My Journey Through Cool Tools and Beyond

This experience has been one of the most fulfilling pd experiences I have had in my 30 years of teaching. Little did I know that I would be facing some very serious health issues this year but the self paced experience enabled me to participate without stress. I also was able to dig deeper and go back and revisit former lessons to enhance what I was learning about. The "things" built nicely on each other. As the librarian and computer lab TA, I found that learning as I go gave me time to share as I went through these things. My computer lab grade 3 & 4 students would ask me, "Mrs. Ronan what are you learning about this week?" My experience was if I was modeling learning to my students they wanted to explore and learn more as well. I also shared throughout this entire experience with my administrator, tech team, one on one classrooms, and the elementary staff. These resources were well received because they were relevant to their every day classroom expe...

These actual two Things I started back in February but I ended up sick and was not able to complete them. Sometimes "things" happen as they are supposed to. When I was ready to submit these the first time, I had shared many databases with the entire staff but with a focus on our one on one classrooms and only had one teacher respond to using databases for research. With future communication, my administrator and myself were surprised to see how limited research- especially tech based research was being used in our building. What we discovered was twofold. The first was what mode of research was being used in the elementary. When teachers were using student research, they preferred to guide where and what students were researching. This lead to a basket of books from the library, maybe a few encyclopedias, and some teacher printed articles that the class could pick a few resources from. These resources were an introduction to research but often were not the most updat...