Teacher Mentoring Success!

Uh Oh!!! We don't know if we did the Teacher Mentoring Project 100% accurately but hey...we did it lol. Anyways... the name of our teacher is Ms. Lateefah Freeman, a Special Education teacher at Hollins Meadows Elementary in Alexandria, VA. Since she is a friend of (Quinn's) family, we both know her pretty well but t make things easier, we added her on Facebook. Although she is not a high school teacher, I believe she still benefited from this project and it helped keep her updated on a couple different type of media. Plus, as we talked about in class, teaching methods may be switched over via internet sometime in the near future so we did our best to teach her what we [now] know. Its ironic that we taught her how to use technology face-to-face for the most part. We also kept in contact via the telephone, Blackberry messaging, or Skype because she preferred to either see the steps or be walked through the process. We were very lucky to have her take a little bit of time to do this for us since we did ask her on a late notice right around report card season. The evening after we were told (in class) that we could choose any teacher, we immediately thought of Ms. Freeman to see if she was interested in being adopted because she always talks about wanting the newest technology or to be up on the newest media and we figured this to be the perfect opportunity to teach her and it was beneficial towards the both of us. Upon adoption, we asked if she knew how to use any of the forms of technology that we had gone over in class thus far. She told us she had just recently got a Facebook and wasn't too interested in learning about MySpace since people her age aren't really on there. We told her that we wanted to introduce her to Google Docs and Twitter as well as get her more familiar with Facebook. She laughed when we said Twitter becasue, liek most people, she had no idea that the site could be used as a search engine. We did the Google Doc tutoring face-to-face over the Thanksgiving Holiday because we were able to go to her school after it got it since we were on break and work with her for a while on this. She was not completely oblivious to this site, as they are trying to get more teachers to use it, but we made sure to show her how to go into documents and add others to edit.view and how to link websites among other useful tips. Ms. Freeman thought it was easier to do lesson plans through Google Docs because her and her colleagues can contribute and be aware of the schedule for each week. We were happy this mentoring project ended up going well being that it was a difficulty obstacle in the beginning of the year due to our lack of teachers following up with us. We were able to show a teacher how to knowledgeable about technology and hopefully she can help bring insight about what we taught her to people she knows.