Descriptive Profile of Jennifer Heckel

Edtech 554- Boise State Spring 2014

Jennifer Heckel is a 28 year old female Caucasian teacher from Northeast Philadelphia. Ms. Heckel doubled majored by receiving her Bachelors of Science in Bible and Early Childhood Education from Philadelphia Biblical University in December of 2007. After graduation, she began teaching kindergarten at a private PreK- 12th grade Christian school and is currently in her 6th year of service. Her main responsibilities as a teacher include educating a classroom of eighteen diverse learners in an inclusion-type setting, teaching all content areas, providing qualities assessments to gauge student learning and provide support when needed, and maintaining a stimulating, yet structured classroom environment for early learners. In addition to her teaching responsibilities, she also has served as the committee head for an elementary technology committee and led several training sessions/workshops for fellow coworkers on technology tools for the elementary classroom. The main training she provided revolved around the new SMARTboards installed in the elementary classrooms and Google tools when the school looked into changing from Microsoft to Google apps for education. She currently is in her last semester as a graduate student at Boise State University, from which she will receive her Masters of Educational Technology in May 2014. Her main areas of interest/expertise are early childhood development and technology integration for early learners. Ms. Heckel has attended the Pennsylvania Educational Technology Expo and Conference (Pete &C) for the last two years and gained valuable training and tools for integrating technology in her personal classroom. As far as technology goes, Ms. Heckel currently has a SMARTboard in her classroom and one personal computer for children to share for centers time. In addition, she purchased her own iPad that she uses for student testing and support activities. School resources include four projector carts for teachers to sign out and utilize, two computer labs for classroom use, and wireless internet throughout the entire building. The kindergarten classrooms, as well as all classrooms from 3-12th grade, have SMARTboards installed The atmosphere at her current school is not very conducive to technology use. A lack of professional development hinders teacher knowledge of technology tools and uses. Most teachers are intimidated by technology and are unwilling to spend extra time on their own learning about its uses. The unreliable networking and sporadic internet failures frustrate teachers and make them see technology as unstable rather than resourceful. Older teachers are very resistant to changing their approach and current curriculum does not have many technological resources

readily available, which means teachers need to search for or make their own resources for lessons. While most teachers at her current school are yet to fully utilize technology due to the above mentioned reasons, Ms. Heckel integrates technology daily in her classroom. Since she grew up using technology as a child and has a great comfort level with current technological tools, she has decided to use these resources to meet the needs of early learners. Knowing that early learners need to be fully engaged and need to interact with the materials presented rather than passively receive the content knowledge, she decided to use something that her children love, technology, to bridge the gap between school and their lives at home. Most, if not all, of her teaching is done using various methods on the interactive white board. In addition, she houses an online portfolio of student work and accomplishments on a program called Threering.com, where parents are linked to their own childs portfolio so they can access their childs work and see their childs progress easily. Also, different apps for behavior and communication are used to aid in parent/teacher contact and communication. She has received great feedback from parents regarding the use of the apps and consistent communication that takes place between teacher and parent, and has noted a rise in student excitement when it comes to learning when lessons use technology. Based on this information, Ms. Heckel is currently in between the middle and upper tiers when it comes to the Concerns-Based Adoption Model, or CBAM. She has moved past the lower tiers of awareness, information, and personal because of the shift of her thinking from just what technology can do in her classroom to the more global look into the technology itself. She has attended training, workshops, and researched how the technology works in general. In addition, she also understands the overall impact of technology for both teacher and students. Currently, Ms. Heckel is working on creating units, lessons, and individual assignments that focus on using the technology available at her school. She is working on carefully matching common core standards for kindergarten students to her lessons while incorporating real-world technology that the children will experience in their lives. She is also working on analyzing the differences between technology use and non-technology lessons, and seeing if the technology use is positively impacting her students learning, or distracting them from the standards they need to meet. One area that needs some growth when it comes to fully moving into the upper tiers of the CBAM deals with collaboration. While she has carefully researched different uses of the technology and tried to be very innovative with her lesson/unit creations, she has not reached outside her classroom much to see what other teachers in her school are doing or how they are specifically using the technology. She has developed a personal network on twitter that has helped her gain ideas, but more collaboration with fellow coworkers in her school would help

give her specific ideas with the resources available to her. Also, open communication with coworkers would provide a much more supportive environment in general. Also, more research and data regarding the results of the technology use need to be generated by Ms. Heckel to fully move into the upper tier. While some tools have been explored, other similar technology has not been tested to see if it can produce even better results for students. Student learning needs to be thoroughly compared to see if the technology is truly accomplishing increased learning and connections for the students. When Ms. Heckel moves fully to the upper tier, the increased knowledge and resources that she has will help her create an atmosphere of open dialogue to allow each coworkers unique gifts to be shown through technology. It will help create not a one-size-fits-all approach to technology, but more of an innovative, reflective environment with open collaboration and discussion without judgment. This growth will help others not be intimidated by technology, but be open to the possibilities due to the excitement and growth seen in practice.