Guest Blogger #1 Beth Lang- Grade 5 Counselor

I took a lot away from EdCampUSA including a call to action. As part of my promise to highlight teachers from my own school that are doing amazing things, I invited out school counselor to do a guest blog post about her wonderful activites this year. WAY TO GO BETH LANG. Please enjoy her post below and be sure to check out her website.
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PowerLibrarian

 

As a school counselor at Skyview Upper Elementary School, I am embracing technology as much as I can, and I love it!

I work with 5^th grade students here at Skyview.

During this school year, I have created a fabulous website using weebly.com, and have offered a parent book club done via blog. The blog was created as a way of enabling parents who could not come to school for book club meetings during the day a chance to participate in the discussions about the readings.

I have utilized google surveys to create and disseminate needs assessments to my parents, students, and teachers so that I can create and deliver a counseling program based upon current needs.  I enjoy the charts and graphs that google automatically creates for me based upon my results. I am very visually oriented, so this is wonderful!

In addition, I had created and posted a video tour of my office for incoming 5^th graders and their families so that they could become familiar with the space that they would be visiting throughout the year and get to know me a little bit early on in the year. This was a big hit as a part of the transition for our incoming 5^th graders!

Just last week, I held my first ever skype party! My lunch bunch group of 8 girls engaged in pen pal activities with students from Ms. Demir’s class at Rutherford Middle School in Rutherford, NJ. At the end of this school year Mrs. Demir and I surprised our students with a skype session so they could see each other and talk to each other in real time. This was amazing! Through the use of technology, students from 2 different states were able to practice their social skills, conversation skills, eye contact, and use of appropriate questions! They had so much fun! The students and teachers enjoyed hearing about the differences between urban Rutherford and suburban Eagleville. They found that there were many similarities between groups of students in terms of interests, favorite music, favorite pastimes, pets, and family life. All the students are looking forward to continuing to develop their relationships with one another next year through letter writing and through skype sessions. The teachers are looking forward to it as well. For an hour, all the students were “kids” having fun with one another, regardless of boundaries, and physical or educational challenges.

This counselor is totally jazzed about using technology to deliver a comprehensive school counseling curriculum to my students and looks forward to incorporating more elements each year!

Bethany R. Lang, MS  LPC  NCSC  NCC

PA School Counselor, PSCA Past President
Skyview Upper Elementary School
5^th Grade Counselor