Final Blog Post: My Game Plan

Reflection on My GAME

In my GAME Plan, I pledged to improve on my ability to advocate, model, and teach safe, legal, and ethical use of digital information and technology, including respect for copyright, intellectual property and appropriate referencing of sources. Looking back at what I have done so far, I have not been able to dig down deep as much as I wanted to, this is due to lack of time on my part. I have got so much ground to cover; I need more time to do justice to all the issues raised in my GAME Plan. The good thing is that I have introduced my students into all the ideas, and I can see the genuine surprise on their faces, because really, many of them did not know they can violate any law by mere copying and pasting stuff form the internet!

I also wanted to increase my participation in local and global learning communities to explore creative applications of technology to improve student learning so that I can take the advantage of digital literacy skills as pointed out by (Hartman, 2010). Again, time is the culprit, I have attended about two local conferences, and I got to meet few people who are experts in the field of educational technology. I establish contacts with them, one of them actually will be coming to my school on October 28, 2011 to help me set up my class wiki and practice with me and also talk to my students about the use of educational technology tools in the class. So far, I have been able to partially meet some of my set goals, but there is still a lot of room for improvement and I intend to work on the areas that need improvements.

Since the beginning of the course, I have learned a lot of strategies that I have already added to my basket of repertoire from which I can choose and pick to suit the instructional situation. I have learned many GAME Plans to attract and retain my students’ attention for the very beginning to the end.  I have learned about how to turn my students into life-long and self-directed learners through the use of technology tools that will enable students to develop analytical and critical thinking skills that are needed for the 21^st century economic environment. As suggested by Cennamo, Ross, & Ertmer, (2009), I have introduced my students to various strategies about how to set realistic goals, take actions to meet those goals, monitor the progress, evaluate their achievement and extend or set new goals as soon as they have reasonably achieved their   previous goals.  What I have learned in this course has equipped me to device a workable GAME Plan that will enable me to deliver the curriculum to my students through the use of educational technology tools that will help me to design an authentic lesson that will engage students and allow them to express themselves. The idea of enabling students to showcase their skills in their own unique ways is the cardinal benefit of GAME plan. I will regularly modify my GAME plan to meet the changing situation in my class so that my students can always achieve their full potentials. Once I meet my initial GAME plan, the next step will be to consolidate the gains and then extend or move up to higher GAME Plan, or review the previous ones if need be.

Immediate Adjustments

The immediate adjustments I plan to make to my instructional practice regarding technology integration in my content areas are to introduce (I have started this already) introduce my students into social networking platforms such as wiki, blog, and digital storytelling. My students have already to post their work on our class blog, the wiki is also up and running, they are all encouraged to visit these sites daily and review all posting by the teacher and their classmates. Examples can be seen at http://youngmindsformathscience.blogspot.com/   https://minds4mathscience.wikispaces.com/page/notify/home   I have also tried the idea of problem-based learning by using the real life situations and stories that students can relate with and turn them into scenarios and ask the students to research, solve and publish their findings which they will present to their audience using and mass media tool of their choice. The students have told some stories using the class blog site, VoiceThread, Podcast, Prezi, and Microsoft PowerPoint tools. The next idea now is to use other Digital Storytelling tools to research and tell their stories regarding drug and substance abuse among teenagers in their unit in Health. Many of my students are already familiar with these tools. As Dr. Abrams advised, I allow students to explore various technology tools, I also release myself to learn the use of some tools from my students, they learn how to use these tools pretty fast, and they are really into showing it off if you permit them.  

References

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

        classroom use: A standards-based approach: Mason, Ohio: Cengage Learning.

Ertmer, P., & Simons, K. (2006). Jumping the PBL implementation hurdle: Supporting the

        efforts of K–12 teachers. The Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem-Based Learning, 1(1),

        40–54. Retrieved from

        http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1005&context=ijpbleferences

        http://www.educationworld.com/a_curr/virtualwkshp/virtualwkshp002.shtml

Laureate Education, Inc. 2010a (Producer). Spotlight on Technology: Digital Storytelling, Part 1

        (DVD). Integrating Technology across the Content Areas. Baltimore, MD: Author.
Laureate Education, Inc. 2010b (Producer). Spotlight on Technology: Digital Storytelling, Part2

        (DVD). Integrating Technology across the Content Areas. Baltimore, MD: Author

         http://www.storycenter.org/index1.html
Laureate Education, Inc. 2010a (Producer). Spotlight on Technology-Problem Based Learning

         Part 1(DVD). Integrating Technology across the Content Areas. Baltimore, MD: Author.
Laureate Education, Inc. 2010b (Producer). Spotlight on Technology-Problem Based Learning

         Part 2(DVD). Integrating Technology across the Content Areas. Baltimore, MD: Author.

         http://pages.uoregon.edu/moursund/Math/pbl.htm