Who am I?

Sarah Allred is the Instructional Lead Teacher at Braxton Craven School, an all 6th grade middle school. She has 15 years of teaching experience at the middle school level. Her educational background includes a Bachelor of Science degree in Elementary Education earned at the University of NC Greensboro, National Board Certification in Early Adolescent English Language Arts, and a Master of Arts in Education in Instructional Technology earned at East Carolina University. She has taught language arts, social studies, science, and technology. She serves her school in many leadership roles. Her passion is searching for new ways to use technology to improve student learning. Additional roles she fills are mother of two amazing kids, and wife of a police officer. She enjoys reading, gardening, and digital photography.



Sunday, July 17, 2011

Digital Art Portfolio

Ever since my first child began preschool, I have Loved it when my kids brought home school work and all those cute art projects! The hand print art, strings of colored macaroni, and multitude of drawings. These are treasures to a mom and dad, but unfortunately as time passes these treasures look worse for the wear. Besides that, there are SO many of them I want to keep them all. How could I throw our something my sweet babies made? At some point a problemem arises. What do you do with all this stuff?? Add to the fact that I am hesitant to throw things out, my daughter is showing frightening signs of wanting to be a hoarder (kidding . . . A little). How can I save all these great memories without being buried by all the paper?
Technology to the rescue! This afternoon, my daughter (10 yrs old) photographed each of her artistic masterpieces she had created so far this summer, and then I taught her how to upload the pics to a cloud storage tool. Finally I helped her set up a LiveBinder (www.live binders.com) where she could organize, name and save all her creations. She was so excited that she could then share the binder with Grandparents and friends, or even do a formal presentation from our computer screen! Great way to save her creations AND clear out the paper clutter!
We still have lots of art my son created in preschool this past year. Tomorrow I think we will try photographing with my smartphone so we can upload straight to Dropbox with one less step. I will share a link to my LiveBinder once we get it in presentation condition.

(As a side note in respect to my quest to find an ePortfolio tool to use in my classroom this year . . . I think this may be it!)

No comments:

Post a Comment