Debbie Taylor, a freshman and 12th grade honors English teacher at Cardinal Gibbons High School, shares how Vivi's screen capture and annotation tools help her differentiate instruction and keep students engaged, especially during the pandemic when masks made classroom communication harder.
My name is Debbie Taylor and I teach at Cardinal Gibbons High School. I am a freshman English teacher at Cardinal Gibbons. I also teach 12th grade honors English. I've been teaching a little over five years and I've been in North Carolina for about two years. Previously to that I taught in Alabama. VIVI has really changed the way that I teach. I would not even want to go back to the days prior to having vivi. Vivi's allowed me to bring my students into the classroom in an interactive way. And I often tell my students this is their classroom. I'm facilitating the information that's going on, but this is their opportunity to learn. And learning is an action. And VIVI allows me to put that into action. My favorite VIVI tool would have to be Giving Student Control. I have found that my students become really engaged in the learning process when they can see their own work displayed on the screen. And so I've really seen them take ownership of their information and what I like to call they roll up their sleeves and they really get into the learning process. So I'd have to say that student control is really important to me. I also like the ability for them to screen capture something that's out there. And you know what? Screen capture I like because that helps me with the diversity that I have within my students and their learning capabilities. So I may have a high flying student that doesn't need to screen capture and re look at the information that I've given them, but sometimes I do. And so that's a way for that student to be able to capture what's there in my notes or in another student's notes and then take that and look at it later to help reinforce those concepts that we talked about. So I really like that particular the screen capture in the annotation. I like that for differentiation. And it really has helped my classroom a lot. VIVI has been so helpful during this Covid season of teaching because when you have students that are sitting in front of you with their masks on, it's hard sometimes to engage them in discussion. And so VIVI has provided a vehicle by which my students communicate. And whether it's the exit emoji that they give me or, you know, just I take a pull on how they're doing through vivi. It's just amazing how that has just opened them up to the ability to respond to me without actually verbalizing because that's really been a struggle in our classrooms. With the mask, we find that the students are less likely to have discussion and to elaborate on a question that may be posed in the classroom. So vivi's really become helpful in getting those students to have discussion or at least respond to what we're doing through the different options that we have in vivi. I just want to encourage anyone that's considering using VIVI to embrace it. VIVI has really taken my classroom to a new level, and I cannot imagine teaching without using VIVI in my classroom any longer. It's just a vital component of my classroom and really helps my students become engaged with what we're doing. And so much of this new learner that we have, they need to be engaged. They're not receiving information like we used to 100 years ago. You know, the teacher would just lecture and we would take our notes and listen passively. We want our classrooms to be active classrooms and we want our students to be able to participate. VIVI allows that very seamlessly to happen within the confines of the classroom.
