GAME Plan week 4

I am find the the information and the resources that I need to implement my game plan. I have a buddy that I use to bounce ideas and problems with to help find a solution. She is doing a similar thing in her classroom. My students are really getting into the class research question of the week. The students are learning a lot from watching me model how to surf the Internet and helping me decide if the web site's information is reliable. They are also benefiting from watching me think out aloud, which is exposing them to my thinking and reasoning.

I do not really think that I need to modify my action plan yet. The only thing that I may did to change is when I will allow my students to research their own question or topic. I do not think that my students have the necessary skills yet to be able to navigate the Internet by themselves yet.

I have learned that taking the time to reflect each week is really beneficial. I sometimes find myself forcing myself to fill out my little reflection sheet, but it has really been helpful. It is given me a chance to look back and decide which things worked and which did not and what I plan doing differently in the future. It is also giving me a chance to reflect on what the students have learned and what concepts some are still struggling at. This way I know which concepts I need to touch again and with whom.

My question that has come up is How can I give 1st graders the skills that they need in order to be able to use the Internet independently? and not calling my name ever 5 minutes for help.

Reflection on Game Plan Week 3

The part of my action plan that I have already started on is modeling creative thinking. I have been more aware of making sure that I am thinking aloud and showing the students how I would work through the problem and figure out the solution. The next part of my plan that I want to implement would be to start having a classroom problem of the week and having a reflection on one lesson that had technology integrated into to once a week.

The resources that I am going to need in order to carry out my action plan are examples of student based projects, some final examples to see what to expect from the students, different blog sites that relate to technology integration to get feedback from colleagues and to get new ideas and methods from them, and some mini lesson technology lessons designed for younger children to teach them how to use the technology and the Internet.

GAME Plan

My GAME Plan:

GOALS: Facilitate and Inspire Student Learning and Creativity

· I will use my 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.

· I will:

· a. promote, support, and model creative and innovative thinking and inventiveness

b. engage students in exploring real-world issues and solving authentic problems using digital tools and resources

ACTION STEPS:

· My first action step will be to model creative and innovative thinking and inventiveness to my students. Since I teach young students, I need to model the behavior that I am going to expect from them.

· My second action step will be to create a class question list, so that as a class we can vote on one question a week to explore and try to find the answer to using technology.

· My third action step will be to slowly hand over the reins to a student that will lead the class in the weekly real-world issue.

· My final action step will be to allow each of the students to research and or solve their own real-world issues or problem and present their findings. Student would be allowed as much time as they felt they need to be ready to present their findings to the class.

MONITOR:

· I plan on monitor my steps by completing a weekly reflection on my teaching for the week.

· My weekly reflection will have question on it that will ask me:

o How many times did I promote, support, and model creative and innovative thinking and inventiveness?

o If a low number or none, What could I have changed to promote, support, and model creative and innovative thinking and inventiveness?

o What worked well and what did not work well?

o What technology skills are the students missing or weak on that I need to go back to and develop?

o How am I going to develop those skills?

o Did I hand over the reins to the students? How did it go, what I can do to help it go smoother for next time?

EVAULATE AND EXTEND

· After I have completed my reflection, I plan on evaluating my answers and coming up with a GAME plan for the following week in order to address what did not work this week.

· I plan on looking and participating on different blog sites to share my experiences through this experiences and reading about others who are going through a similar experiences and learning from theirs.

· I plan on continue my education through Walden to continue to develop my technology skills and knowledge that I can then apply to my classroom and my students.

Reflection from Web Literacy

The most striking revelation that I had about the teaching of new literacy skills to my students as a result of this course would be that the students need to start learning these skills at a young age. I think that it is easy for teachers to look at the list of skills as say that their students are to young for them or that the skills are to challenging for their students. The problem with that is when the students get into the upper grades, they have no prior experience with the new literacy skills and those teachers have to start at square one and get them to where they need to be for them and then get the students ready for the next teacher. I think that when I first looked them over, it was overwhelming, but once I started breaking them a part into smaller pieces and realizing that I can at least start working on the foundation of that skill I was more comfortable teaching the skill.

The knowledge and experience that I gained in this course will influence my teaching practices going forward by helping me feel more comfortable and capable of teaching inquiry based project and undertaking teaching the student new literacy skills and technology skills require for them to complete the inquiry based project. I feel more comfortable letting the students lead their own learning and taking that step back and just being support when they ask for it. I know that inquiry based learning not only pushes me out of my comfortable zone, but also the students. They have learned to depend on me for their learning. Though I believe that once they gain self-confidence in the inquiry based learning, they will not want to switch back to teacher-centered learning.

One professional development goal that I would like to pursue that builds upon my learning in this course and develops my own information literacy or technology skills would be to have my class take part in an online collaboration with other classes that are outside of our own school district. The second part of my goal would be to one day host my own collaboration, where I set-up the medium of the collaboration and lead the different classes through the different steps of it. The steps that I will take to accomplish this goal would be to first search different education websites to see what kind of collaboration projects are already being offered through different classrooms. Once I have found one that I believe fit my needs and my students needs, I would sign-up to take part in it. While I am taking part in someone’s else collaboration, I plan on asking the lead teacher questions about how they went about setting up this collaboration and if they have any tips. Then for my own, I first would survey what different topics that teachers would be interested in researching for a collaboration project. After I have figured out which topic most teachers would be interested in, I would start putting together the different activities, technology, and website that would be needed for the collaboration. I would also try and have a teacher that has lead a collaboration before to help me set-up mine up and guide me through it. After the collaboration was finished, I would want feedback from the other teachers on what work and what did not work, so that I could improve for the next collaboration project.

Reflection

Reflecting back on my personal learning theory, that I developed in week 1, based on the knowledge that I gained from this course, I would not modified my learning theory. My personal theory about how students learn is: that students must be able to access the information being present to them, feel comfortable in the learning environment, receive positive reinforcement, and make meaningful connections to the information being presented. I believe that technology can be very easily integrated into my personal learning theory and there is no need to spell it out in the learning theory.

Any immediate adjustments that I will make to my instructional practice regarding technology integration will be to have at least one integrated lesson per day. I need to have my students on the computers more and take advantage of all of the resources out there that would let my students express their knowledge in a way that best fits them. Two technology tools that I would like to use with my students would web cams and VoiceThread. The reason that I picked web cameras is because my students are deaf and communicate through sign language. I think that web cameras would be a great to track progress of each student’s language development and reading fluency. It would be a great tool as well to record books so that the students can have a watching center instead of a listening center, which is what their hearing peers have. The reason that I want to use VoiceThread is because it allows the students to interact with each other in a different way and to have conversations about educational topics, so that they are getting that language practice and vocabulary development. It is also a good tool, because it allows the students to practice their writing skills, in a new and exciting way. I can also then grading and or track their progress with concrete evidence through these assessments as well.

My first long-term goal that I would like to make in my instructional practice regarding technology integration is to be able to think of ways that technology would support the standard curriculum without much effort. Right now, I have to work hard at making technology integrate into my curriculum. I want to be a person that people could give me a topic and could list five different ways that technology could be integrated into the lessons. The first to achieving this goal is to finish my degree in Integrating Technology in the Classroom. The second would be to follow blogs or professional journals and get ideas from the current experts in the field. The third would be to try as often as possible to have integrated lessons, and then make notes on each lesson about what work and what did not work so that in the future the lesson could be improved. The final step would be keep working at it because practice makes perfect and to attend workshops and classes to keep update on all of the new technologies that are available and support education.

My second long-term goal that I would like to make in my instructional practice regarding technology integration is to have every lesson for every subject to have some technology integration built into it. The first step would be to pick one subject and try to have one lesson a week, and then to slowly build to having it in every lesson. The second step would be to add another subject after, feeling comfortable with the previous subject or subjects. The third thing would be then to work towards having all subjects. I think that it could be a huge undertaking, but I think the key will be to take it slow and not try and hurry. I think that this goal may take a couple years to full master, but I think the pay out at the end is well worth the effort. I know that I cannot do it alone, so I will need to tap into every resource available to me whether it be blog sites, professional journals, workshops, classes, and or people around me.

Voicethread Project

Please scroll down to view my voicethread project.

Social Learning Theory

The instructional strategies described in the resources I explored this week correlate with the principles of social learning theories, because they focused on social networking and using others to gain information and skills. The resources talk about using different software and programs the enable many people to work on the same project at the same time, and where the participants are located does not affect their ability to work on the project. Social learning theorists believe that the primary way that people learn is by interacting with people and their environment. They believe that children should be involved in cooperative learning groups and should connect new knowledge and skills to old knowledge while they work in their groups to complete a common task. These cooperative learning groups are a great place to integrated technology using social networking. Group members can not only work on the same project, but they each other feedback and answer each other’s questions