Profile of a Leading Technological Educator

As part of a course I am currently taking at Brock on integrating new, innovative technologies in the classroom, we have been assigned the task of researching a current educator who would be considered a leader in this area and preparing a short presentation on them. I have chosen to talk about Alice Keeler, a high school math teacher of 15 years who is currently working at a charter high school in Fresno, California, the Academy for Civic and Entrepreneurial Leadership (ACEL). ACEL's mission is to involve students in a large amount of project-based learning, as opposed to relying on traditional teaching methods; the school believes in using the technologies students already love to solve problems that would arise in both everyday learning and in the world of work. More information about ACEL can be found here.

Alice has her Bachelor's degree in Mathematics and her Master's degree in Educational Media Design and Technology. In addition to teaching high school, she also teachers an online course at Fresno Pacific University. She describes herself as a "technology missionary, on a quest to inspire and help teachers to try something new." In addition to her other qualifications, she is also a Google Certified Teacher; this means she attended the Google Teacher Academy, a one-day event that is held only sporadically at cities around the world, and is very selective; only 50 people are accepted to attend each event, based on their professional experience, use of technology in school settings, and passion for learning and teaching. Teachers who attend these classes learn a lot of valuable information that places them at the head of the technological pack among educators; they get hands-on experience with new Google products and other technologies, as well as learn creative new instructional strategies. They are expected to share what they've learned with their local community by leading at least three professional development activities over the course of a year after attending the Academy. They also get to put this image on all of their websites:

One of the most interesting ways that Alice is ahead of the pack is the fact that she has eliminated paper-based assessment from her class completely; every student in her class uses Wordpress to create a blog, which they also use to submit assignments, also known as "quests". Their blog includes a page called "Achievements" where students can list everything they've accomplished over the course of the year, accompanied by an avatar they create at a site called Face Your Manga. An example is the avatar below:

The students' blogs also have tag clouds, which allow Alice to see that they are covering in their blog posts all the topics and issues they are supposed to cover over the course of the year; an example is seen below. The larger a specific word is in the cloud, the more a student has used that word in their blogs.

Alice points out that there are a lot of advantages to having her students use Wordpress to hand in assignments rather than the traditional paper-based method, including:

• She can grade students' work using her iPad, desktop computer, phone, etc., so no matter where she is the assignments are easy to look up
• She doesn't have to worry about losing students' papers
• She can quickly check to make sure students have actually completed their work
• She can leave individual feedback in the comments section of the blogs, which means students get feedback right away instead of having to wait for assignments to be returned
• Valuable class time doesn't have to be wasted handing back papers
• Students can be absent from class and still get their assignments back
• Students no longer have to worry about forgetting assignments at home, and thus they are always accountable for incomplete work
• Overall, Alice has a lot of time freed up which she can use to develop other creative ways of using technology in the classroom

Each student in her class has their own iPad, which makes it easy for them to submit completed assignments in a uniform way. A video of Alice explaining more about how she uses Wordpress in the class can be found at her Youtube site.

Some other interesting ways Alice uses technology to break from the pack include:

• Showme, an iPad app that allows students to explain verbally what they are doing as they complete written homework on the iPad; the app records everything they say and write, and allows all the students in the class to upload these videos to a website, creating a whole video library of student-created tutorials that other students can look at for help with course work. An example can be found here.
  
• Instead of using physical textbooks, the entire course textbook is found online at a website called Flexbooks, which allows educators to share open-source material for K-12 classes.
• She uses Quia, a site that allows teachers to create games like Jeopardy! and Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?, on which their students can compete against each other for prizes; an example can be found here.

Alice is certainly one of the leaders among classroom teachers in her ability to find creative ways to use 21st century technology to enhance student learning, and I plan on adapting many of her ideas for use in my own classrooms one day.