Name
Elizabeth Harris
What Do You Teach?
11th-12th: AP Language and Composition, AP Literature and Composition, and Debate
Where Do you Teach?
Goose Creek Memorial High School
How Long Have You Been Teaching?
5 years
How Does Educational Technology Play a Role in Your Classroom?
Educational Technology plays a major role in my classroom. When planning lessons, I always work to incorporate a technology component into every lesson. From using a Prezi or PowerPoint presentation to support a classroom lecture to allowing opportunities for students to demonstrate mastery of a concept through a multimedia project, I find that incorporating technology helps to better engage my students.
How Do You Find Technology in the Classroom Helpful?
Technology allows for meaningful collaboration in the classroom. Since most students are familiar with online social networking sites, I find that as long as I present material or create projects that mimic social networking layouts, my students perform better. For example, I realized that once students had to post their reading responses to a message board that could be viewed by all of their peers, they spent more time crafting and editing their responses.
What Is Your Favorite Piece of Classroom Technology? Why?
While I do use the E.L.M.O. on a daily basis in all of my classes, my current favorite piece of classroom technology is Google Drive. Last year, I made the decision to make our debate program paperless. Instead of printing thousands of pages of current event files, my debate students now have a common drive in the cloud that allows them to collaboratively collect files for their extemporaneous speaking competitions. My favorite part of using Google Drive is the fact that each student can see their individual contribution to the team effort since Google Drive displays their picture as an icon next to each file they create and upload.
What Is On Your Technology Wish List For Your Classroom? Why?
In a perfect world, I would have a permanent cart of high-speed laptops in my classroom. I use a classroom website as well as message boards on www.turnitin.com to manage my English courses, so it would be ideal to have the resources to provide a laptop for each student to use in class.
What Do You Love Most About Teaching?
My favorite part about teaching is those “small moments” that happen in the classroom. Consequently, I value the small accomplishments: from the heated classroom debate that goes 30 minutes longer than planned to the student who comes racing to class to say she heard one of our vocabulary words on the news, I love watching each of my students learn and grow as a student of the written word.
Nominated by:
Regina Rogers, Ed Tech Specialist for GCM Feeder Pattern
"Ms. Harris has used technology in her classroom to bring English literature to life. Recently, she had the students dramatize MacBeth and videoed them to help the students understand the play. She used MovieMaker to edit the material. She is currently working on a flipped-classroom approach to increase student learning and success. "