Laura Coughlin

Laura Coughlin’s Web Portfolio

Welcome to my Web Portfolio, the final venture in earning my Master’s Degree in Information Science and Learning Technologies with an emphasis in Educational Technology.
Focus Area: Technology in Schools
My expected graduation is December of 2012.
Portfolio areas to visit:

My Resume
Program of Study
NETS Homepage
Reflection Statement

Ways to connect with me:

Email Laura Coughlin
Visit my professional blog, Love::Teaching
Visit my class web site, Mrs.Coughlin’s Class Page
Follow me on Twitter @CoughlinLaura

Engage in Professional Growth and Leadership

Teachers continuously improve their professional practice, model lifelong learning, and exhibit leadership in their school and professional community by promoting and demonstrating the effective use of digital tools and resources.

a. participate in local and global learning communities to explore creative applications of technology to improve student learning.

This is, perhaps, my favorite part of being involved with instructional technology. I am a part of a global learning community – my personal learning network (PLN). The world is full of excited educators with a desire to learn and share, and it is the connected educator’s job to keep him or herself involved in that process. I write about that idea a lot, but one of my favorite reflections on that topic is here.

As a participant in a global learning community I get more ideas for creative ways to improve student learning than I give, but one of my recent favorite technology applications to improve learning that I have shared is the idea that YouTube videos of popular music can be used to teach skills necessary to prepare students for standardized tests.

b. exhibit leadership by demonstrating a vision of technology infusion, participating in shared decision making and community building, and developing the leadership and technology skills of others.

I try to be an education technology leader by posting both technology integration ideas and technology lesson plans free to the web via my blog. For example, I posted a blog about how to use Prezi as a classroom tool, and have also posted many presentations to the website that are free and customizable to anyone who wishes to use them.

c. evaluate and reflect on current research and professional practice on a regular basis to make effective use of existing and emerging digital tools and resources in support of student learning.

While I am a proponent of technology use in the classroom, I think it can be easy to push forward full steam ahead without taking time to pause and reflect on how the professional practice of teaching is being affected by technology implementation. It is important to look back, even as we move forward. One way I like to reflect is to share my thoughts on my professional blog to see what other professionals are thinking on the same issues. I even sometimes focus on my own children in these reflections.

d. contribute to the effectiveness, vitality, and self-renewal of the teaching profession and of their school and community.

I am proud to be a teacher. It is a calling for me, and it is also an extremely difficult job. By sharing positive ideas and thoughts on teaching on my blog I hope I am reaching my community of teachers and increasing their vitality and self-renewal.

Even more than the personal pride I have in being a teacher, I am proud of my students. Not only for their quality academic work, but because I get to see them grow into responsible citizens of our school and community.

Promote and Model Digital Citizenship and Responsibility

Teachers understand local and global societal issues and responsibilities in an evolving digital culture and exhibit legal and ethical behavior in their professional practices.

a. advocate, model, and teach safe, legal, and ethical use of digital information and technology, including respect for copyright, intellectual property, and the appropriate documentation of sources.

I model legal and ethical use of copyrighted materials by ensuring that all images I use on my professional blog are fair use images, and by making them clickable and putting an attribution at the end of the post. I also teach my students about copyright and Creative Commons by folding those lessons into other lessons, like this one over getting ideas for descriptive writing using images.

b. address the diverse needs of all learners by using learner-centered strategies providing equitable access to appropriate digital tools and resources.

Learners have diverse needs, and flourish under different conditions. This is even true for technology use. Some of my students have more success when I use strategies that include pencil and paper work, and others feel more comfortable in digital environments. I try to give them choices whenever possible, and always enjoy discovering what choices individual students make while straddling two worlds of teaching reading and writing – the paper world and the digital world.

My digital reading notebooks are a learner-centered tool that enables me to converse with every student privately and at their personal level of understanding. With the GoogleDrive app on our iPads, now that my students are 1-1, digital reading notebooks are also an equitable way to record thinking because they can make entries off-line and upload them when they arrive at school the next day.

c. promote and model digital etiquette and responsible social interactions related to the use of technology and information.

One of the best ways I know to promote digital etiquette is the explicitly teach it. Middle school students like mine haven’t had a lot of experience with interacting in digital environments, so teaching them the best ways to communicate effectively online is important.

This video is an example of me modeling poor digital etiquette, and is a good conversation starter for topics of appropriate technology use in and educational setting.

d. develop and model cultural understanding and global awareness by engaging with colleagues and students of other cultures using digital-age communication and collaboration tools.

Using our class blog, my students were able to connect with a classroom in Hawaii and trade ideas for ways to reduce the number of students skipping school. My students became instantly engaged when they realized that students 4,000 miles away were reading and responding to what they wrote. Among other things, my students learned that on the inside, middle schoolers in Hawaii were really just like them.

I have personally engaged in collaborating with education professionals from across the world via technology and have gained cultural understanding by getting to truly know them. The image above was posted by Silvia Tolisano, a nationally renowned education technology specialist, to a Flickr group for educators of which we are both members. I never would have seen this touching tribute to a German father were it not for the connections I have made with other educators through technology.

Model Digital-Age Work and Learning

Teachers exhibit knowledge, skills, and work processes representative of an innovative professional in a global and digital society.

a. demonstrate fluency in technology systems and the transfer of current knowledge to new technologies and situations.

There two things every traditional reading teacher needs to run a Reader’s Workshop — chart paper, and a library card catalogue system. However, as I progressed in my comfort with and understanding of technology in my classroom I was able to replace both of these items with my SmartPhone – a huge time and cost savings.

One of the most profound transformations of process using technology that I have implemented over the past year is a transition from spiral-bound paper Reading Notebooks to a completely digital Reading Notebook system. Having online digital notebooks has completely changed the way I conference and communicate with my reading students.

b. collaborate with students, peers, parents, and community members using digital tools and resources to support student success and innovation.

I found out this summer that my school would be going 1-1 with iPads in the 2012-2013 school year. Once I got this news I immediately went to the best resource I know, my peers online. I knew they could support me as tried to build a successful iPad rollout plan for my students. I posted questions about iPads in the middle school classroom to my blog, and immediately got some wonderful answers to help me prepare.

As it got closer to rollout time, I collaborated with colleagues to provide resources for students to help explain expected norms and procedures for using iPads in the classroom to make the transition easy and successful.

c. communicate relevant information and ideas effectively to students, parents, and peers using a variety of digital age media and formats.

My main method of providing relevant information to students and parents is my class blog, which has a page with my contact information and also a page containing my weekly lesson plans.

To communicate ideas to my peers, I have a separate blog called Love::Teaching where I post anything I feel is a relevant conversation starter for educators, especially those who might share interests with me: educational technology, teaching reading  and writing, and middle school. The “about” page on my blog sums it up:

In the summer of 2011 I was challenged by a presenter at EdCamp SJSD, Dean Shareski, to share my teaching experiences with the world via technology. He said that today’s educators have not only the opportunity, but the responsibility to share with their colleagues worldwide.

I’m easily excited by a new idea to make my classroom better, and I love to share when my students and I do something that works well. I use my blog to share a mix of reflections, lesson ideas, and the just plain love story of my life in education.

d. model and facilitate effective use of current and emerging digital tools to locate, analyze, evaluate, and use information resources to support research and learning.

I collaborate with my building’s teacher librarian to teach our students about internet source reliability and evaluating web sites. We teach them to put sites through the CRAP test – Copyright, Resources, Author, Purpose.

I have also removed all paper dictionaries and thesauruses from my classroom, and instead teach my students the 21st century information resource skills to answer their learning questions.

Design and Develop Digital-Age Learning Experiences and Assessments

Teachers design, develop, and evaluate authentic learning experiences and assessment incorporating contemporary tools and resources to maximize content learning in context and to develop the knowledge, skills, and attitudes identified in the NETS•S.

a. design or adapt relevant learning experiences that incorporate digital tools and resources to promote student learning and creativity.

One of the easiest ways to make a learning experience relevant to a middle school student is to provide them with an audience. One of the ways my students love to address their audience is through making movies. Our most successful movie to date is a video where my students teach their viewers some new vocabulary, called “Expanding Mood Vocabulary: More than Just Happy and Sad.” At last count this video had 180 views, and the blog post I wrote about making it has 14 comments. I also implemented digital reading journals in my classroom and saw many benefits over the paper variety thanks to that fantastic digital tool, GoogleDrive.

b. develop technology-enriched learning environments that enable all students to pursue their individual curiosities and become active participants in setting their own educational goals, managing their own learning, and assessing their own progress.

Independent reading is a requirement in our school, but not all students enjoy reading self-selected books. As a way for our students to manage their own learning, my colleagues and I designed a self-assessment for our students using GoogleForms in which we allowed the students to express their feelings about reading. We then used this information to group them into reading groups that better fit with their own educational goals.

c. customize and personalize learning activities to address students’ diverse learning styles, working strategies, and abilities using digital tools and resources.

Differentiated learning is one of the most important yet difficult tasks to accomplish in a classroom. Thankfully, using technology can make that differentiation easier. Sometimes letting the advanced students take an assignment to the “next level” using technology is the way to go, as described here in a blog post I wrote about a differentiated assessment. Other times, those students who are ahead of the pack simply need to move on and do something different. Last year, at state-mandated standardized test time (MAP testing) I had my advanced students create a “How to Be Ready for the MAP Test” video as an enrichment activity while I retaught concepts to the students who needed another shot.

d. provide students with multiple and varied formative and summative assessments aligned with content and technology standards and use resulting data to inform learning and teaching.

This year my colleagues and I are trying to ensure that our students are on track with the standards by identifying power standards and tracking our assessment data using Data Teams. As teachers, we track this data using a GoogleDoc so we can collaborate on the same document.  As a powerful visual reminder and motivation to our students we post class proficiency percentages on a data wall in our classrooms.

Facilitate and Inspire Student Learning and Creativity

Teachers use their knowledge of subject matter, teaching and learning, and technology to facilitate experiences that advance student learning, creativity, and innovation in both face-to-face and virtual environments.

a. promote, support, and model creative and innovative thinking and inventiveness.

The Haiku Deck presentation above is not only a summary of my thinking on instructional technology, it is also an example of something I created to model innovative thinking to my students. Created on my iPad as an example of a presentation using an app that my students have access to, it serves as both model and promotion of creative thinking using technology. I have also used technology to promote innovative thinking in my classroom by creating a webcast showing my students how to create digital reading notebooks, leaving their old paper notebooks in the past.

b. engage students in exploring real-world issues and solving authentic problems using digital tools and resources.

The best way I know to engage my students in exploring real world issues and solving authentic problems is to read non-fiction texts about issues relevant to their lives and then discuss them together. Technology can enhance this process by allowing students to extend these conversations outside the classroom walls. I have used a class blog to let my students converse with other 8th graders in our school building about the benefits and drawbacks of a 4-day school week, and I have also had my students interact via our class blog with students and adults across the country about how to prevent students from skipping school.

c. promote student reflection using collaborative tools to reveal and clarify students’ conceptual understanding and thinking, planning, and creative processes.

As a reading and writing teacher, one of the most important questions my students need to be able to answer is, “What is a text?” This question becomes increasingly interesting with the addition of the internet into the conversation. My students collaboratively created this concept map around the question, and ended up including items from magazine articles to Twitter.

One of the best ways for students to clarify their contextual understanding is to communicate with one another. By middle school most students have no trouble communicating face-to-face, but online communication is another matter. I created a lesson to teach my students how to constructively comment on one another’s blogs so they could collaboratively reflect on each others’ thinking.

d. model collaborative knowledge construction by engaging in learning with students, colleagues, and others in face-to-face and virtual environments.

Social media is one of the most powerful environments for collaborative knowledge construction. One example is a recent virtual discussion I was involved in over the true meaning of the term “authentic audience.” A colleague I met through Twitter notified me that she had mentioned me in her comment on another colleague’s blog. Because of this tweet I too read and commented on the blog and recommended it to a fourth colleague who then read and added her own thoughts on the question. This is only one of the many experiences of collaborative knowledge construction made possible every day by social media.

Laura Coughlin’s Web Portfolio

Welcome to my Web Portfolio, the final venture in earning my Master’s Degree in Information Science and Learning Technologies with an emphasis in Educational Technology.
Focus Area: Technology in Schools
My expected graduation is December of 2012.
Portfolio areas to visit:

My Resume
Program of Study
NETS Homepage
Reflection Statement

Ways to connect with me:

Email Laura Coughlin
Visit my professional blog, Love::Teaching
Visit my class web site, Mrs.Coughlin’s Class Page
Follow me on Twitter @CoughlinLaura

Course Description: Study of theories and practices associated with educational technology. Explores basic instructional design processes and strategies for integrating technology into teaching and learning. Provides an overview of the EdTech field and a survey of emerging trends.

Reflection: This course was a great way to begin my coursework. Being a member of an online community was emphasized, and as I learned what it was like to be a student using technology I learned better ways to be a teacher using technology. I also began building relationships with people that have sustained throughout the process of earning my degree. Every course I have taken since Introduction to Technology has included a classmate I first met in this course, which really made me feel at home as a distance learning student at MU. It also drove home what true connections students can build with people all over the world through technology, which has led me to encourage my students to make those same kinds of connections through classroom blogs to other students across the country.

I also learned in the course that “technology” can mean very different things to different people. I teach in a school district where every teacher has a school-issued laptop, iPad, document camera, and web page. Because of this I was very surprised when given an assignment to interview a teacher about their use of technology to have her list “overhead projector” as a technology that she used in her classroom. To me, an overhead projector is antiquated, but to someone not given the tools I have, a projector might still be the best “technology” for the job.

back to Program of Study

Course Description: Seminar in Instructional Systems and Learning Technology – Teaching Online Courses.

Reflection: Of all the courses I took to gain my degree, this was the one whose main concept was most foreign to me. I had never taken an online course before, and I had certainly never taught one. One of the main focuses was on how to lead and moderate online discussion boards. While those skills are required for teaching online courses, they have also come in handy in my face-to-face classroom. I adapted the discussion board moderation skills from this course to moderate blog posts by my middle school students on our classroom blog.

I also overcame a huge fear during this course — I taught my own online lesson using Blackboard Collaborate. I was very nervous leading up to my lesson. Mostly I was scared that there would be some technical problem that I wouldn’t know how to solve. But all went well, and I built my confidence to the point where I now feel I could teach a live online course again without the fears.

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Course Description: Study of concepts associated with action research; and the processes and procedures for conducting action research. Culminating project is the development of an action research project.

Reflection: For my action research I delved into to world of digital writing, designing action research to find out whether the use of a word processor improved the quality of student writing, not only in correctness but in higher order thinking skills. While conducting my literature review I discovered that this question hadn’t been asked very often in recent years. Most studies I found were covering the switch from typewriter to word processors, and I was interested in the move toward GoogleDocs and iPads.

Not only was the research and preparation for my Action Research project informative to my teaching of writing, it also drove home the point to me that I am teaching on the cutting edge of a revolution in the way human beings create and share their writing.

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