Shelly Fryer's Blog "Technology 101 Skills for Teachers" Review
Shelly Fryer (@sfryer) describes herself as a teacher, author, and advocate for children. She is a 3rd and 4th grade elementary school teacher in Oklahoma City at a non-profit school for homeless children called Positive Tomorrows. Her blog has countless posts about ideas for teachers, particularly for those wanting to integrate more technology into their classrooms.
I found her blog to be very helpful to myself and many other teachers because it covers so many topics anyone could find a helpful resource. I enjoyed how well organized her site was because it features images, an objective line, easy links to social media, and tabs for navigate the site with. Shelly Fryer's blog and classroom web page are great examples for all educators to gain inspiration from.
Shelly's post on technology for teachers was particularly interesting and provided a large varitty of ideas for educators to incorporate into their classrooms. She begins by discussing Oklahoma's A Plus schools which she is partnered with. They value the perseverance of the arts in the classroom. Shelly allows her students to use both art and technology in their learning processes. She provides a great student example of this by including a project her students completed after studying bats. Each student drew pictures to illustrate a certain topic and then those pictures were put into a video project. I thought this video was very fun and would be a way for students to display their learning to a larger audience. Shelly says she enjoys using YouTube videos like this because students enjoy them and it keeps them motivated. Next, she shows an example of a student's work using a book creator app. I thought this was a neat tool because students were able to be very creative and imaginative which is particularly helpful to her elementary students. Then, Shelly discusses how she uses QR codes in her classroom. She talks about the benefits of this resource because it saves valuable class time and provides students with a way to organize their work. With every tool mentioned, Shelly includes a student example for one of her tweets which shows how passionate she is about her students and their progress and learning as well as technology. I like how her tweets usually have a hashtag either for her classroom such as #Room 108 or for the project it is like #BatWeek. Finally, her posts allow others to comment and discuss the information she has supplied. I thought this was great because educators can interact and share knowledge and resources with each other. Overall, Shelly Fryer's website is extremely well done and a great example to future teachers like myself.
I found her blog to be very helpful to myself and many other teachers because it covers so many topics anyone could find a helpful resource. I enjoyed how well organized her site was because it features images, an objective line, easy links to social media, and tabs for navigate the site with. Shelly Fryer's blog and classroom web page are great examples for all educators to gain inspiration from.
Shelly's post on technology for teachers was particularly interesting and provided a large varitty of ideas for educators to incorporate into their classrooms. She begins by discussing Oklahoma's A Plus schools which she is partnered with. They value the perseverance of the arts in the classroom. Shelly allows her students to use both art and technology in their learning processes. She provides a great student example of this by including a project her students completed after studying bats. Each student drew pictures to illustrate a certain topic and then those pictures were put into a video project. I thought this video was very fun and would be a way for students to display their learning to a larger audience. Shelly says she enjoys using YouTube videos like this because students enjoy them and it keeps them motivated. Next, she shows an example of a student's work using a book creator app. I thought this was a neat tool because students were able to be very creative and imaginative which is particularly helpful to her elementary students. Then, Shelly discusses how she uses QR codes in her classroom. She talks about the benefits of this resource because it saves valuable class time and provides students with a way to organize their work. With every tool mentioned, Shelly includes a student example for one of her tweets which shows how passionate she is about her students and their progress and learning as well as technology. I like how her tweets usually have a hashtag either for her classroom such as #Room 108 or for the project it is like #BatWeek. Finally, her posts allow others to comment and discuss the information she has supplied. I thought this was great because educators can interact and share knowledge and resources with each other. Overall, Shelly Fryer's website is extremely well done and a great example to future teachers like myself.
Here is a neat video of Shelly and her Husband, Wes (@wfryer) at a conference in Austin, TX discussing technology in the classroom.