Featured Teacher: Lindsay Cesari
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Lindsay Cesari Library Media Specialist Durgee Junior High School Baldwinsville Central School District Lindsay Cesari is a Library Media Specialist working at Durgee Junior High School in the Baldwinsville Central School District. This is her sixth year in the district. She has been teaching for seven years overall. Lindsay describes herself as a non-shhing LMS that loves technology. She believes in a well-stocked candy drawer & the creative process & thinks two heads are almost always better than one.You can follow Lindsay on Twitter: @MrsCesari. Be sure to check out her blog, No Shhing Here. What are some of the innovative ways you are integrating technology into your curriculum?
Lindsay relishes her role as a librarian because it allows her to collaborate with teachers from all different subject areas. She enjoys coming up with new ways to make the same technology work in different environments with different instructional goals. Baldwinsville's iPad program is a great example of this. Teacher and librarians have found ways to integrate the iPads in a wide variety of settings, some of which are listed below.
Recently, Lindsay and some of her colleagues participated in the CNYRIC's online classes, Flip Out and There's an App For That, where they learned how to implement the Flipped Classroom approach to teaching and learning (Flip Out), as well as how to integrate some useful education apps on the iPad (There's an App for That). As a result, they started using the iPads to model a flipped classroom environment. Using a free app called NearPod, 8th grade students began a self-paced unit on Irony.
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How have students benefitted from your technology integration initiatives?
Lindsay is convinced that students are benefiting from her and her colleagues' efforts to integrate iPads. The iPads allow students to create authentic projects that are easily shared beyond the walls of the school. For example, a recent lesson on root words asked students to use the PicCollage app to create a poster. In addition to presenting their posters in class, students shared their posters on Instagram, applying hashtags to categorize and organize their work. Instagram was a great motivator, as students went home and used personal Instagram accounts to like and comment on their classmate's work. Read more here.
Another positive impact has been the collaborative effort to develop a flipped classroom environment. When students use Nearpod and the iPads to complete self-paced lessons, teachers are given immediate access to formative assessments. This data allows them to instantly address problems and pinpoint individual students that would benefit from reteaching. Integrating this technology prevents students from falling through the academic cracks.
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