Intentional and Purposeful Technology in the Classroom

For many years, I have been interested in, experimented, and learned more about how to implement and work intentionally with purposeful technology in the classroom.

In the History of American Burlesque class in Summer 2018, my students and I pursued research alongside one another. Together, we built a visual timeline of the history of the genre focused on particularly central figures. I contributed some posts; students contributed others, and collaboratively, we created a visual representation of history using Knight Lab’s Timeline JS connected to a Google Sheet: bit.ly/burlesque-timeline-summer18.

As an embedded Instructional Technology Fellow in four classes at CUNY’s Macaulay Honors College in 2018–19, I was able to learn how to refine the technology used in my classrooms from a detailed pedagogical perspective. I am particularly enthusiastic about two projects that came out of a class on patterns of migration in New York City. The students were encouraged to pursue research that searched for their families’ or communities’ histories of migration. In two projects, “Humans of the Five Towns” (@humansofthe5t) and “Colombians of Long Island” (@colombiansli), students worked on Instagram to create multimedia auto-narratives that emphasized the cultural construction of borders, difference, and notions of immigration. It was inspiring to see students use the social media platform differently and understand the power of knowledge dissemination.