To conclude the summer, we have the announcement of our August EdTech grant recipient! This month's award goes to Kimberly Eure, a middle school teacher at John F Kennedy Middle School in Suffolk, VA! Kimberly is dedicated to helping her "quirky" students find books they love and applied for our grant in hopes that technology might be able to play a role in that! Her project is creatively called 'Reading to Their Own Tune' as Kimberly is going to be using both music and technology to increase student engagement with reading and keep that excitement alive!
For Kimberly, grabbing and keeping the attention of her students for long periods of time isn’t always easy, but she knows that educational technologies, like the ones she'll receive with the grant, can help. As middle schoolers, a lot of them are starting to develop the sense that they don’t need to waste their time with some of the things they are required to learn and Kimberly wants to be sure they don’t lose touch with what’s most important. One thing today’s students are interested in, however, is technology and, when it can be used as part of reading, that helps them gravitate towards it all the more.
Pretty much all of Kimberly’s students love music and that love is equally strong for technology. Since the Sphero Specdrums bring the two together in a very engaging way, it seems like it was a no-brainer for her to request these items when she applied for our grant. By combining two different types of media, Kimberly is much more confident that she will be able to engage her students in fun and engaging STEAM lessons that are made possible through literature and get and keep their attention for longer periods of time. Ultimately, she wants the enjoyment of literature to be something that comes natural to her students and we share the belief with her that tech tools can help make that a reality.
The Specdrums help make in-class collaboration a lot more attainable and Kimberly sees the potential of this technology for helping her students learn to create. She wants them to work together in creating music that reflects the literature pieces they’re reading in class, which we think is a very creative idea! Not only will it help them get more familiar with different kinds of technology, it seems like an effective way to help them stay more engaged in what they’re learning. Since the Specdrums are perfect for small groups of students, Kimberly is planning on taking advantage of this feature and continuing to help her kids get more comfortable with the learning process, giving feedback to each other, and growing together once they receive the grant materials.
Once her students are comfortable with using the Sphero Specdrums to simply create music, Kimberly will challenge each of them to use this technology to create their own pieces of music that accompany their fiction writing. She wants them to create multiple drafts of each piece and really focus on fine tuning their writing in the process. She’s even going to let her students share their literature-inspired musical creations with their parents and other community members through the power of, you guessed it, YouTube! Kimberly’s end goal after implementing the grant materials is to pair music and technology to inspire lifelong readers who make it a point to find new books to read!
We love Kimberly's intentions for using her new tech tools! We'll be providing her with some Sphero Specdrums sets so her students can create music that reflects the themes of their favorite books! Be sure to follow our updates on social media to see how Kimberly uses these new tech tools! And, if you are interested in applying for our EdTech grant for the month of September, the application is now open and will remain open until Sept. 20. We encourage you to apply if you have not yet done so!