Ms. Raser's Blog

Over the past eight weeks I have been learning about the benefits and negatives of social media, how it can be used in the classroom, teaching students about digital citizenship and Internet safety, and so much more! With the Internet ever-evolving, I wanted to continue to explore how I can use social media professionally and in my classroom. Image Source Why Social Media? Why can social media be beneficial in a classroom setting? It is clear that social media is not going anywhere and our students are going to be on some form of it. So as teachers, it is important that we teach our students digital skills and how to be responsible digital citizens. In order to do so, we should embrace social media and incorporate it into our lessons. This  blog post shares 7 reasons why social media should be used in classrooms. Some of the reasons include engaging parents and community, sharing work, make global connections, and connect with experts. Social media is a great way to connect with f...

 Looking Back When I think back to 8 weeks ago at the start of the class, I remember being nervous, and a bit overwhelmed, with all the new technology and tools we were going to be using. In the classroom I used technology by having students log onto their Chromebooks and use one of the many apps our school has (Lexia, IXL, Epic, etc.). Personally, I am on social media to keep in touch with friends and family through Facebook and Instagram. There are accounts that I follow to get ideas for my own classroom and projects to use with my students. However, I acted as an observer rather than a participant. Image Source   Looking Ahead These past 8 weeks I have learned about, and used, many resources that I were unfamiliar to me. I also had the opportunity to dive deeper into resources (Nearpod) and tools (accessibility features on Chromebooks) that I knew about but did not use frequently. Twitter is one form of social media that I never used in the past- I just didn't see the appea...

Online Learning Design After reading an article from ISTE , one of the biggest challenges educators faced during the pandemic was moving lessons designed for in-person teaching to an online classroom.  When the 2020-2021 school year started my district was entirely remote due to COVID-19. At this time I was working as an inclusion teacher in first and fourth grade for ELA and Math. During a collaboration meeting between my fourth grade co-teacher and myself we kept asking the same question: "How can we increase student engagement?" That is when we discovered Nearpod . We initially began using Nearpod during our math lessons and immediately noticed students participating more throughout the lesson. I have not used Nearpod since we were teaching fully remote. As I have been thinking about ways to incorporate more technology into my small groups I wanted to take time to learn more about how it can benefit myself as well as my students. When we incorporated Nearpod into our daily...

Frameworks in Technology Image Source What is TPACK? TPACK is an integration framework that identifies the knowledge needed to effectively teach using technology. In the TPACK framework there are three areas educators need to combine in order to successfully incorporate edtech into their classrooms- technology, pedagogy, and content. The point of TPACK is to "understand how to use technology to teach concepts in a way that enhances student learning experiences" (PowerSchool).  Technological Knowledge:  How technology is used Pedagogical Knowledge: How they teach Content Knowledge:  What the teacher knows  An Introduction to the TPACK Model While the goal is to fall in the overlap of the three knowledge areas, often teachers (myself included) find themselves between two knowledge areas (Technology/Pedagogy, Content/Pedagogy). Where you place yourself may change based on the subject area you teach.  TPACK in the Classroom As a special education teacher I...