My second grade teacher, Mrs. Bradley, was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. I was in awe of pretty much everything she did.
But then, one life-changing day, Mrs. Bradley sat us down on the green, braided rug, turned off the classroom lights, and turned on an overhead projector. I’d never seen an overhead projector before, and I marveled at the white square of light on the wall. Then, Mrs. Bradley showed us how to write a cursive letter “d.”
At that moment, I knew that I, too, wanted to be a teacher when I grew up.
So that I, too, could write on an overhead projector.
Projectors
By the time I was a teacher with a classroom of my own, overhead projectors were on their way out. During those years that I had one, however, I used it well. I learned that I could use my computer printer to print onto the overhead transparencies. One of my favorite uses was making Jeopardy-style game boards to use for whole-group review before tests. I covered each square on the transparency with a cut-to-size sticky note. Then, when I put it on the overhead, the students only saw the silhouette of the square, but from up front, with the light shining through the paper, I could read what it said underneath.
I ended up being the first teacher in my school to get a projector, which opened up an entire new world of Things I Could Do. I bought it myself because I could not wait to have one to use!
Graphic Design and Websites
I’ve long loved being at the front-edge of technology. At one point in time, I was the only person I knew at my school who had a computer with a CD-ROM drive. On that same computer, I taught myself to use Microsoft PowerPoint. I didn’t understand what “slides” were for and instead used it as a graphic design program, which included making a class newsletter and personalized stationary for a bunch of my friends, among other uses. That computer didn’t connect to the internet; at the time, I saw no need for it to do so. When I brought that same computer into my classroom, I didn’t need internet either. I used it to make things that were printed, and I made them all from scratch because I enjoyed doing it.
I took a summer class focused on using educational technology to support problem-based and hands-on learning, and I absolutely loved it. That class, supported by a local non-profit, provided teachers with access to the latest and greatest technology of the time. The following summer, I helped teach the class, and the year after that, I led it. In that role, as a “Technology Fellow,” the non-profit bought out my contract from my school district for one year, and I, along with twelve other Fellows from around the state, spent a year traveling, attending conferences, working with teachers in their classrooms, teaching workshops, and working and learning together. It was truly an incredible year.
At one point during that year, a principal I’d been working with asked me to teach his staff how to use a software program they’d just adopted. I’d never used that program before, so I downloaded a trial version, taught myself how to use it, made some training materials, and was at his school leading a training session the next day! There was so much to learn, and I wanted to know as much as possible.
During that year, I had access to a lot of information and resources intended to be shared with teachers state-wide. While leading an after-school session for teachers on how to make a class webpage in Microsoft FrontPage, I got the idea to create a website for teachers. I wanted to use it to share the resources I had access to as well as things I made. And so, foridahoteachers.org (now fortheteachers.org) was born.
The original website banner was a picture of my upstairs carpet, pixelated out to look abstract and interesting.
Around that same time, I had completed a Master’s of Education in Curriculum and Instruction and was doing coursework for teaching endorsements in Reading and Gifted and Talented Education. I had a lot of very strong opinions about what education should look like. I wanted students to be actively involved, to be treated as individuals, to be able to make choices, and to be supported in learning something new every single day, no matter what they already knew or didn’t know. I used my website as a place to share ideas and materials. I intended for the website to be anonymous so that I could point people to it without it being about me. I got some really useful – and very honest! – feedback when I shared the link with people in training sessions and could watch how they navigated and reacted to it. (A few years in, I got an unexpected phone call from a principal who had wanted to know who was behind the site and tracked me down by having a friend look up the directory information connected to the site. Eventually I got more comfortable with claiming it as mine.)
During an Educational Technology conference, I was introduced to Adobe Dreamweaver, which I fell head-over-heals in love with. I spent the rest of the conference in my hotel room converting the entire site to Dreamweaver. That program and Adobe Photoshop became my playgrounds, and two of my favorite ways to spend my free time. When my kids were little, I remember taking them to the local Barnes and Noble so they could play with the trains in the kids’ area while I sat nearby taking notes from books about HTML and cascading style sheets.
The site was eventually moved to WordPress to keep up with the latest technology, and then, as my kids grew and my jobs changed and life happened, keeping up on the latest technology – especially since it moves so fast! – was something I had to put on hold. I maintain the site but haven’t added new materials in quite a while.
Artificial Intelligence
I worked for many years in professional development – teaching teachers, primarily – which led to my current work as a freelance Instructional Designer. One unexpected but very welcome benefit of the work I’ve been doing has been getting to work with AI in a wide variety of ways.
At my kids’ school, AI has primarily been used to uncover plagiarism. While using it in this way makes sense, I’ve seen a lot of flaws in the available programs. My son, who is a very good writer and (thanks to me, I think) has had a larger-than-average vocabulary since he was a toddler, was called up to the teacher’s desk along with several other students one day. The teacher said their recent assignments had been flagged by an AI program as “likely to be plagiarized.” One of those students made the brave move of asking the teacher to write a couple sentences of her own and to run them through the program. Her sentences were also flagged as “likely to be plagiarized.” The program may have caught some students who really did cheat, but it seemed like mostly it just punished students who could write well. (I sometimes catch myself, in my own writing, wondering if I should intentionally spell something incorrectly or use a wrong punctuation mark, just to make sure it’s obvious it was written by an actual human!)
Earlier this year I wrote a curriculum for high school students that included a unit on AI. I wanted to help shift their (and potentially their teachers’) view of it being something that helps a student cheat to seeing it as a set of incredibly useful tools that can be used to help them learn. Just with a chatbot like ChatGPT, students can:
- generate flash cards and practice quizzes to help them study
- break down the steps of a large project and create a schedule to get everything done on time
- generate checklists and homework trackers
- check written work for grammatical and spelling errors
- get help writing their first resume and practice responding to potential job interview questions
- and countless other things!
I’ve gotten to see some AMAZING possibilities for AI through the projects I’ve worked on over the last couple of years. I’ve seen AI chatbots used as a brainstorming partner, helping come up with ideas for activities and assessments. I’ve worked with organizations that have developed their own AI tools for a variety of purposes. I’ve seen some incredible ideas for uses and tools that simply make daily life run more smoothly. And I’ve had the privilege of seeing some prototypes that could eventually help teachers with lesson planning, individualizing instruction, and more, which is so exciting to me!
The possibilities truly seem endless. I’m greatly looking forward to seeing what I get to work with next!