Podcast409: All My Lesson Plans are in Google Docs! (An Interview with Shelly Fryer)

Summary: This podcast is a 17 minute interview with Shelly Fryer, who is teaching third, fourth, and fifth grade students in a self-contained classroom this year in Oklahoma City. Shelly has been out of the classroom for over a decade, and in returning has committed to teaching as a twenty-first century educator. One of her top priorities was to find a way to digitally create and share her lesson plans. In this interview she explains how she's using Google Docs for lesson planning, how she's directly linking to YouTube videos she's using in lessons, how she's utilized some paid YouTube videos for "brain breaks" with students as well as commercially sold lesson plan resources on "Teachers Pay Teachers." She also shares some of her other newly developed technology skills including creating shorter PDF file "excerpts" of longer files, using her Smartboard for digital writing, dabbling a bit with Twitter, and using the Augmented Reality app CoLAR with students. Technology skills Shelly wants to develop in upcoming weeks include using her YouTube channel to create playlists of videos, using a classroom KidBlog site with her students for interactive writing, using a classroom Twitter account to connect her students to a wider audience for their writing, learning how to differentiate math lessons for her students using the Khan Academy "coaching" option, finding free lessons plan resources on Curriki, and introducing her students to programming and problem solving on the iPad using the free CargoBot app. Check out the podcast shownotes for links to these referenced resources and tools. Please contact Shelly on Twitter @sfryer to share words of encouragement as well as feedback and ideas.