Leadership

Leadership is one of my favorite topics! Partly because I've had such amazing opportunities to experience truly exceptional leadership and also truly poor leadership. Here is my leadership philosophy that was formed partly because of one of my amazing leaders. I use an email he sent me and break it down to show why he was such a great leader and why his leadership is part of my philosophy.

One of the roles of a leader is to mentor others and to continue to learn. As one of my first projects in my MA program, I created this Professional Development session presentation to help teachers find ways to use inclusion in their classrooms. As an example of inclusion, please note that both voice over and transcripts are available as methods of inclusion in the presentation for those with vision or hearing difficulties.

Technology Inclusion

Including technology in lessons is one of my favorite things to do! I love helping teachers find ways to include technology in their lessons. This Social Studies Unit Plan will help teachers with content literacy strategies and some technology when teaching 10th grade students about the Holocaust.

Here I used the Stanford Design Method, to help engage students in Shakespeare. In my experience teaching English Language Arts, I found that students didn’t enjoy units on Shakespeare. I wanted to see what I could do as a teacher to support this process. Using the Stanford Design Method, I worked the problem through the five stages and found a possible solution. This blog post will walk you through my entire process and results.

I've come to see the extreme benefit of using a "flipped" classroom where the "lecture" occurs at home online and the "work" is done in the class, helping the students to have more time to work with others and their teacher. This blog post shows the ease and benefits of using a Classroom Management Site (CMS) to create a formative assessment for an English Language Arts classroom.