About Me!

I began teaching fifth and sixth graders in the 2006-07 school year. Since that time I have taught 5th and 6th grade English Language Arts, reading and social studies. Currently I am teaching 8th and 9th grade ELA in my home district. I hold a professional teaching certification in New York State for both Elementary Education (1-6) and English Language Arts (7-12). and have my initial certification as a School Building Leader.

I believe one of my biggest strengths as an educator is my ability to integrate technology into the lessons. In fact, I earned a master's degree in integrating technology in the classroom. Many times I think teachers use technology as a bell or whistle and not as a tool to educate. It is great to get the attention of students with these bells and whistles, but it is even better to use these technologies to teach!

Friday, April 20, 2012

A Paperless School Newspaper


Before deciding that teaching was what I wanted to do, I was considering going into the “newspaper business.”  Throughout my schooling and still today I love to write.  For this reason one of the things I wanted to start when I began teaching was a student newspaper.  Many high schools have school newspapers, but not many elementary schools have a school newspaper.


My first few years teaching, my students and I were able to create a student newspaper.  Since writing, collecting, and editing stories takes a great deal of time (especially when lessons and teaching, rightfully, takes up most of the time in school) for the first few years we normally “published” three or four issues of the newspaper.  These issues turned out very good, but the time of distribution and consistency of distribution varied greatly from year to year and issue to issue.

When my district upgraded our website design they also made it easier for staff to create and update their class websites.  This gave our librarian and I the idea of making our school newspaper digital.  Now instead of having to wait to collect an issues worth of stories we would be able to post stories to the website as they were completed. 

Overall this method has increased the excitement for our school newspaper.  Since changing the newspaper to an online format students in all grades have submitted stories and artwork.  Students can write stories at any time and then use the forms that have been set up to submit their stories to the student editors and myself via email. 

By going “paperless” our school newspaper, The Valleyview Buzz, has grown significantly when compared to our paper versions of the past.

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