GAME Plan Reflection Post

Reflection Blog Post

Learning to use technology and then applying what you have learned into the classroom is something that a teacher must constantly do throughout their professional career (Cennamo, Ross, & Ertmer, 2009). This statement holds true as teachers in order to best teach their students, must constantly be honing their own technological skills and expanding their teaching repertoire with the goal of connecting to every student in the classroom. Throughout this course we have been immersed into new material and new ways to use technology, learning a variety of new strategies useful to the classroom teacher. These strategies have provided ideas for individualized lessons and the customization of content area instruction allowing us to accommodate the needs of an increasingly diverse population of students that are entering our classroom today. This final assignment is broken into two parts, with the first looking at our work throughout our GAME plan, identifying what we have learned and taken from the course. The second part of this assignment identifies any immediate changes that I will make in the classroom as a result of my new skill set.

One of the biggest gains from this course came in the form of my own personal GAME plan. This plan provided me with specific guidelines to reach my goals where before I often relied on vague ideas and strategies accompanied with a little luck to reach my end goal. Using the GAME plan I found allowed me to first identify my goal, something I often did, but then took it a step farther finding then best possible to reach my goals and ensuring my actions stayed in line with where I eventually wanted to go within a specific period of time (Cennamo, Ross, & Ertmer, 2009). Basically, the GAME plan took an informal process that I often struggled with before this course and made it more formal allowing me to focus my attention on constructing activities to reach my goals. With the process being clearly outlined I was able to stay on task throughout the entire process monitoring my work as I worked and finally evaluating what I did and where I needed to go to expand my work. This process proved invaluable and will be something I continue to use in my own work and also something that I will pass onto my students, allowing them a more active role in their own learning.

I also learned that using a GAME plan will allow me to take difficult goals and work at them slowly yet efficiently in order to make them a reality. Often when goals are hard even the most diligent professional may find them tedious to implement. This plan allows four steps to be used in order to make the entire process more manageable with a focus on each specific step during the course of the work (Laureate Education, Inc., 2010a). This I feel is one of the greatest strengths of a GAME plan and something I will pass on to my students during my class. In global studies, the work is often seen as boring and difficult for many students. Using the GAME plan with my own students, particularly when they are working on a longer project with allow them to break the material and work down into sections, reducing stress and creating a stronger end product. I found that even though this plan may seem time consuming and difficult at first glance, the benefits greatly outweigh the time it takes to use and learn the strategy. My hopes are that this benefit will transfer into the classroom setting without much difficulty to assist the learning process and the amount of information the students are able to glean from the material.

Another strong take away throughout my GAME plan was the discovery of many different tools that can be useful in my classroom. Through my work and actions to reach my identified goals in my GAME plan I found is that there are many different online resources that are available to assist me in bringing authentic learning experiences into my classroom (Cennamo, Ross, & Ertmer, 2009). The first thing I found was there are a multitude of different websites that have multimedia images, audio and video clips available for the students and the teacher. This information engages the students in a way that simply reading or listening to text will not do. I also, found many different websites that allow for online interactions with other students and experts allowing students to collaborate with others breaking down the limitations of the classroom walls. Students are much more eager to learn the material when they are able to find the information on their own and discuss their findings with others, both inside and outside of the classroom. My work on the GAME plan allowed me the opportunity to find these resources and to identify ideas for their usage in the classroom, hopefully bringing a larger amount of excitement and engagement into my content based instruction.

Finally, I found that many of my lessons did not need to be completely revised in order to accommodate a form of useful technology. This made changing my classroom lessons much easier as the technology itself took center stage but was much less intrusive that I initially thought it would be. I found that using technology in my lessons often “fit” and the students were much more engaged in the work when they saw images and movies or could manipulate the material using a computer (Cennamo, Ross, & Ertmer, 2009). These tools that are available in my classroom have made the classroom setting a more conducive place to learn for students who were raised with this technology and expect its usage in the classroom. Simply put, my classroom now matches my students more closely allowing my instruction to reach more of my students thus improving their knowledge of my content material.

The second part of my reflection focused on the immediate changes I will bring into my classroom using the material learned in this course. Throughout this course I have made note of many different ideas and strategies that I found that I feel will be useful in allowing my students to learn global studies. However, I feel that overall the best plan is to bring changes into the classroom slowly as to not overwhelm the students by changing my entire instruction. I believe if I bring different forms of technology into the classroom with a “less is more” approach, at least initially, and then build upon the new skills the students learned I will be able to provide students with the skills they need without completely disrupting the flow of the classroom. With this in mind I have identified five different areas in which I will focus my attention throughout the year.

The first change I will bring into the classroom is allowing the students to guide their own learning more often, rather than having the students always follow the teachers lead and instruction. This will allow the students to not only work through the content but also to “think about thinking”, taking a more active role in the learning process (Cennamo, Ross, & Ertmer, 2009, p.3). I can provide the students with the tools and the topic and then see what the students can do with the information creating various projects to show their learning. As in the real world and the workplace, a topic or problem is provided and the workers are asked to work collaboratively to find a practical solution to the problem, without the guidance of their supervisor. My global studies classroom is the perfect place for students to research information on real world topics using online resources, the same way the students find information when they are at home and also in the future. These are skills that I can have an immediate effect upon my students and the classroom. This will result in real learning that will make a tremendous impact on the students and stay with them throughout their lives.

The second change I will make is to bring digital storytelling into my classroom immediately, most likely during the next unit. Digital storytelling allows the students to take the information they have learned and deepen their understanding by reflecting, presenting and communicating the information to others, often in the form of a multimedia video (Cennamo, Ross, & Ertmer, 2009). This strategy could help the students expand their writing skills as well providing an opportunity for them to share their knowledge with an audience outside of the specific classroom in which it was created. I like the idea of having students research a topic finding useful information, create a skit, find images to fit their material and finally create and present a strong example of a multimedia project (Laureate Education, Inc., 2010d). Our school is fortunate in that the students already have the available tools in my classroom and all we have to do is utilize them to help the students learn my content. I would like to have the students take a current event that is making the news today and then interview others outside of the classroom to help identify their opinions about a specific topic. I feel this is a strategy that will allow students to really dig into the material allowing them a chance to show what they have learned while learning real world skills such as collaboration, research and analytical skills all within a guided classroom environment.

Also, I have already begun to bring more project based assessments into the classroom helping students to immerse themselves into the content completely. These assessments allow students to take what they have learned and demonstrate their learning in a real world setting, similar to the kind they will experienced after school (Laureate Education, Inc., 2010c). Right now the students are learning about different ways they are able to affect our government in comparison to the lack of freedoms experienced by people in other countries. The students are to take a right that we are provided in our constitution and then find examples of areas that do not share the same privilege, then discussing the importance of the freedom. So far the students have been eager to participate in the project and the time immediately after Christmas break should yield some strong results. In the future I would also like to look at more situational dilemmas and community issues making the information more realistic to the students and allowing for greater interaction (Cennamo, Ross, & Ertmer, 2009). I feel the greatest benefit of this strategy is allowing the students to look at real world issues with a critical eye, identifying and the underlying problems and creating solutions from their work.

Another strategy I will employ immediately is rather simple yet will yield great benefits to my instruction. I will explore new technology and new opportunities myself in order to bring new ideas fully into my classroom (Laureate Education, Inc., 2010a). The information I learn can be provided to my students allowing them to continue to strengthen their own skills and expand their own learning. This can be taken a step farther with the teacher working closely with the students throughout their work, allowing both parties to learn from each other helping to establish a classroom of mutual respect and learning. I feel that I will begin to take more chances and bring new ideas in to classroom using the Internet, professional journals, my colleagues as well as the students as places to gain ideas and information that will become the building blocks of a great classroom setting.

Finally, I will explore the use of wikis more in my classroom and utilize this tool to help my students collaborate on a variety of topics. I plan to use this strategy allowing the students to work as a group on a teacher selected topic bouncing their ideas back and forth to one another in search of a realistic solution or answer (Cennamo, Ross, & Ertmer, 2009). Group work allows many more opportunities for deeper level instruction while still allowing for the creativity and diverse skills that students bring to the group as individuals (Laureate Education, Inc., 2010b). This will allow my content work to continue when the students are outside the classroom and over any given length of time. The beauty of this technology is that students do not have to be together to work on their project completing the work during times when their creativity and ideas are the strongest. I feel using this technology will be invaluable in teaching my students and providing them with the opportunities they need to take the material beyond the boundaries of the classroom where much of the learning in today’s world takes place.

When I recall the last eight weeks I find that this course has been greatly beneficial to my professional growth. This course has allowed me to experience first hand the construction, implementation and assessment that goes into creating solid technology based lessons that go beyond the basic use of PowerPoint or movies, a necessity in a 21st century classroom. This class has shown me that students when working together can guide their own learning as long as there is support available from an engaged teacher. Through this course I have found that technology is key to student success and many students respond differently when provided with different outlets for learning in the form of multimedia and online collaboration. Overall, my work through this class has opened my eyes to the opportunities that await my students when technology is used in a meaningful way, integrated seamlessly into the classroom instruction.

Randy
HS Social Studies

References

Cennamo, K., Ross, J., & Ertmer, P. (2009). Technology integration for meaningful
classroom use: A standards-based approach. Mason, OH: Cengage Learning.

Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (2010a). Program One: Promoting
self-directed learning with technology. Integrating technology across the
content areas. Baltimore, MD

Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (2010b). Program Three: Enriching
content area learning experiences with technology: part one.
Integrating technology across the content areas. Baltimore, MD

Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (2010c). Program Eight: Spotlight
on Technology: Problem-Based Learning, Part 1. Integrating technology across
the content areas. Baltimore, MD

Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (2010d). Program Twelve: Spotlight
on Technology: Digital Storytelling, Part 1.
Integrating technology across the content areas. Baltimore, MD