Shelly Fryer Reflection
According to Shelly Fryer's About Me page, Fryer is a teacher, author, speaker, and advocate for children. She teaches 3rd and 4th grade students at Positive Tomorrows, Oklahoma’s only elementary school specifically for homeless children. Shelly’s passion is helping her students love learning. She believes student learning in the classroom should be engaging. Shelly encourages students to make choices about how they learn best. With over 20 years of teaching experience, Shelly has taught in an iPad 1:1 classroom since 2013. She believes students need to understand their voices matter and can be shared with others beyond the walls of their classroom.
On Shelly Fryer's blog, one can find a page called, "Technology 101 Skills for Teachers." On this page, I learned that technology tools should be used to enhance and amplify student creativity. According to Shelly Fryer, "Creating and making with technology is so important! With iPads specifically, teachers need to begin building their own sense of “app literacy” to know what is possible and what apps are appropriate for students’ developmental levels and needs. Teachers need to learn “workflows” for using different apps in sequence or together." In addition to developing app literacy and a shared vocabulary which can be used with iPads, teachers also need encouragement and support to create “channels” for saving and sharing student digital projects. Technology tools like an iPad can empower teachers to use “enrichment assessment” activities with students which can provide extremely helpful insight into what students understand, have synthesized, and can demonstrate. Some of the apps Shelly Fryer's students and her regularly use to demonstrate understanding are Opinion, Book Creator, Shadow Puppet EDU, SeeSaw, Pic Collage Kids, and iMovie. Furthermore, Shelly Fryer uses QR Codes and her classroom digital portfolio, SeeSaw, to share links to videos and other digital curriculum sites they use in lessons. The website Fryer uses to create QR Codes on her classroom computer is createqrcode.appspot.com. She copy and pastes these QR Codes into Google Documents she prints for students to use at different learning stations. Students use the free iPad app i-Nigma to scan QR codes and directly view videos or visit websites Shelly Fryer has selected. The use of QR Codes, SeeSaw, and their classroom website is very important from an Internet safety standpoint. According to Shelly Fryer, "I never require my students to search online for a curriculum link we are using in class. That could not only waste time, it also could present multiple opportunities for students to be distracted or see inappropriate web content." Shelly Fryer is an inspiring educator that I will continue to follow throughout my years of teaching. Her passion for teaching is evident through her blog posts, website, and YouTube videos. The way she integrates technology into her classroom is absolutely remarkable. The integration of technology into the classroom setting not only makes learning creative, but it enriches what you are teaching! To other educators, I hope you find Shelly Fryer's blog as useful as I have found it to be for me. |
Featured about is a YouTube video of Wes and Shelly Fryer discussing their ideas of how to integrate the use of technology into the classroom setting and why this is important.