Introducing Me...Again!
Image Source: Personal Image
Hello, blog! Long time, no write. If I did the math correctly, it has been exactly 623 days since my last post on Miss B. Multiplies. In that time, I have: 1.) completed my master's degree, 2.) moved (again), 3.) re-enrolled at Dominican University to complete my technology specialist endorsement, and 4.) (almost) completed my first full week of the 2024-2025 school year. For those of you who I haven't connected with before, hello! My name is Kelly Barker. Check out this word cloud I created on Mentimeter to learn a little bit more about me!
Currently, I work as a special education teacher for grades 4-6 at an intermediate school in New Lenox, IL. This is my third year working in this position and my fifth year teaching overall. When I stop to think about it, I am shocked at just how fast time is moving! I started teaching in 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and very quickly had to learn how to integrate technology into my every day teaching. While everything about my first few years of teaching was challenging, I can look back on them and feel a sense of gratitude. Those first two years inspired me to return to school, further my education, and learn more about how to improve myself as an educator as we move further and further into the digital age.
As a 27 year old and a 21st century teacher, my use of technology is two-fold. Personally, I use technology to connect with family and friends that live out of state and keep up with various types of social media. I consider myself to be a "content consumer", rather than a content creator. While you will rarely catch me posting on X, Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok, I spend an almost embarrassingly large amount of time on these platforms in my spare time. My TikTok doom scrolling has gotten so bad that I had my partner set up a daily time limit through Apple's Screen Time function. Spoiler alert: it hasn't worked as well as I hoped it would. I fear sometimes that I'm becoming as chronically online as some of my students!
Image Source: GIPHY
In my classroom, I use various types of educational technology every day. My school is very fortunate to be 1:1 with student devices and provide teachers with a Macbook and an iPad, as well as projectors, Apple TVs, and a multitude of online platforms and subscriptions to enhance our instruction. I am very familiar and comfortable with platforms such as Classlink, Canva, Google Classroom, iXL, and Reflex (just to name a few). I am also proud to be the unofficial "tech girl" to my lovely special education teammates and spend time helping them out with our educational technology platforms and devices when they encounter a problem or when we are implementing new and exciting programs as a team. When examining how I use technology with my students, I realize that we are very regimented in the way we use technology during instruction. Due to my use of station teaching in the classroom, my students get a balanced exposure to traditional paper/pencil activities and technology based subscriptions in ELA, Math, Science, and Social Studies. As a special educator, I am making it my personal goal this year to learn more about using various types of assistive technology with the hope to implement some tools in the classroom to help my students overcome challenges with decoding, spelling, and writing. My team and I were lucky enough to attend professional development on using AT to assist with reading prior to the end of last school year and since then, I've just wanted to know more and more! One of the tools that I was fascinated by was a device that looked like a highlighter, but when passed over a line of text, would read it aloud to students. Technology like the C-Pen Reader 2 would be an absolute game changer for some of my students in terms of their ability to work independently and their confidence in the classroom. Even though I feel like I know a good deal about using technology in the classroom, I am excited by the prospect of expanding that knowledge during this term!
