How A Teacher From Michigan Uses ShowMe To Enhance Students Reading
In our series of ShowMe educators, we love to feature exceptional teachers who use ShowMe in their teaching process to enhance the study experience of students. This month we had a great pleasure to interview Alyce Howarth from Michigan who uses educational technology to demonstrate close reading at a variety of levels.
Alyce Howarth is a sixth-grade social studies teacher in Michigan. Over the past twenty-six years, she has taught first graders through university students, mostly working with English language learners. She calls herself rather ‘a reluctant user of technology’, but tries to implement some solution in her classroom.
As the biggest obstacle in implementing EdTech Alyce points out a lack of technology at students houses.
“We have an online textbook but many of my students do not have adequate technology in their homes to access it, so we use the paper version in class,” she explains. Many teachers struggle with similar problems that is why it’s essential to make sure all students receive the study materials, even if they have to be printed out.
Among some EdTech tools that are present in Alyce’s classroom, she points out SmartBoard, Flocabulary and ShowMe. Alyce has not decided to fully flip her teaching process, yet she takes full advantage of educational technology tools that maintain in the blended learning method.
ShowMe has been part of Alyce’s teaching routine for over 3 years. The app helps her in providing students with some extra support when they struggle with reading. “I upload assignments at the highest and lowest reading levels and then read them aloud and annotate them,” Alyce explains. ShowMe allows her struggling readers to better access the content Alyce creates.
Alyce prepares her ShowMe lessons by firstly create slides of uploaded images from a variety of sources – web, device, cloud, taking a photo. Later she voices over the images and marks important parts or text that students can find difficult. With ShowMe educators are also able to upload the whole document or a presentation for Google Drive – it saves a lot of time and it’s extremely useful while teaching English.
Make sure to check out stories of our previously featured educators:
Personalized learning with ShowMe by a teacher from Melbourne
