Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Patti A. Raeburn
school teacher. Having left Corporate America eight years earlier to become a stay-at-home-
mom, I began volunteering at my sons school. At the request of the school principal, I took the
CBEST test and was immediately hired as a long-term substitute teacher in a kindergarten
classroom to finish out the school year. After only three days, I knew that I wanted to spend the
In the fall of 2011, I enrolled in the combined multi-subject teaching credential and M.A.
in Ed. program, but completed only the teaching credential courses and began subbing full-time
in the fall of 2012. After subbing for a year, I was hired as a temporary fourth-grade teacher and
promised a permanent position in first grade if I would commit to returning to APU to complete
program.
GROWTH ASSESSMENT 3
History of Coursework
Personal Growth
Over the course of the past six years, I have experienced a tremendous amount of
personal growth. Both the credential coursework, and now the Master's coursework, have
enriched my life and have become interwoven with my simultaneous roles of mother, wife,
teacher, student and Christian. I have discovered that teaching is not only what I do, it is Who I
Am! I am so thankful to have found this path and His purpose for my life. While I have always
been a Christian, I admit that I had never really taken the time to reflect on my Spirituality, until
Each week, I was deeply inspired by the incredible Christian women in my cohort who
taught me the power of prayer, and the Professors who asked me to reflect on scripture and other
spiritual readings. The integration of Christian faith into each course has served to deepen my
faith and knowledge of scripture as I integrated the Christian values and attitudes of my
instructors and classmates into my life, into the lives of my family, and into my classroom. The
Christian influence has contributed to my spiritual growth significantly and has motivated me to
instill in my students the value of living a virtuous and ethical life. My students learn this in my
classroom every day through my modeling and also through integrated lessons in ethics and
morality which serve to teach them how to belong, and how to get-along so that they may live a
successful and harmonious life. I sincerely believe that, as educators, we have a profound impact
on the lives of our students and have a moral duty to teach values that develop our students into
people who are honest, thoughtful, ethical, caring, respectful, and therefore successful in life.
Due to the online nature of the newly redesigned Masters in Educational Technology
program, I did not feel that same spiritual connection and nourishment that I had hoped for again
as I returned to APU to complete my Masters Degree this year. However, I appreciate the
GROWTH ASSESSMENT 6
spiritual focus and reflection encouraged by the professors through some of the online class
discussion forums.
As I now write this growth assessment, I realize that I am incredibly thankful to have
been a student at APU and am so proud of my completion of this Masters program. As the only
family member to attend college on both my husbands side of the family and mine, I know my
In addition, I have been able set an example for my children as they watched me set goals
for myself and transform from a stay-at-home-mom into a classroom teacher with an advanced
degree. As I attended this program, they have learned the value of hard work, dedication, and
perseverance while I sat with them at the kitchen table each night completing my own homework
as they completed theirs. Besides the enriching reward of a new career path, this program has
also allowed my family to reap the benefits of dual-incomes as we have progressed from
Professional Growth
Completing this program was a condition my Principal and I agreed to when she hired me
enrolled in this program in the Fall of 2016, and true to her word, the classification on my current
employment contract reflects a permanent status. However, with the completion of each course
due to the invaluable lessons, assignments, collaboration, and access to technology offered in this
students are far more engaged and better able to demonstrate their learning.
GROWTH ASSESSMENT 7
teaching strategies and technological tools gained from this program to our weekly PLC
meetings. I no longer depend on my curriculum to provide scripted lessons for me to follow, but
instead apply what I have learned in this program to plan meaningful lessons with technology
integrated throughout, to address the many needs and learning styles of my diverse group of
students.
EDUC 511 set the tone for the program and served to establish a foundation on which to
build my new, knowledge and skills. I learned the importance of engaging my 21st century
digital native students with relevant and authentic learning that prepares them for the careers of
tomorrow. This course also provided much needed organizational strategies and tools to ensure
that I can easily access all that I have learned and will continue to learn.
In EDTC517 I learned valuable Google Drive, Google Forms, and Google Docs skills
that I use on a consistent basis. I also learned screencasting and how to make an interactive
website for my students and their parents to navigate. I learned about Skype in the classroom and
actually set up a virtual field trip for my entire grade level on the giant screen in our multi-
In EDTC527 I learned how to integrate a huge variety of technology and applications into
my lessons and design a unit plan to engage students with differentiated instruction. And
EDUC572 deepened my learning about learning preferences and taught me how to assess and
plan lessons designed to address my students individual learning preferences This course also
taught me the value of meeting my students needs according to Maslows Hierarchy in order to
motivate them to a higher level of learning. According to Maslow model, students must be
adequately sheltered and fed, have adequate love and attention, and feel secure within my
GROWTH ASSESSMENT 8
classroom community before they can learn effectively (Chapman, 1995-2014). In EDUC 572, I
refined and carried out the unit plan that I developed in EDTC527, observed behaviors, assessed
student learning and reflected on what made some lessons successful while other lessons were
not as effective. I also learned the value of implementing several different learning approaches
learners in my classroom.
Technical Growth
Going to high school in the eighties, I was witness to the birth of technology and
immediately embraced it! In my high school typing class, I learned to use one of the first hybrid
word-processing typewriters which had a very small, single-line LCD screen that allowed me to
correct errors, before printing line-by-line on paper. This skill landed me my first job as a clerk
typist where I also learned how to use teletype and facsimile machines. At home, I played on my
Commodore and then moved on to Atari, Nintendo, Sega, and PlayStation. I eventually learned
WordStar and then moved over to MSWord and its cousin, PowerPoint. When the internet
arrived in the 90's, I became a stay-at-home-mom and began earning my paychecks online. All
this is to say that my love of learning and technology has set me on natural path to earning this
I went back to school in the digital-age of the 21st Century to get my teaching credential,
and naturally brought my love of technology into my classroom. Many of my lessons already
included basic PowerPoint presentations, online videos, and a few apps using my classroom iPad
before I returned to APU this year. Now, as I complete my Masters in Learning & Technology, I
Move over, PowerPoint, thanks to EDTC515 and 517, I am now using PowToons,
iMovie, and screencasting software to make powerful and engaging tutorial videos. I can use
MindMeister, PiktoChart, Glogster and other cloudbased platforms to create amazing interactive
create unit-specific, interactive websites to engage and inform both my students and their
parents.
Beginning next school year, my first grade classroom will have 2:1 student iPads and my
students will be using many digital applications and platforms that I discovered through
EDTC527 to both learn and demonstrate their learning. They will scan QR codes, annotate
pictures and record their learning through apps such as ShowMe, Songify, Telligami, Brushes,
Google Read&Write, GarageBand, Audioboo, Wordle, Edmodo, and yes even good-old
PowerPoint. I also learned how to use assistive technology to help struggling students and how
to limit my students' iPad activities with GuidedAccess. Some assistive technology that I learned
and now use in my classroom include SpeakIt which converts written text to audio for my
struggling readers, and VoiceRecorder to improve my students' fluency as they record themselves
reading and then listen back to themselves. They are always so motivated to improve their
recordings, and re-record themselves again and again, which is an awesome and fun way to
In EDUC572, I applied what I learned in EDTC527 to design and teach an entire 3-week
science unit to my students with technology integrated throughout every lesson. The focus was
Gardner's Multiple Intelligences, and then design lessons using technology to address the many
different learning preferences of my students. With borrowed iPads, I was able to carry out these
GROWTH ASSESSMENT 10
lessons in my classroom and assess my students as they demonstrated their learning using a
Finally, I will use what I learned in EDUC511, to keep my resources organized and at my
fingertips using LiveBinder and Symbaloo. In addition, the ePortfolio that I am creating in
As I reflect on what it means to have a lifelong learning plan, I realize that there has
never been a time in my life when I was not actively engaged in learning and enriching my life
with new skills and knowledge. The very fact that I am completing this Master's Degree
journey through this Masters program is coming to an end, I feel like my tutelage in educational
learning every day as well. Completing this Masters program has opened my eyes to the value
and endless possibilities of infusing my classroom with technology-rich lessons to engage and
enrich myself and my students. With the ever-increasing technological advancements and
applications, the learning potential is literally endless there will always be new technology to
My immediate next step is to become a Level 1 Google Certified Educator and I plan to
continue on that path to ultimately become a Google Certified Trainer so that I can share my
newfound technology passion with other educators at my school and even throughout my district,
if possible. I have already joined the ISTE Community to connect with and learn from other
GROWTH ASSESSMENT 11
like-minded educators and I look forward to participating in any upcoming ISTE sponsored
implementing more and more technology into my classroom on an ongoing basis. As a result of
the various assignments and projects in this Masters program and because my classroom will
have a 2:1 ratio of iPads in the coming school year, I have already searched out and connected
with many technological-savvy educators through blogs, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and ISTE
and look forward to learning much from their combined experiences and knowledge.
During the course of this Master's program, I researched, developed, modified, and implemented
an Earth Science Unit to use in my current first grade classroom. I planned this 3-week-long unit
with the technology and learning approaches that I learned from this Master's Program embedded
into each lesson. The idea of this unit began as a simple slide presentation assignment to satisfy
a course requirement showing how I could use Skype and some other technologies in the
classroom. Later, as I began progressing through the courses in this program, I returned to that
unit again and again and used it as an on-going project on which to apply and practice my new
My learning from each of the courses in this Master's Program is integrated throughout
the entire unit, and as a whole, I believe this project now is a good representation of my growth
across Bloom's Taxonomy and Webb's Depth of Knowledge Levels as I progressed though the
courses in this program and will serve as a model that I will be basing most of the other
The coming year holds a lot of new integration as well as I am planning to use an
interactive classroom website to hold digital lesson content, engage both students and parents.
GROWTH ASSESSMENT 12
This website will contain resources used during my lessons, including links to video clips,
activity instructions, handouts, student work samples, a gallery of pictures taken in the classroom
throughout the year for students and parents to view, a blog written by me to replace my current
Conclusion
As I write this Growth Assessment, I am amazed at the growth I have experienced while
measured and documented within this writing. My approach and methods of planning and
implementing lessons in my classroom this year as I have progressed through this program, have
classroom across the curriculum to differentiate my instruction and see the value of using
technology to not only engage and enrich my students, but also as a means of assessment by
I can especially see the impact this program has had on my teaching when I look back on
my lesson plans from last year and compare them to the lessons I planned and implemented this
year while progressing through the courses of this program. Previous lessons include a lot of
direct, teacher-lead instruction and paper-and-pencil assessments. While I did use a couple of
classroom iPads for students to use during my learning centers in the past, the technology used
by my students was limited to listening to reading and math fact practice. I have always been
good with PowerPoint and MSWord and have made some fun presentations to show my students
in the past, and of course I have made my share of worksheets for them to complete in order to
GROWTH ASSESSMENT 13
assess whether students have mastered the content. But none of that comes close to the
technology that I am now incorporating into my lessons on a daily basis as a result of this
program. My students are now making videos, annotating pictures and creating documents of
their own as they use technology to demonstrate their learning. My lessons are far more
interactive and project based, and more and more of my assessments are performance tasks using