Emma VanBuskirk

     My name is Emma VanBuskirk, and I am a second-year 4th grade teacher at St. Jacob Elementary School in St. Jacob, Illinois. St. Jacob is a small rural community within the Triad Community Unit School District #2 in Madison County. The students and families that live in the community where I work face many problems outside of the classroom. From this course and learning about digital equity, I hope to be able to take away ideas that I can bring into my own classroom, school district, and community. Every student should have equitable access to resources that they can use to learn and be successful. My Call to Action is that students and families in St. Jacob need equitable and consistent access to reliable high-speed internet at home, in town, and within the school building. This Call to Action will serve students, families, and teachers at St. Jacob Elementary School, but there are also other families and neighboring towns within the Triad Community Unit School Distr...

  I have made good progress on my digital storytelling project about my late grandfather. I have finalized my StoryCore and my script, and now I am putting the finishing touches on my Story Table. I need to find a song to play throughout the video and make a list of references. To be prepared for Week 7, I need to put my video together and make sure everything is seamless and the story shows what I want my audience to see and feel. My Story Table will work as a great guide to show which picture goes with each part of the script when creating my video. For assistance, I think it would be beneficial to get some feedback from peers or instructors on how they feel about my story and if I need to add or retract anything from my draft. One of my goals for this project is to convey an emotional connection with my audience, and I want to ensure I am doing so before my presentation.       After reading the article from Ed Tech Teacher (2013), I feel that I have really st...

For my DST project, I am going to share a personal story/narrative as a tribute to my late grandfather and how he impacted my life. My grandfather was a great math teacher and was a major influence in my decision to go into education for my career. Not only did he make me realize I have a passion for teaching, but he also taught me so many valuable life lessons that I will forever be thankful for. From him, I learned to be patient, kind, and how to encourage the importance of lifelong learning. I want to share what an amazing person he was to others by creating this story in his honor. I am the person and teacher I am today because of my grandfather. The purpose I want my story to have is the lasting impact educators can have on people. I hope this story makes readers think back on educators or other influential people in their lives and remember all they have learned from that person.  Using Ohler’s (2023) framework, I will include the following story elements: Characters- My ...

     This week, I decided to take a deeper look into “Welcome to Pine Point,” created by the National Film Board of Canada in 2011. Pine Point was a mining town that, when shut down, was completely diminished and no longer exists. This digital story uses a mix of many different media, such as photographs, videos, narration, special effects, and features within the interactive “book”. The author uses an interactive scrapbook-like digital story to really engage the readers and make them feel like part of the story. Readers can flip through the pages of the scrapbook, and within each page, there is another interactive feature, such as pictures to click through that go along with the text on the page. Between the photos, videos, sound effects, and narration, you feel like you are really in Pine Point. This was one of the neatest digital storytelling projects I have seen so far in this course, and I hope to add some of these features to my own DST project.     ...

My name is Emma VanBuskirk, and I am a 4th-grade teacher at a small rural elementary school in Illinois. I teach all subject areas, but I enjoy teaching math the most. This August, I began my second year, and it has been going fantastically! I graduated from McKendree University with a Bachelor's degree in Elementary Education in 2024. I come from a family full of teachers, so choosing teaching as my career path felt like it was meant to be. I am very passionate about building strong relationships with my students to help build a sense of community within the classroom. I believe that students should have ownership of their education to help them grow and become responsible individuals. My teaching philosophy reflects this by running a student-centered learning classroom. I am currently working on my Master's degree in Curriculum and Instruction at Southeastern Oklahoma State University.  After taking some time to think about possible ideas for my story, I am thinking about wri...

This week’s blog will focus on course design and coaching for SMART goal attainment. The course being developed is to help with the following SMART goal: To enhance my instructional practice, I will complete 1 written reflection about a lesson that involved a student-centered technology activity, once a week throughout the 1st and 2nd quarters of the school year. The reflections will be written using a digital reflection log on a Google Doc. These reflections will focus on lesson effectiveness, student engagement, and instructional adjustments, and will incorporate digital tools such as student performance data from online platforms (IXL), digital exit tickets, and student work samples collected through Seesaw/Google Classroom. Reflections will be documented within 24 hours of the lesson in the digital log, allowing me to track progress over time and make timely adjustments to improve my future lessons. Part 1- To help develop this course, I chose to read an article written by Stephen...