Reflections in Tech

Plan. Schedule. Print. Prep. Hide clues. Set locks. Test locks. Double-check clues.  Breathe. Engage. Breakout! I won't sugarcoat this, the process of preparing for my first BreakoutEDU session took me a long time!  (I used a pre-made game, Grammar Guru, it was great by-the-way!) However, every bit of time I spent printing, cutting, re-printing, scanning, and building was WORTH IT! Cyndi Childers, a 6th grade teacher at East Burke Middle School, was looking for something to get her students engaged, and I knew Breakout was just the trick. We ran two simultaneous games in two rooms, with Cyndi facilitating one room and myself in the other.  We had groups about about 12-15 students in each room.  The group size worked, it could have been smaller, but it really wasn't bad at all.   This game has a progression of clue finding, one leading to another, so they were all somewhat forced to be working together on 1-2 clues at once, which I liked.  This helped ensure that all/mo

I still remember, clearly, answering a phone call from Melanie Honeycutt in my kindergarten classroom back in September of 2012.  I remember crying as I happily accepted a job as an Instructional Technology Facilitator under her leadership.  I was crying because I was overwhelmed with joy at the chance to take on a role that I so excited to have.  Three weeks later I was in tears again, as I had packed up the last of my personal belongings and was ready to say goodbye my classroom and my students.  Tears, streaming down, as evidence of my fear of no longer making a meaningful impact on students.  Never being about to talk about "my kids." because I gave them up. Flash forward to NCTIES 2016 and the keynote speakers Brad Waid and Drew Minock share that relationships with our students are key , and that one may never know what we as teachers could do to help a student find his or her voice.  I gladly accepted the role as an ITF to share my passion of educational technolog