Technology Survival Guide

Did you know the first web page was born in 1991, and you can still view it here The World Wide Web project (cern.ch)? It was also my third year teaching special education in a large elementary school in Gulfport, MS. I moved to Louisiana and spent seven years as a special education resource teacher at a middle school in Slidell, LA, before taking a break to raise my young growing family. In my last year of teaching, a technology coordinator installed a computer in my classroom with preloaded learning games. The technology coordinator asked me to document the time used by my student for testing remediation. There were no further instructions. Fast forward to 2020; A global pandemic occurs, and teachers are in high demand. I became a Title 1 reading tutor for Kindergarten, second and fourth grade at a local elementary. When I expressed an interest in teaching again, the principal hired me for a position. This fall, I will step back into my classroom after 20 years.

Mayfield Elementary is a large pre-K through sixth-grade Title 1 school in St. Tammany Parish Louisiana. I will be teaching first and second-grade resource and a model of inclusion that is undecided. There will be some students receiving their math and reading in the resource setting.

As a Title 1 tutor, I used an iPad to deliver direct instruction to reading students using the my.amplify program, formerly known as BOOST. It worked in tandem with our reading program, automatically grouping students and providing multiple activities for each skill deficit. I was also the facilitator for the Achieve 3000 computer lab. Achieve is a differentiated reading computer program that uses reading, writing, and questions to improve the students' Lexile level. There were times I used a Promethean board to demonstrate the program.