To effectively prepare our students to meet the challenges of the Information Age, we must teach them how to become self-directed learners that plan, monitor, and evaluate their educational actions (Laureate Education, Inc., 2009). The GAME Plan is a self-directed learning model that teachers and students can utilize as an active means of planning, monitoring, and evaluating their goals throughout the learning process (Cennamo, Ross, & Ertmer, 2009). Teachers, especially, can use the GAME plan to help them stay up-to-date with current technologies available for classroom use. The GAME Plan encourages you actively plan and evaluate the steps of your personal learning process, particularly in regards to learning new technologies and incorporating them into your curriculum. I will use this plan to deepen my understanding, confidence, and proficiency of the National Educational Technology Standards (NETS), and to continue my journey as a life-long learner (ISTE, 2008).
GOALS
-Facilitate and Inspire Student Learning and Creativity: Teachers use their knowledge of subject matter, teaching and learning, and technology to facilitate experiences that advance student learning, creativity, and innovation in both face-to-face and virtual environments.
-Promote and Model Digital Citizenship and Responsibility: Teachers understand local and global societal issues and responsibilities in an evolving digital culture and exhibit legal and ethical behavior in their professional practices.
ACTION
To facilitate and inspire student learning and creativity, I plan to create and implement authentic learning activities that incorporate current technologies, explore content area knowledge, and foster multiple forms of creative thinking (Cennamo, Ross, & Ertmer, 2009). Creating authentic learning experiences that utilize technology will help my students become more self-directed in their learning. Cennamo et al (2009) insist that technology supports learning by doing. When students are actively using technology to understand and create, they become immersed in the content as well. They must become confident learners of the content if they are to effectively explain, present, or publish their findings using technology.
To broaden my knowledge base of technological skills I can utilize in my classroom, I plan to keep an on-going list of the next three technologies I want to explore. To facilitate student learning, teachers must model the new technologies they want students to learn. One way of I plan to model is through exhibiting my own personal artifacts as examples. My students will view my blog and my classmates’ blogs before they are asked to create their own. The three new technologies I plan to explore are wikis, WebQuests, and digital storytelling (Cennamo et al, 2009). By investigating these technologies further, I will be able to discover the most appropriate places in my content area curriculum that could be best supported by these technologies.
To promote and model digital citizenship and responsibility I plan to implement the QUEST model for internet inquiry with my 7th grade language arts students to exhibit how to effectively model and teach the ethical use of digital information and technology. Students will learn the importance of intellectual property and how to appropriately document sources used in their research. Students will learn these necessary 21st-century skills while interacting with the QUEST model for inquiry. Students will learn how to create effective questions, conduct online searches, evaluate websites for validity and reliability, organizing and making meaning multiple sources, and transform their information into knowledge. QUEST stands for questioning, understanding resources, evaluating, synthesizing, and transforming (Eagleton & Dobler, 2007). Being able to evaluate and make judgments about online resources helps students develop critical thinking skills and allows them to view information from multiple perspectives (Leu et al, 2000). Students will learn about proper digital etiquette and responsible social interactions while they communicate with me and peers through their blogs and other social media tools.
MONITOR
To monitor my progress on meeting my professional goals I will keep daily reflection journal, taking notes of the challenges and success I encountered while teaching lesson or integrating a new technology. I will keep a log of the new technologies I explore, how I use them with my students, and what were the outcomes after implementation. My reflection journal will help me keep track of my personal learning process and those of my students. I will consider which components of the lesson were meaningful to my students and which should be taken out or improved (Cennamo et al, 2009). It will also help me to understand patterns emerging from the information I have found about certain technologies and how particular students respond to them.
EVALUATE
I will also use my reflection journal as a way to help evaluate my learning and my student learning. My reflection journal will help me evaluate if I am meeting my learning goals and help me extend my goals by make plans for the future. If my logs state a particular technology is not supporting the content area effectively, I may need to modify my teaching strategies to better meet my students needs (Cennamo et al, 2009).
By employing the GAME Plan, I will become a more organized, self-directed learner, and I will learn skills that I can utilize with my students. By teaching my students how to utilize the GAME Plan, I am preparing them for the rapid and continuous technological changes of the 21st-century.
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.
Eagleton, M. B., & Dobler, E. (2007). Reading the web: Strategies for Internet inquiry. New York, NY: The Guilford Press.
International Society for Technology in Education. (2008). National education
standards for teachers (NETS-T). Retrieved from http://www.iste.org/Libraries/PDFs/NETS_for_Teachers_2008_EN.sflb.ashx.
Laureate Education, Inc. (Producer). (2009). Promoting self-directed learning with technology [Webcast]. Technology across the content areas. Baltimore, MD: Cennamo.
Leu, D. J., Kinzer, C. K., Coiro, J. L., & Cammack, D. W. (2004). Toward a theory of new literacies emerging from the Internet and other information and communication technologies. In R. B. Ruddell & N. J. Unrau (Eds.), Theoretical models and processes of reading (5th ed., pp. 1570–1613). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.
Hello Whitney,
ReplyDeleteI agree that the QUEST plan is a strong model. I was impressed with how the model helps to organize the inquiry learning process with technology. Also, I felt your suggestion to include models of exemplary works, such as blogs, is a strong idea.
As I read your game plan, noticed another method you could use to monitor if you were meeting your NETS-T goals. Since your students will most likely produce work using technology, you may want to create a file to store their electronic work. This way as you reflect on your journal entries and logs, you also have the physical evidence of their work to support your thoughts. Furthermore, this provides you with long-term evidence of student progress towards meeting standards in the language arts content area. At the same time you will build a large file of student models to use in future classes.
Jonah Tornberg
Hi Whitney,
ReplyDeleteYou seem to have a clear plan on how to proceed and what areas you wish to develop.
It struck me that evaluating our own journals is sometimes hard to do objectively. So I was thinking that you might want to set some learning goals for the students or the class and then use student data (answers to test, focus groups, interviews..etc) to evaluate how successful the new intervention have been?
Additionally, I was wondering if you feel that it is important inform/educate the parents on safe, ethical use at home so that you can be sure that your students are applying their new skills to their homework as well as class work?
Susan
Hi Jonah,
ReplyDeleteThis is exactly the same idea I brought up in my discussion post this week. I would love to use an electronic file or portfolio to store my students’ work. It would not only be useful to me as a teacher to reflect and use for student models, but I also want to my students to be able to access their created artifacts even after they leave my classroom and move into the 8th grade. It is important for students to have a way to view the work they’ve created, especially, so they can evaluate their learning throughout the school year. Digital portfolios provide evidence for student and teacher learning (Laureate Education, Inc., 2009) Have you used online storage spaces for student work? If so, could you recommend a useful tool you have had success with in the past? I appreciate your ideas! Thanks Jonah!
Whitney Barber
Laureate Education, Inc. (Producer). (2009). The game plan. [Webcast]. Technology across the content areas. Baltimore, MD: Cennamo.
Susan,
ReplyDeleteI agree that setting up learning goals for my students, and collecting data on their challenges and successes would be a useful way to evaluate my professional learning goals. Evaluating student data helps teachers begin to understand patterns that may be forming in their classroom, but also helps teachers better understand the specific needs of each student. Thanks for bringing this idea back into the forefront for me! I will plan to implement the collecting student data as a way to monitor and evaluate student and teacher progress in my GAME Plan.
Addressing your second question, I do believe it is important for teachers and parents to discuss the safe and ethical use of online resources. For the most part, our students’ parents were not taught using this much technology in school, so they were not trained in its safe and ethical uses. I think it is important that parents understand that there is a whole other world taking place online, and our students are digital citizens of that world. Therefore, it is our responsibility as parents and teachers to equip our students with the necessary tools needed to participate safely and ethically on the Internet.
I’ve thought about discussing this issue at parent night; however, not all parents attend. I have also thought about posting a safe and ethical uses of the Internet information on my teacher website for parents to read. Have you educated your parents on this issue before? How did you reach out to them? Thanks for any ideas!
Whitney Barber