Saturday, June 7, 2025

All About Me

Hello,

My name is Christopher Yack. My journey to teaching has been winding and circuitous. After graduating high school in 1990, I attended college for a year before dropping out to pursue a career on Wall Street. I started out as a "runner" on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. My duties entailed running errands for floor traders. Within a year I was offered a position as a backup clerk for a specialist firm. These are the elite trading firms in charge of making markets, facilitating trades, and maintaining market liquidity. I spent my time in this position maintaining commission bills and learning everything I could about trading stocks. The apprenticeship to become a specialist broker usually takes about ten years. I was right in the thick of the curve and after ten years became a specialist broker, a member of the New York Stock Exchange, and Vice President at Bank of America. A few years down the line, automated trading disrupted human based trading, and it was time to start my second career. I completed my undergraduate degree and a master's degree in Elementary and Special Education. I began teaching kindergarten, Universal Pre-K, and Special Education. I found a district teaching position in Uniondale, New York, where I have been for the past ten years teaching Pre-k and STEAM. I'm married and have two daughters. One is a graduate of SCAD (Savannah College of Art & Design), the other is studying architecture at Georgia Tech and is a member of Navy ROTC.

The purpose of this blog is to present information accrued during the course CI6163 Technologically Driven Curriculum and Social Media at the American College of Education. In this course I have explored digital tools and how they can be implemented into instruction following best practices. The blog will act as learning journal and a place where I have accrued some of the artifacts aligned with what I have learned in this course.

Some of my hobbies include cycling and playing acoustic guitar. I began racing mountain bikes in the early 1990's and competed in races up and down the East coast. I transitioned to road cycling where I competed in hundreds of road races in New York City, including Central Park, Prospect Park, Flushing Meadows Park, Randalls Island, and Floyd Bennet Field. At 50 years old, I hung up my racing wheels but still manage to ride 4,0000 miles each year.

Some of my professional goals include completing a doctoral program and earning an Ed.D. in Curriculum and Instruction with a concentration in Special Education and becoming an administrator in my school districts special education department. When I leave the teaching profession, I want to work for an education company and deliver professional development to teachers around the country.

Thursday, June 5, 2025

The Challenges of Developing a Blended Course

The Challenges Faced While Developing a Blended Course

While developing a blended course for a Kindergarten class, there were many considerations to be negotiated and problems to solve. Kindergarten students are in the Piaget’s pre-operational stage of development and require course content that aligns with their specific capabilities. Many of the educational apps vetted were not developmentally appropriate and finding ones that were took time and patience. Kindergarten students utilize symbolic thinking and are egocentric. They use pictures to represent objects and concepts, and they view the world from their own perspective. Their attention span is limited, and they effectively learn through social interaction. Understanding how kindergarten students learn was the key to successfully designing my blended course. For the at-home portion of the lesson, finding technologies that align with my student population was a trial-and-error endeavor. Several apps were vetted to ensure learner success. The apps chosen were novel, developmentally appropriate, and easy to access. Finding apps that were appropriately paced and aligned with the lesson learning objectives were difficult to find and required a trial and error approach while vetting. Cost was a consideration and an obstacle as well. Some apps charge for access and choices had to be made based on thumbnails as to whether the apps would be aligned with the needs of my learners. There were a few apps that I paid for that I wound up not using.

At home support was also a consideration that went into the lesson planning. Alerting parents and caregivers as to the use of technology by their children was a way to ensure student safety. Requesting that students are monitored at home while using technology acts as digital safeguard for children. A JotForm attendance sheet was sent to parents and caregivers to record student participation. An email was also sent with instructions for accessing the classroom blog which contains lesson instructions. Home language considerations were addressed by providing videos in English and Spanish on the blog. Special education students would require additional supports at home. Parents of these students received additional instructions as to how to support their children. During the in-class portion of the blended lesson, dual language students were paired with English language learners for language support. Special education students were provided a calming area, movement breaks, and sensory supports. The in-class portion of the lesson also contained student tasks that were sensory, which aligns with their learning style. To address their egocentrism and increase their expressive language skills, students were tasked with sorting authentic clothes collaboratively. To address their attention span, several of the tasks were gamified. To successfully design a blended lesson for the kindergarten population, it is effective to think like a five-year-old and ask yourself, “Is this interesting, can I touch it, and is it fun”. In my experience, lessons that clear these three hurdles are gateways to success.

What to do Should the Course be Taught Again

Should I reteach this blended course, I would increase the use of authentic materials such as instruments that measure weather. Authentic materials are novel and due to their age, kindergarten students have limited access to these at home. Instruments that measure the temperature and windspeed could be used. To help students appreciate and understand the views of others, I would ask parents and caregiver to create small, one-minute videos with their children during the at home portion of the lesson that could be viewed in class.

Considerations for Using the Course as a Professional Development Opportunity

If the course had been developed as professional development opportunity for peer professional educators, I would have included more information as to why the materials chosen were appropriate for the learner population. It is important for teachers and administrators to understand that alignment of learner needs with the lesson is a prerequisite for success. There are many opportunities to embed digital resources into a blended lesson, but if they do not align with how students learn their efficacy is lost. I would have also included an assessment of how the lesson went when delivered, the lessons learned and how to best leverage the technologies chosen.

Saturday, May 24, 2025

Mod 7 Assessment, Instruction, and BYOD

Reflection

Types of BYOD Available

For the kindergarten population, the types of devices that are available include school provided iPad’s, tablets, Chromebooks, iPhones, and LeapFrog or VTech Learning Tablets. I have found these devices to have sufficient functionality for this demographic of students. Since the attention span for these students is low, it is necessary to constantly monitor what they are doing on the devices. It is recommended that each device be inspected before allowing student access to insure only teacher assigned apps and content are available.

Making More Devices Accessible

Increasing accessibility to devices could be achieved through a school-wide sharing program. There are currently not enough iPads for each student in my school building. However, placing iPads on a cart and making them accessible during the times that they are not in use by the assigned students is a viable strategy for increasing accessibility for all students. Informing parents and caregivers of developmentally appropriate apps for their children could lead to students being granted more access to devices at home. Lobbying school administrators for more devices by informing them of the positive academic outcomes they can provide is another way to increase student access to devices. Asking for donations of older devices that people may not be using anymore could increase the number of available devices. Many devices, such as Leapfrog tablets and Chromebooks are outgrown by students as they move up through the grades. These devices can languish inside student homes before eventually being discarded. Asking for these devices then is not intrusive. Holding fundraisers with clearly defined goals could also help in procuring more devices.

The Use of Smartphones in Support of this Assignment

Smartphones would be an excellent digital tool for supporting this assignment. Students could be tasked with using smartphones to take pictures of authentic items of clothing that they see outside of the classroom and then embedding those pictures into their digital stories. For this lesson, students are to use internet searches to find pictures. Having them use authentic pictures would increase the novelty and student engagement. If students took pictures of their own clothes, it would increase ownership of their lesson. Students could also use the phones to share their pictures with each other, thus increasing the collaborative portion of the lesson. Finally, students could share their completed digital stories with each other using their phones.

The Usefulness of Digital Storytelling as an Assessment Strategy

Digital storytelling permits students to expand their understanding of concepts through personal engagement. When students are required to express their thoughts and explore their perspectives, they are better able to critically reflect on their learning and experiences. This leads to deeper comprehension and long-term retention of knowledge. This strategy transfer to a variety of contexts. Digital storytelling enables students with disparate skills to collaborate, communicate and create and express their understandings in diverse ways. As a teacher, this creates multiple and unique assessment opportunities.