Hello Everyone! My name is Nicole Winston. I have an 11 month old daughter named Lola, who is the world to me. I cannot believe she is almost a year old. Becoming a mom this year has been the most amazing experience and blessing. It has been amazing to spend my first summer with her and will definitely be hard to go back full time this week. Some of my hobbies included: fitness, health food, sleeping, working and time with my family. This is my second class with NLU and I am really enjoying it so far and loving online learning. I am so excited to take what I am learning and apply it to this school year. For the upcoming school year, I have switched roles to a Middle School Instructional Coach from a special education teacher. I work in Rockford, IL at a charter school and have been here for 5 years. My career path started off as a paraprofessional at a therapeutic day schools, special education teacher for 2 years, second grade and mentor teacher for 1 year and then back to special education and mentor teacher for one year.
I have more experience with Web 2.0 personally than professionally. We received a title one grant last year so we are going 1:1 in middle school, therefore I am really looking to learn about using technology in the classroom for pedagogy and metacognition; to push the teachers to use technology other ways besides apps and googling information.
Congrats on Lola and on your new role! Instructional coaching can be challenging but rewarding at the same time. When you say you are going 1:1 are you referring to iPads? Chromebooks? Will you teach any digital citizenship lessons before implementation? How are you planning to lead your teachers as a coach?
ReplyDeleteWe are going 1:1 with chromebooks in the middle school grades. We had 2:1 last year. We had not planned on a digital citizenship lessons specifically but we are not rolling out them completely until the students and teachers have the procedures around the usage down and are comfortable with them. I really like the idea of digital citizenship lessons, we have a community period built into our schedule this year so that is something we could incorporate into those lessons. My plan for leading teachers this year is through building community amongst our teachers, students and families. We have all brand new staff this year due to a toxic environment in the middle school the last two years. So we are resetting the stage for the students and new teachers. It is going to be very challenging but we had orientation last night and it was AMAZING to see the students reactions and how excited they were with all of the changes and just the environment we have created for day 1. I will also be modeling and co-teaching with lesson planning and implementation due to the amount of new teachers.
ReplyDeleteSounds exciting! Happy to hear that after a rough couple of years there is a new enthusiasm with new faces. I've worked in an environment like that and it's draining. When you start thinking of digital citizenship lessons CommonSenseMedia.org has a program already designed. When I went in to talk with our middle schoolers about the Chromebooks the focus was more on understanding and protecting their online identities as opposed to internet safety (by middle school they've heard all of that). Here's the Prezi I used with them: http://prezi.com/awp-beqjdgxq/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy&rc=ex0share
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