EEND 680 Introduction

Hello! My name is Katie Trafton. I am a second grade teacher at Troy Heritage Trail in Joliet. I have been teaching at Troy for six years. Next year, I will be teaching kindergarten and I am very excited to teach a new grade level! In my classroom I have ten devices for my eighteen students. We have seven Chromebooks and three iPads. Each grade level in my district is assigned a different amount of devices. The number of devices increases in the higher grade levels. Each school in my district also has an iLab which contains Chromeboxes, Chromebooks, iPads, and a green screen. Each teacher is assigned an hour in the iLab each week and have the opportunity to sign up for additional time. We are a Google school and I have found one tool that I use daily is Google Classroom. By using Google Classroom, I can create assignments and easily send a copy to each student. I can then view the assignment as they work and leave comments and give them assistance. Another feature of Google Classroom that I like is that it organizes all of the assignments in folders in my Google Drive. Therefore, I can easily look over the assignments and access them whenever I need to. I also like that I can create multiple classes. Therefore, I have made a “class” for each of my reading groups. This allows me to stay organized and easily send different assignments to different students. I am very excited to learn more ways to integrate technology throughout this course. I am very comfortable using technology but I want to work on using it in all parts of my day in meaningful ways.