#SOLSC15 Day 18

Thank you to the Two Writing Teachers and the Slice of Life writing community for providing this opportunity to share our "slices." Thanks to Stacey, Anna, Beth, Tara, Dana and Betsy for creating a place for us to share our work. Check out the other slices and join in the fun!

 My Love/Hate Relationship with Technology

On Monday, a brilliant idea popped into my head on the way back from Kindergarten. I don't even realize it, but I'm always thinking of ideas to support our teachers even when I think I'm focused on other things. 

Each day I teach for an hour in our Kindergarten intervention program. As I walked down the hallway on Monday to return to my classroom/office, it came to me.

This year our district adopted a phonological assessment at K and 1 to be administered in the Fall, Winter, and Spring. It is an area of our instruction that we've been working really hard at improving. We've spent some time professionally developing our staff, we've worked in a study group together, and we continue to meet as grade levels to work on Action Plans using data from our assessments. After our Winter scores came out, we were happy with the growth, but had not stacked up to well when compared to the other four elementary schools. Disheartening to say the least, but we didn't give up. Since then, we've kicked things up a notch and are tightening up our instruction. 

That's when the Movenote idea popped into my head. As literacy coach, I could use Movenote to send a demo lesson each week to our K and 1 teachers. Our district is in the process of piloting Fundations. Up until now, we've been using a combination of Words Their Way, F&P, Systematic Phonics and Making Words lessons. From now until the end of the year, we committed as a group to using the F&P Phonics Lessons. It is hard for some teachers to get into the mindset that this resource doesn't have to be so time intensive after all. We can work smarter, not harder. Before becoming literacy coach, I spent the last four years using it in my classroom and absolutely loved it. I've used the 1st and 2nd grade one and now this year I've gotten a chance to use the K one. Again, I love this resource.

So, in an effort to make things a little easier on the teachers, I decided I'd try to make a Movenote showing a sample lesson that supports one of our subsets on the phonological assessment. I set up an account and waited for an account verification email. Ten minutes later it arrived. I was a bit annoyed it was instantaneously in my inbox, but I carried on. (We are a society of instant rewards, aren't we? Yikes). Then, I videoed myself highlighting the lesson features and when I went to send it, it was gone. Frustrated I called upon my principal and Library Media Specialist to help. We couldn't figure it out over the phone so after misplacing my F&P book, I spent 20 minutes trying to regroup and look for my book.  I decided I'd have to video it all over. This time I couldn't get it to share or upload. After walking away, driving home, and trying it again I was able to make it happen. Finally I sent it out.  Phew!

Hoping this will be a helpful way to save our teachers time, model how to use a new resource, and support our efforts with improving our phonological instruction with the help of technology.

I love to take advantage of technology, but sometimes it requires a lot of patience. What I could of had done in 10 minutes on my iPhone video took me an hour to sort out.