Week 7: Using the GAME Plan Process with Students

Over the past few weeks, I have learned what a GAME plan is. I have developed my own GAME plan as a student in this Master’s course, where I have decided in what NETS-T standards I can become more proficient. Through the GAME plan process, I have learned all about setting a goal, creating an action plan and then monitoring and evaluating my progress. I was able to identify which NETS-T standards in which I was not proficient and set a goal to become proficient by the end of my plan. This to me is a great way for anyone to accomplish a goal because it keeps a person accountable on their progress.

The NETS-S and the NETS-T interrelate because they are both a set of national standards, and they encourage the use of technology in school and life outside of school. The teachers are the ones designing the lessons and the students are the ones learning how to participate in the technological lessons created by the teacher. They ensure that both a teacher and a student are prepared for 21st century learning. Both the NETS-S and NETS-T can be implemented easily by either a teacher or student developing their own GAME plan. I will use the GAME plan process with my students just as I was instructed to do so in this Master’s course. I will use the GAME plan process with my students so they can be held accountable for their learning. Setting goals and monitoring and evaluating the action plan used to set the goal is a great way for any student to learn persistence. I have decided that with every project, I will have my students develop a plan. They will choose a NETS-S in which they would like to develop proficiency and a goal for the project on which they work. This will be a very valuable tool to teach every student about achieving goals.

Revising my GAME Plan

What I have learned so far that I can apply in my instructional practice is the GAME plan strategy. It has helped me see how it would come across to a student, how it helps, any challenges I come across I can fix before I have the students use this strategy. I am still working on my two goals, although I have made a lot of progress thanks to this current master’s course. I have come up with a lot of different lesson I can use for my first goal and I have learned a lot about online reflections with this class. I will have my students reflect using blogging next year and I will have developed a unit plan when this course ends that will help me with this second goal. I sent an email to my principal about getting a new interactive whiteboard, so I am waiting for a reply. If the reply is good, then I will have met all my goals! If the reply is a no, then I will be persistent and keep trying!

Based on the NETS-T, I have already come up with a new learning goal I will set for myself next year. Since I will finish with my Master’s degree in December 2010, I will make it my goal to engage in professional growth and leadership so I can be up to date with new technological advances in education. This current program helps me stay up to date, but when it is over, I will have to keep learning and take a leadership role to show others the benefits of technology integration.

Next time I use the GAME plan, I think I will be more active in my approach from the start. This time since it was new to me, I did not start on being active in my plan until the second week, and I think I could have got a lot more done if I had started earlier.

Evaluating GAME Plan Progress

Update on my GAME plan:

In evaluating my GAME plan over these past few weeks, I have seen that I have accomplished a lot of what I wanted to accomplish. A few things I cannot accomplish until the school year begins. My actions were very effective in meeting my goals, because rather than just saying what my goals were, I actually had to dig to figure out how to meet a goal I set. I have learned a great deal about how to set goals and monitor progress towards meeting a goal. I now know how I can apply this strategy for my students to use as well. I can use this for my instructional practice and my students can use this for their learning. I still have a few things I need to learn. I still want to know whether or not I will get an interactive whiteboard. With this tool I will be able to do a lot of new activities and students will enjoy it as well. My principal will let me know at the beginning of the school year about this. If I am granted this, many new doors will open for me! In order to continue incorporating technology into my lesson plans to support learning, I need to adjust my plans to not include interactive whiteboards at this time, and just plan as if I will not have one. Then, if I do get one, I will modify as needed.

How is everyone else doing in meeting their goals?

Monitoring my GAME Plan Progress

This week, I have been looking over my GAME plan and have thought about how I can continue to progress toward the goals in my GAME plan. I am finding some good resources that I need for my first and second goals, even though some of the resources I need will not be available until the beginning of the school year. So far, I have not found that I need to modify my action plan. I have learned that there is a lot of work in the action part of my GAME plan and finding resources is not easy. Still, I have not had any new questions arise. Here are the goals I have been working on:

1. 1(B) engaging students in exploring real-world issues and solving authentic problems using digital tools and resources.

2. 2(C) promoting student reflection using collaborative tools to reveal and clarify students’ conceptual understanding and thinking, planning, and creative processes.

Because most of the action in my GAME plan will start at the beginning of the year when I have my students in class, I haven’t been able to do a whole lot yet, but I have decided that I will talk to my principal about getting an interactive whiteboard at the beginning of the year. For my first goal, in order to help my students explore real-world issues, I have decided that these websites will work well with the content I teach:
www.maps.google.com
http://www.inkpot.com/news/
http://www.live-radio.net/european.shtml
www.youtube.com
www.teachertube.com
**The program Google Earth was recently installed on my school computer, which will be of use, too.

For my second goal, I would also like to add blogging and voicethreads to my list of ways students can reflect, using collaborative tools. I will be setting up these accounts at the beginning of the year. I have learned last week that blogging is a good way to have students reflect to a prompt, and then they can comment on their peers’ reflections as well. Voicethread will work in this same manner when doing performance tasks.

I will see you all next week as I continue the GAME plan!!

Carrying out my GAME Plan

Last week I started to develop my own GAME plan, as Cennamo, Ross and Ertmer (2009) state, to help me “think about and take steps to direct [my] learning process, specifically while learning about technology and how to integrate it into the curriculum” (p. 3). My action plan discusses the two different goals I have: engaging students in exploring real-world issues and solving authentic problems using digital tools and resources and promoting student reflection using collaborative tools to reveal and clarify students’ conceptual understanding and thinking, planning, and creative processes.

For my first goal, I will need to make sure that I will have access to Net Books and that they will always be available. I will have to reserve the tech cart well in advance, so in August I will start investigating what days I will need them, and I will reserve them on certain dates to make sure I will have them for the students. If something goes wrong and I am unable to have the Net Books, I will take my students to the computer lab for a backup plan. The computers will work just as well. In order to get an interactive whiteboard, I will need to talk with my principal directly and ask about getting one. I still have to do this, but I do not know if I should ask him now or wait until August when I go back to work during our in service days. As for websites, I am currently looking on the internet and bookmarking websites that are valuable for my students learning Spanish. I have them bookmarked on my delicious site, so I will not lose them.

For my second goal, in order to start my action plan, I stated that my students first need to know how they learn best, by determining their strengths and weaknesses. In order for them to know this, I will have them take an assessment online at: http://literacyworks.org/mi/assessment/findyourstrengths.html. This website will help them see how they learn best. According to the results, I will also take a look and see what they say so I can plan the best way for my students to reflect using collaborative tools. One way of having my students reflect collaboratively is to have them create wiki’s as a group, giving them a concept or idea and they create a wiki to demonstrate their knowledge. I would use www.wikispaces.com for this activity. Another idea I have is to have students create their own mind maps using http://bubbl.us. This tool would show me how they see a concept or idea in their own mind, and they can reflect on it after using their mind map as a reference. Reflections could be on their own blogs, using www.blogger.com.

References:

Cennamo, K., Ross, J. & Ertmer, P. (2009). Technology Integration for Meaningful Classroom Use: A Standards-Based Approach. (Laureate Education, Inc., Custom ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.

Developing my personal GAME plan

After reviewing the National Education Technology Standards and Performance Indicators for Teachers website, I realized that I am more proficient than I thought I was in using technology. This Master’s course has really helped me think about technology and its importance in the classroom. Because of the previous courses for my degree, I feel that I do well with modeling digital-age work and learning, promoting and modeling digital citizenship and responsibility and engaging in professional growth and leadership. I feel I do well with meeting these standards, but I still need to work on the first standard, facilitating and inspiring students learning and creativity and the second standard, designing and developing digital-age learning experiences and assessments. In order to work on these two standards, I will be using the GAME plan, as illustrated by Cennamo, Ross and Ertmer (2009) to help me “think about and take steps to direct [my] learning process, specifically while learning about technology and how to integrate it into the curriculum” (p. 3).

GOALS:

The two performance standards I need to work on are:
1. 1(B) engaging students in exploring real-world issues and solving authentic problems using digital tools and resources and

2. 2(C) promoting student reflection using collaborative tools to reveal and clarify students’ conceptual understanding and thinking, planning, and creative processes.

ACTION:

1. In order to take action for my first goal of engaging students in exploring real-world issues and solving authentic problems using digital tools and resources, Cennamo et al. (2009) suggest that I need to “determine steps [I] can take to meet [my] goal within a reasonable timeline” (p. 10). In order to become proficient in my first goal, I will need to decide what technology tools I feel will be of best use in my classroom. I have three different ideas: interactive whiteboard, NET books and websites. I will need to talk with my principal about getting an interactive whiteboard, my school is in the process of getting NET books and I will need to see what websites would be of best use with world language students.
2. For my second goal of promoting student reflection using collaborative tools to reveal and clarify students’ conceptual understanding and thinking, planning and creative processes, I will first need to be able to identify the ways in which my students learn best, in order to creative lessons in which I will get the best student reflection. An example of this is if I find that my students learn best visually, I can have students create mind maps or concept maps using digital tools, and then have them reflect based upon the visual tool they created. In order to determine how my students learn best, I will conduct a survey (either using surveymonkey or finding a survey online which will help students find out their different learning styles). After reviewing the results, I can tailor my lessons to best fit their needs.

MONITORING:

As I work on these goals by taking action, I will need to take a step back and look at how my planning is going. As I take action to achieve my learning goals, I will need to “monitor whether [I am] making sufficient progress toward [my] goals and reflect on whether the strategies [I] have chosen are working” (Cennamo, et al., 2009, p. 4). I will ask myself these questions before going forward:
• Are my goals being met?
• Do I need to modify my actions?
• Do I need to do more research to meet my goals?
.

EVALUATING:

During evaluation, I will reflect on what went well and what I did to change something, so when I look back, I will remember the process I went through to be successful. According to Cennamo, et al. (2009), the most important question I need to consider is “whether [I] was successful in meeting [my] goals (p. 5). I can then ask myself what I would do differently in the future.

As for my students, as I work on my two goals, they will undoubtedly be involved in the process, so I will also have my students give me feedback as to what they thought worked and what did not work, and how I can work to better meet my goals.


References:

Cennamo, K., Ross, J., & Ertmer, P. (2009). Technology integration for meaning

classroom use: A standards-based approach (Laureate Education custom edition.

Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Reflection for EDUC 6712

Upon completing the course, Supporting Information Literacy and Online Inquiry in the Classroom, I realized how important the teaching of new literacy skills is to every student in today’s society to prepare them for the 21st century. One quote I read at the beginning of the course that stuck with me and really summed up the importance of learning new literacy skills was written by Jukes and MacDonald (2007), “The illiterate of the twenty-first century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn” (p. 1). The most striking revelation I had in this course was that there are new literacy skills that need to be addressed in the curriculum, and that these skills are important for every student to know by the time they graduate from high school. It is taken for granted that every student knows how to use these new literacy skills, so teaching students step by step is a very important way for students to become exposed to these skills. I also have realized that the way in which I teach will allow these literacy skills to be added into my lessons and units seamlessly. I usually model for student ahead of time during a lesson or unit what I want for them to do, and by including these new literacy skills, this will be very easy to do. I can model for students how to ask questions, how to research, how to synthesize the information and how to then communicate the information in their own words to an audience. Each step of the way can be modeled for a seamless production.

The knowledge and experience gained from this course will influence my teaching practices in the future in two different ways. The first way my teaching practices will be influenced from my knowledge and experience from this course is before I do an inquiry project with my students, I will have already practiced the skills on my own, therefore, most of the bugs will have been worked out before my students practice on their own. Since this course gave me personal practice with each piece of an inquiry-based unit plan, I will know how to go about it with my students. Secondly, my teaching will be influenced because I have learned many different ways to assess that students have successfully learned each new literacy skill. There are a multitude of assessment strategies from Eagleton and Dobler’s book, Reading the Web: Strategies for Internet Inquiry. This book provides handout examples for every step of the inquiry process and provides pre and post assessment strategies. I will use many of these when assessing whether students understand the new literacy skills or not.

One professional development goal that I would like to pursue that builds upon my learning in this course is going to be a gradual goal process. The first part of my goal will be to include one online inquiry-based learning project next school year for my first year Spanish classes. This will build upon my learning in this course because I will use what I learned and will adapt it to fit with my first year Spanish curriculum. I will also have to do the project on my own first, to work out any problems beforehand. After I successfully implement one online inquiry project, I will then add one inquiry project for my second year Spanish students. Once I have both classes that I teach doing an online inquiry-based project next year, the following year I will proceed to doing two projects each year, and then hopefully the third year I will have students doing one online inquiry-based project every unit. I have four units each school year for each level of Spanish that I teach. I am going this gradually because I want to take time to perfect each unit project, so there are no problems and it is well organized. I have chosen the goal of eventually implementing an online inquiry project for every unit of study into my curriculum because, according to Eagleton and Dobler (2007), “If we want to prepare today’s students to excel in tomorrow’s workplace, we had better start teaching them to be web literate” (p. 4).

References

Eagleton, M. B., & Dobler, E. (2007). Reading the Web: Strategies for Internet inquiry. New York: The Guilford Press.

Jukes, I., & MacDonald, B. (2007). 21st century fluency skills: Attributes of a 21st century learner. Retrieved from http://www.committedsardine.com/handouts/twca.pdf