Claire is an 11-year teaching veteran who was once nominated for Teacher of the Year in the Northern Illinois District. She holds a B.A. from Concordia University in Early Childhood Education, and an M.S. in Education with a concentration in Special Education from Walden University. In addition to teaching first grade at Cross Lutheran School in Yorkville, IL, she is the coordinator of Mimio Training and co-director of Extended Care for her school.
Asked her thoughts on Mimio, Claire exclaims, “What did I do before it?” She is convinced that Mimio has everything teachers need to keep students interested, engaged, and interactive—while still learning the same information from the usual formal textbooks. She is not in favor of completely replacing texts, paper, and pencil with Mimio, but points to its unique benefit: “Mimio allows us to reach other aspects of the multiple intelligences in our competitive technology era.”
When it comes to lesson creation and delivery, Claire says “the sky is the limit,” and emphasizes that lessons “will only be as good as we make them.” A finalist in the FETC 2011 Create Lessons & Win contest, she notes that it is important to pay attention to what students like and what they respond to, and use those observations when designing lessons. She also is an advocate of letting students create their own lessons and present them to their classmates, because “peer teaching is a powerful tool.”
Claire makes many of her lessons available on her blog with the help of Google Docs, so that her students can review them at home. “It’s especially helpful,” she says, “when a student is absent and I can send home the .ink file we used during the day.” She provides parents with the Mimio software download instructions so that they can see what concepts are being taught.
Claire is an active member of the MimioConnect community, where she is known as “teepeesmommy.” She loves the new Content Packs, particularly the “awesome REAL pictures of animals, plants, and the like.” The support, kind words, and appreciation shown by fellow MimioConnect users is what encourages her to continue sharing what she creates—“sometimes into the wee hours of the night.” She is grateful for the opportunity to share lessons with thousands of her online colleagues.
Her tip for other teachers: check out the new information provided on objective writing (one of the Quality Content Criteria that Mimio recently introduced). “I’m excited to see what mimioconnect.com could bring to our classrooms,” she says, “if everyone started trying to include as many of the Quality Content Criteria as possible in lessons.”