Ms. A is in her second year of teaching high school Math. She is very dedicated teacher who works long hours to provide her students with thorough lessons and plenty of formative assessments. She is tasked with teaching in 7 different classrooms which keeps her on the move and without a home base.
Opportunities
Ms A. engages her students through the use of technology when she is certain that it will have a positive impact on student learning. Her students use “programs or apps on phones that students can use and will have access to.” These apps and programs include Kahoot, Desmos, and the Schoology learning management system. Ms. A “use[s] desmos mostly to help with Pre-Calculus 12 to help with graphing” and as an alternative to students having to purchase graphing calculators. “In the junior grades [she] does not like to use phones that often because they turn out to be more of a distraction than a help.”
“I have looked into other [applications]… but haven’t been able to apply it yet because I am still a new teacher and am still wrapping my head around everything.” She feels that her use of technology would increase if given the opportunity to focus on new educational applications during professional development days. Ms A. finds that her limited use of applications is due to “time but also sometimes apps aren’t the most clear as to how to run them and connect them so students have access them; that would take time and direction.”
Access
As a teacher candidate, Ms. A used technology in her instruction more as she was “working out of a single classroom and could use ipad carts more easily.” Ms. A finds it difficult to use technology in her current teaching position as the use of ipads requires her “to sign them out and know quite far in advance when you will be using them” and “having to run across the school from [her] various classrooms to grab them while students are left unattended.” She also feels that the amount of technology present in her school is not adequate to support multiple teachers regularly using them for instruction.