Hey, y’all! I’m Michaela Ibrahim, a full-time educator who has taught little 3 year olds all the way to 60 year olds for over seven years :)
I started out my journey during the summers and in after-school programs where I would work with elementary students. I worked in a Christian school, so we had lots of lessons revolving around the Bible (which also helped me work on reading comprehension and math skills with them, too ;) ). From there, I went on to major in English and Secondary Education in college and became a high school teacher in 2015. I taught AP Language and Composition (11th grade), Honors 12 English Literature, and Ninth Grade. In those classes, I had a mix of students with IEPs and 504s; the term “differentiation” became my middle name!
In 2017, I was chosen to pilot the one-to-one program FCPS would shift to in the 2019-2020 school year. I was given a class set of 32 laptops devoted to my class specifically. I never had to check them out, and each student had a designated laptop during class. I adapted the writing process, created new activities, tested out the various ways to conduct assessments, and created rules for classroom management. In the fall of 2018, I helped orchestrate a school-wide professional development (and even held a session) preparing teachers for next year’s one-to-one initiative.
At the end of the school year in 2019, I decided to take a different route as an educator. I would leave the world of high school and enter the corporate world as an educator. I now work with adults at a technology company that focuses on cloud work. In my new world, technology isn’t an issue for us. FCPS went one-to-one, but our company is one-to-three monitors, a laptop, and a mouse and anything else you could possibly want. In that sense, I have been lucky to avoid the struggle of technology. But in another sense, we don’t have school-wide applications or tools that I had access to in Fairfax County. Much of what I create, I would have to advocate for the need or use of it. I don’t see my students daily, and they don’t necessarily graduate. It’s a very different approach to being an educator.
Nonetheless, being a former English teacher (and a forever English nerd), I highly value communication through the spoken word, actions, and the written word. So where does technology fit in with all of this? That’s what I’m going to discover throughout this blog. Stay tuned for a book review coming up on Reclaiming conversation: The power of talk in a digital age by Sherry Turkle.
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