Digital Toolkit

I'm Lindsay Emerson, and I am in my third year as a middle school literacy specialist/curriculum & Instructional coach. I am in my tenth year of public education, having taught seven of those years in either 6th, 7th, or 8th grade English Language Arts. My time in the classroom included the 2020 school year, which I believe propelled my career in technology and instruction. I took every opportunity to explore how each of our district's digital resources could impact my blended classes.

Currently, I am spearheading an initiative on my campus that has already gained attention from district leaders. We have taken on the much overdue project of redesigning our House Bill 4545 intervention hours. Instead of 30-minute “homerooms” that have been proven to be ineffective for a decade now, each core content teacher will now dedicate every Friday to small-group intervention time, with the five 30-minute homeroom minutes added back into the core class periods. This way, our teachers can directly intervene with students, rather than hoping they complete the prescribed digital intervention in whatever homeroom they are assigned (in some cases, even in the gym with PE coaches who are unfamiliar with the technology). That being said, we are still in the beginning stages of implementation, and my teachers are feeling the burden of the workload. My Technology Toolkit Website will be a direct solution to help teachers in this initiative.

The topic of this Toolkit Website will revolve around small-group intervention activities, planning, resources, and collaboration among our school’s teachers. This will be shared in a whole-staff meeting when we return in January, and it will be easily accessed through our campus dashboard. By now, hopefully, it has become apparent that this website will be created directly for the teachers of core content at my school who are seeking information, inspiration, clarification, ideas, and collaboration regarding our intervention initiative. They will be able to find digital resources for specific learning targets, see what other departments are doing within their intervention lessons, and personalized learning pathways for students outside of each targeted intervention small group.

The categories, organized by pages, of this website will include the following: Communication and Collaboration, Intervention Activities, Multimedia, Online and Blended Learning, Games and Simulations, Virtual Reality, and Additional Resources. My selection criteria will be determined by the efficacy of educational resources, availability to Klein ISD accounts, and ease of use for our teachers.

Ultimately, this website will be shared districtwide when we are to share our results at the end of this year. While we have some resources currently to share with other campus leaders, this Technology Toolkit website will give them a teacher-facing plan that is undeniably foolproof. My goal is to provide teachers with as much as possible for them to feel empowered in the interventions, and less about creating more work for them. When we have pushback from teachers, it typically stems from the lack of knowhow to achieve intervention small-groups in our middle school setting. The district is looking at our implementation each Friday, and I truly believe this initiative is positively impacting our students so far. Once our teachers have a technology toolkit to build out these Friday plans in their PLCs, I feel they will gain more confidence and efficiency in closing educational gaps.