Meet our Featured Teacher: Kelly Guy

Congratulations to our January 2017 Featured Teacher Kelly Guy. Kelly works at A.A. Gates Elementary School in the Port Byron Central School District. Kelly is a 16-year veteran teacher, with three years at Port Byron CSD. Previously, she taught in Kansas City; Waimea, Hawaii; Conway, South Carolina, and toured for a month visiting schools in Victoria, Australia, discussing elementary education in the United States.  

Kelly has integrated a wide variety of instructional technology tools to facilitate math instruction as her classroom supports a 1:1 iPad initiative to share all math curricular materials. She has "flipped" her instruction for the past three months, leveraging Screencast-o-matic and EDpuzzle to create and share content-based instruction that her students consume for homework. Screencastomatic allows her to create custom instructional videos, while EDpuzzle allows her to assess student learning through a series of comprehension-check and open-ended computation problems.

Kelly has also had success motivating her students to review math concepts through the use of Prodigy. This program allows students to interactively review previously taught math concepts through a game-based environment. The students are given access to Prodigy as a reward for completing assignments during class. "Students are so engaged, they forget they are reviewing math," says Kelly.  

When she's not leveraging the Flipped Classroom model, she uses Nearpod to share interactive presentations with her students. Kelly combines the Engage NY lessons with Nearpod to create presentations that contain opportunities for students to interact with the lesson through the use of drawing, poll, open-ended questions, and more. Kelly can then check for understanding by looking at reports generated by Nearpod for each lesson. Other tools that support Kelly's curricular goals include Google Classroom, IXL Math, Explain Everything, Compass Learning, and Zearn.

Since she has implemented the Flipped Classroom teaching strategy, Kelly has noticed increased engagement among her students as well as more personalized learning in the classroom as students consume instructional content for homework and spend class time in small groups. This strategy has afforded Kelly the luxury of time as she can circulate throughout the classroom, helping students with understanding and computation, leading to greater mastery of math concepts. According to one of Kelly's fifth-grade students, "You don't have to shuffle papers and there is no chance to lose them. If I am home sick I can see what we learned using EdPuzzle so I don't fall behind. Then I can open the classwork in Google Classroom and know what to do."