Making Learning Experiences Better!
Education technology has grown to be a key part of modern learning and teaching, establishing meaningful interaction and inclusivity in classrooms globally. Its progression continues to close gaps in accessibility while equipping educators with new innovative tools to make learning experiences better. Teachers are enhancing student performance by incorporating newly emerging technologies such as AI and personalized learning strategies and responding effectively to various learning needs. The significance of education technology is that it can convert traditional teaching practices into interactive, effective practices that enable teachers and students to excel in today's interconnected world.
Renee Dawson, an Education Technology Consultant, is a passionate leader in this revolutionary field. She possesses a reflective and imaginative methodology in her work, showing a commitment to creating professional development programs that enable teachers to maximize the full potential of technology. She works towards making technology accessible and sensible, allowing teachers to establish inclusive and motivating learning spaces.
Renee Dawson's capacity to engage with diverse educational communities and her dedication to meeting students' and teachers' specific needs reflect her powerful vision and leadership for creating a new future for education technology.
Design for You Learning, a consultancy firm with expertise in educational technology, is at the hub of these initiatives. The firm partners with schools, teachers, and ed-tech providers by way of innovative solutions and tailored professional development offerings to inspire effective technology integration in the classroom. Design for You Learning is at the forefront of developing technology-facilitated learning by emphasizing customized assistance, hands-on training, and constant collaboration. Its commitment to developing a culture of innovation and inclusion makes it a go-to partner for educators working to improve learning experiences and outcomes.
Let's see what Renee Dawson does with her groundbreaking strategies for advanced education:
Embracing Professional Development Roles
Renee Dawson instructed special education in multiple grade levels and subject areas for 15 years. During seven of those years, she spent most of her time working with students and teachers to determine and implement assistive technology in the classroom. In 2021, she became an Instructional Technology Coach and discovered that she enjoyed creating and delivering professional development to teachers.
Her grant-funded Instructional Technology Coach position was eliminated after funding ended. She contacted Ed Tech companies she had ties to through ambassador programs or had worked with previously on webinars, blog posts, or podcasts. She discovered that Screencastify needed contract Professional Development Facilitators.
Having been hailed as a platform super user and best content creator for many years in her district and globally, she was thrilled to be joining their ranks to demonstrate other teachers the wonderful benefits of their platform and how video can help improve teaching.
Screencastify is not the sole business she contracts with for Professional Development Facilitation. She works with Almanack AI to develop onboarding videos and professional development materials for users and assists in setting up an ambassador program for the teachers who utilize the platform.
She also just began a contract with EliteGamingLIVE, an esports league and STEM education platform she coached for in her previous position. She will work with them and apply her background as a coach to their league to develop onboarding and professional development content.
Renee Dawson transitioned to an independent Ed Tech Consultant because she felt that it would be best to engage as many educators as possible and make an impact on student learning by offering high-quality professional development and onboarding. She loves designing engaging, concise, and valuable content for educators. She excels in the consulting position because she is continually learning how to "up her game" and developing in her content generation process based on what she has learned and feedback that she gets from her work.
Planning for Successful Professional Development
Renee Dawson learns that the most effective means of incorporating new tools into educator professional development sessions is to get them to work with the tool as much as possible. Renee typically has minimal slides to present because she gets educators to work with the new tool or platform for the majority of the session. Renee plans her session development under the paradigm that she has three general types of learners in her sessions: speedboats, tugboats, and anchors.
Theoretically, a speedboat requires its course and couldn't drag an anchor off the bottom of the lake without the line breaking. So, she assigns her speedboat instructors an independent activity they can complete at their own rate without being held back by the less technology-oriented instructors.
For her tugbats, she typically distributes them evenly among the anchors so that they can assist in pulling the anchors up off the bottom with minimal support. These two sets get special training on the tool or platform and many hands-on exercises to make them feel comfortable and confident in using the tool or platform in their classrooms.
She also offers a series of follow-up classroom check-ins with teachers who require additional support in putting new technology into practice. She tends to begin by modeling implementation, then proceeds to co-teaching with them on the tool and finally monitors them practicing the tool on their own in their classroom. It requires a lot of planning on her part, but it leads to greater implementation following the first professional development session.
Personalized Learning for Diverse Tech Skills
She has firsthand and remembers that bridging the digital divide is not merely a matter of giving people access to devices and connectivity—it's about giving teachers the power to use technology in ways that increase learning for every child. She works extensively with teachers of varying backgrounds, particularly teachers who work with historically underserved populations.
Their insights are priceless in crafting professional development that tackles core dilemmas. Her process is centered on continuous learning and persistent practice. She is concerned with developing long-term capacity, as opposed to short-term proficiency. Her aim is to build a self-perpetuating culture of tech-powered innovation in schools. A few of the ways that attention to digital equity informs her professional development are:
Personalized Learning: She understands that teachers possess different tech expertise and environments. Her professional learning sessions provide flexible, tailored learning choices instead of one-size-fits-all training.
Instructional Design Focus: Renee Dawson moves beyond entry-level tool training to emphasize the way technology can enhance instructional design. Teachers learn to create tech-supported lessons that foster higher-order thinking and creativity.
Emphasize Equity-Centered Practices: She clearly discusses how technology can close the achievement gaps and deliver more equal learning opportunities. This involves training in Universal Design for Learning principles and teacher observations several times during the school year using the Technology Integration Matrix.
To gauge the effect of her professional learning and make sure it is actually making a difference, she seeks out a number of indicators during her classroom walk-throughs, such as modifications in classroom technology integration instructional practices, student engagement and learning results – especially for historically disadvantaged groups, teacher confidence and effectiveness in utilizing technology, and building teacher leaders in educational technology within her facility.
As she further develops her practice, she looks forward to new technologies such as AI opening the door to further personalization of professional development. Her central focus still lies, though, in the human factor – enabling teachers to leverage technology to develop more inclusive, interactive, and engaging learning experiences for all students. By placing digital equity at the heart of her vision for professional development, she is not only closing the digital divide but reconceiving what is possible in education.
Effective Usage of AI Tools for Teachers
Renee Dawson's most favorite session she presented was on Curipod, which is an AI tool. She created the whole session in Curipod with interactive questions and engaging brain breaks for teachers to understand how they could use it in their class. She realized it was a success because several teachers implemented the tool the very next day with what they made during the session.
Over a single educator entirely shifted their view regarding the use of AI for teaching after witnessing how much the tool could do for them to deploy in the classroom within minutes. An educator even scheduled time for a coaching session on Curipod for the following day during her planning time despite being against the use of AI at first. Once she felt that Curipod's AI capabilities saved her time and worked smarter, not harder, her perspective changed, and it significantly improved her curriculum implementation.
Developing Engaging Learning Content for Students
Esports teams and the Minecraft Student Ambassadors programs positively impact student development in numerous ways. The two most outstanding areas where Renee Dawson noticed significant changes in the students who took part were their school attendance and classroom behavior. She began a "Lunch Bunch Esports Club" during last year's school year and collaborated with school administration, counselors, and the social worker to reach out to at-risk students to join. Students received their lunch, took it to the esports room, and were able to play video games for about 20 minutes a day.
In one month, attendance among the participating students rose by 21%, and suspensions fell by 27%. From the beginning of the program in October until the conclusion of the school year, the attendance of the participating students rose by 63% and suspensions fell by 57%. In addition to gaming space and socialization with their peers, she also tutored students or remediated curriculum requirements as necessary to ensure they retained passing grades in their core subject classes. She frequently used her free time outside of school to develop interactive and fun learning materials for them to utilize for remediation or additional practice.
Through the Minecraft Student Ambassadors program, she collaborated with students on leadership and encouraged them to develop the confidence they needed to promote Minecraft for Education in classrooms around the school. When teachers needed to integrate a Minecraft lesson in their classroom, she would walk the students through the lesson activities so that they could know and understand what the activities were and how to assist the teacher in executing the lesson and students in finishing the activities.
Maintaining Engagement with Themed Social Media Posts
Renee Dawson served as Almanack AI's Community Manager but transitioned into content creation for onboarding, professional development materials, and their ambassador program. Design for You Learning is her consulting LLC.
As a Community Manager at Almanack, though, she utilized a social media planning calendar and scheduling the posts to maintain interaction. She had a theme by day of the week:
Motivation Monday: She made a post with a motivational quote that mentioned the use of AI in education.
Tech Tip Tuesday: She made posts with a tech tip for the Almanack platform.
Women Wednesday: She made posts with well-known women leaders in AI education.
Thoughtfulness Thursday: She made posts that asked a question for the followers to think about and share their thoughts through comments or by sharing and adding their thoughts.
Follower Friday: She made posts that featured one of their followers and their efforts in AI education.
Virtual Teaching and Content Creation Niche
Her inspiration for creativity is driven by what's trending now, TV shows, movies, and anything the students bring to class that they are interested in. Renee Dawson holds a certification in K-12 special education core content and adaptive learning, plus English as a Second Language and Gifted endorsements.
The education she received through those programs assisted her in developing content at grade-level standards at differentiated levels to address all learners' needs. She has always found herself to be a creative person, and when she began teaching virtually amid the pandemic, she discovered her forte in developing content for her students that she wanted other teachers to find useful to apply and utilize in their classrooms.
Continuous Learning for Education Leaders
Ed Tech certifications assist Renee Dawson in remaining at the forefront of Ed Tech and ensuring she knows more about the tools she offers professional development on or suggests to teachers for implementation in their classrooms. She strongly feels the best educators, particularly education leaders, never cease to learn. In terms of the most revolutionary certification she has obtained, she would have to say either her Apple Learning Coach certification or her Microsoft Innovative Education Expert (MIEE) certification.
Through the Apple Learning Coach program, she was taught how to become a much better Instructional Technology Coach. They also offered a number of useful coaching materials she refers to as she supports teachers and Ed Tech businesses. She considers the MIEE certification transformative since there are new learning requirements to fulfill each year to be recertified. Those learning requirements are always current and very useful when dealing with Microsoft products in the educational field.
Prioritizing Digital Literacy and Diverse Learning
Renee Dawson's experience working with Title 1 schools has given her excellent insights into bridging the digital divide, informing an equity-centered approach emphasizing access and holistic support. It's not just giving students devices. Some important lessons learned and recommendations for educators striving for the same are as follows:
Provide home internet access: Most low-income students have no stable home internet. Programs such as the Verizon Innovative Learning Initiative and Comcast's Internet Essentials program can be effective and viable options. Innovative solutions such as constructing WiFi towers to provide district internet in the homes of students, sending WiFi-laden buses to create internet hotspots in communities, and offering free WiFi hotspots for students to use at home have also been introduced by some districts.
It’s not just about having technology but how it’s used. Educators should focus on:
Digital literacy education: Integrate comprehensive digital skills training into the curriculum, covering essential computer use, internet safety, and even introductions to AI and its societal implications.
Diverse learning options: Provide multiple ways for students to access and engage with content, including text, audio, video, and hands-on activities.
Support families: Provide digital literacy classes for parents and caregivers, mostly bilingual or YouTube University-taped classes that parents can access at their convenience.
Renee Dawson's recommendation to educators who share the same objectives is to test student access devices and the internet prior to starting any new tech projects, develop curricula and select tools (particularly AI tools) that are suitable for student populations of varied diversities (including special education students and English Language Learners), continue to incorporate print material and offline activities to complement learning and avoid digital burnout, creates digital citizenship through education on technology use responsibly and ethically and research grants and available funding that can assist in meeting students' technology needs.
By taking a holistic approach that addresses access, quality of use, and broader socioeconomic factors, educators can work effectively towards bridging the digital divide in Title 1 schools and beyond.
Aiming for Ed Tech Conference Keynotes
For Renee Dawson's future career path, the sky's the limit! She would be thrilled to be a guest presenter or keynote speaker for an Ed Tech convention someday. She will keep looking for contract work with the companies she respects. She believes in sharing that enthusiasm with as many educators as she can, getting them pumped and ready to use those tools in their classrooms.
She went into education because she needed to alter the way she learned and how disconnected she felt to K-12 education when she was a student. Most of her classroom career, she did not have the support and leadership she needed to fully alter the method of learning that occurred in her classroom. In her favorite book about education philosophy, "Ratchetdemic," Christopher Edmin invites teachers to "be your most ratchet educator self."
That is, unapologetically taking your entire self into the classroom and making an authentic connection with students of all backgrounds by engaging with their cultural references in order to meet students where they are without sacrificing intellectual seriousness. That was her emphasis as a classroom teacher. Now that she is an Ed Tech Consultant, she would like to keep sharing that philosophy with as many teachers as possible and imparting them what they do not have to enable them to make it feasible-assistance to transform classroom education from an instructor-centered learning space to a student-centered learning space.
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