My Summer School Teachers: Susan Oxnevad

Continuing with my series sharing about some of the fabulous teachers I took the opportunity to learn from this summer.

Susan Oxnevad is a technology integration specialist. Since she and I have similar jobs, I have bumped into her several times on the web as I have researched different topics for teachers.  Susan does an amazing job of sharing not only what she knows, but what she creates. And she creates amazing resources.  I am really in awe of the amazing thought, creativity, and care she puts into the tools for learning that she creates and so freely shares. 

As I said, she is all over the web sharing resources, but this summer, I had the opportunity to attend several of her webinars she presented on Simple k12. Susan covered topics such as the Common Core, Digital Differentiation and Google Apps for Education.  

Susan has a great talent for planning and developing lessons thinking of every detail to help insure success for her students.  She does an amazing job scaffolding instruction for both students and teachers. She has has built an extremely useful toolbox of templates, tutorials, websites and lesson plans to help guide differentiated learning.

Here are a few examples of the the ways Susan has shared with me and inspired me this summer.

Thinglink: Susan is master at using Thinglink to share information and create tutorials. Thinglink is a nifty Web 2.0 tools where you can add links too text, videos, audio, websites, etc. within the image. Susan has used this to create these multi layer tutorials that include examples, video tutorials and links to more information. I can't wait to create my own, but Susan's are really helpful and she has generously shared her creations with Creative Commons licenses, so I am also able to use her great work as I share with teachers. Here is an example of her work with Thinglink. 

Help links: Susan anticipates the needs of her students and builds video tutorials into her lessons.  This helps students to be able to get over learning curve hurdles when using new tools and to focus on the learning. For example, if her lesson plans include students inserting a video into a presentation, she provides a quick YouTube video reminding students of the steps to take to embed the video. Students can review the video and keep working instead of waiting for help.

Templates: Another scaffold she provides for her students is starting them off with a template. The templates include steps by step instructions including links to video tutorials as needed. Susan has done a beautiful job of creating templates that walk students though the steps but also provide students with opportunities to choose their own direction, interest and tools. I love this example she shares of using a Google Presentation template for student created multimedia vocabulary cards.  

Thanks Susan for sharing your learning and resources.

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