Reflection

The GAME Plan allows teachers and students to follow a structured practice of learning with the use of integrating technology. I have followed a GAME Plan that has allowed teachers to introduce technology web tools into their classroom effectively. This task will be on going and have short term goals to complete a main goal of integrating technology throughout the district. I have been introduced to new learning techniques that will and have been benefiticial to students in the classroom. Digital Storytelling is a great way to incorporate technology into the classroom, but also allows students to show their true potential.

The immediate adjustments that I have introduced to our district is online portfolio's. Students are in the process of collecting digital data to capture the progress and the hard work of students projects. This allows everyone to reflect on the final product and evaluate based on true meaning. This will also give the students to show their best work in front of the community as a whole.

Using the GAME Plan Process with Students

Using the GAME Plan with my students would become second nature to them. Most of my curriculum is Problem Based Learning. Students are introduced to a real world problem and then need to address ideas and goals towards solving the problem. Students take action in their quest to come up with the best solution while carefully monitored by the teacher and if need be guided into the correct direction. They are also monitored on how well students work together on a project. After the project is complete and has gone through the testing phase, students will be able to reflect on the weaker areas of the project. Students after they have assessed the project for weak points will then be able to come back and make adjustments to improve their first design.

Incorporating NETS-S in Problem Based Activities has been very beneficial for students and teachers to stay on track to instilling technology not only in the classroom but in the community. It has allowed me to create new web tools to help students reflect on their projects. Students have found when using online collaboration web tools they gather ideas to innovate their previous design on a project. Using online web tools also gives students a chance to showcase their projects to the outside public. NETS-S has given students the goals that will benefit them in the future.

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

Revising Your GAME Plan

This week I have learned that not only using wiki’s for online portfolio could be useful, but using them to ask essential questions for introductions to problem based learning activities. Each student could engage into their own opinion into deep thought of the topic. The teacher will be able to assess the student during the process of the project to see if he or she are heading in the correct direction for success.

As for new goals that I would like to set for myself, I have none. I am trying to accomplish the two goals that I have set out to do and am still in the process of doing. I believe that creating too many goals can be counterproductive. I have learned that introducing technology in the classroom to teachers that do not want technology in the classroom is very difficult. They refuse to learn, but using the “don’t go away,” method has started to influence a certain few. I have found that is a success to me. I will keep encouraging the use of web tools in the classroom and hopefully will conduct some kind of progress.

Evaluating My GAME Plan Progress Week 5

My progress towards indicator 1c has been slow, but over time I have accumulating pictures of students work on my digital camera. Students have been working diligently to finish their sheet metal projects in Materials Processing class. I am in the process of creating the Wiki for student’s portfolio’s using Wikispaces.com. When I have finished set-up on the Wiki page I will then start a quick tutorial of how to set up their wiki Portfolio Page themselves. I have learned that creating a Wiki for student evaluations can become time consuming, considering that I will be including about 60 students onto this Wiki. I am also wondering if a Wiki can manage all of the pages including the pictures that will be add. I will need to do some research on how much space can be stored on a Wiki in Wikispaces.com.

The second goal indicator 3c, “collaborate with students, peers, parents, and community members using digital tools and resources to support student’s success and innovation,” has also become work in progress. As a part of my first goal is to incorporate a wiki in the classroom, I would also want to create a proposal to the technology department to introduce wiki’s as a guide to online portfolios for students from the middle school and up. Many problems that I am facing is teachers in the middle school teach every student, so there would be a lot of students that would only have one year as their portfolio and then move on to the arts or business. I would like to create a portfolio that allows the student to showcase their work through the stages of their high school academic performance so the student could have easy access to show their projects off campus. I believe this will create a more understanding of how wiki’s work and how they could be used.

References:

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

Monitoring My GAME Plan

Monitoring my GAME Plan and finding the information and resources that I need has not been a problem. I want to incorporate the knowledge of creating a Wiki for students and teachers in the district. When doing some research online I have come across many tutorials that will assist you when incorporating Wiki’s in the classroom. I have been able to share my findings with some of my colleagues through e-mail but have not received any feedback to the teachers about the use of Wiki’s in the classroom.

I may have to change my GAME Plan somewhat in order to provide a better understanding of the goals and how to assess the goals of incorporating web tools in the classroom.

When sitting through a professional Development Day and a class on websites it is clear to me that many teachers do not have the patience for the learning of web tools and how they could be benifeical to their classrooms. I may change one of my goals to provide examples of how Wiki’s can be used in the classroom

One of the goals is to create a Wiki to share students work as an online portfolio. I would like to do some research not only on Wiki’s but all portfolio based web tools, to decipher which tool could be the best for students and the teachers in the district.

GAME Plan

GAME Plan:

When looking at the National Education Technology Standards for Students, some goals have come to mind for strengthening in engaging technology in the classroom. One would be to incorporate web tools into not only the classroom, but the district. There are many teachers that may not know how to use the tools necessary to instill technology into the curriculum. As a person that has grown up in the communication era, it is only right to take a leadership role when incorporating tools from the internet and infuse them into the classroom. The second goal is to exhibit the skills necessary to represent digital age work and learning. It is necessary to share your knowledge of information with technology and the tools that are available for teachers through the internet that is easily accessible.

I would like to incorporate an online Wiki that would allow students to update their digital portfolio to showcase their work over the internet. When creating a Wiki it is necessary, especially when students can have access, to make sure you have control and manage the site.

I will also will add a reaction page to allow viewers to share their insight and comment on certain pages. It is important for students to feel some kind of critical critique of their work and be able to constructively take that information and grow as not only professionally but also as a person.

Resources:

The ISTE NETS and Performance Indicators for Teachers (NETS•T)

http://www.iste.org/Libraries/PDFs/NETS_for_Teachers_2008_EN.sflb.ashx .

Reflection

As I reflect on the course, I find myself developing new ways to effectively teach students new literacy skills through Inquiry-Based Projects. I have found new teaching tools and techniques to guide students in the correct process of searching the web for supportive information on a project. Students will be able to think creatively and essentially define problems that are confronted and be able to search for supportive information on the topic effectively. Using Inquiry-Based Projects will help students ability to successfully solve problems and allow them to transition from a school setting to a real world atmosphere.

Finding the best ways to make sure sources from the internet are valid and reliable teachers can use different teaching tools for students to understand the validity of a website. Mostly this class has influenced me to teach students how to search and what to look for to become efficient at using new literacy skills to help improve their information. Students will need to make sure they are required to give credit to authors and owners for their work. Using Inquiry-Based Projects also allows students to conduct deep thought when researching their topics and also develop new literacy skills through essential questioning. Using Inquiry-Based Projects allows for students to become self-motivated when searching for the correct information to problems that arise.

One professional development goal that I would like to pursue would be using teaching tools from the web to teach students the validity and reliability of a website for supporting information on a topic. Using screen casting I would show students the key element s when looking for reliable sources from the internet. I would give examples of bias websites and point out why the information is not reliable and valid for an Inquiry-Based Project. Then using the web they would be able to create a search on their topic and continue to use the literacy skills that they have learned from the screen casts.

This course has provided me with the correct information to teach students how to support information on a topic and to improve internet literacy skills. Students will be able to adapt to essential thinking and be able to support information on the web using new practices learned. As I reflect on the contents of this course, it has allowed me to enhance my capabilities when teaching students the effective practices when finding and supporting information using an Inquiry-Based Project.

Reflection

As the course comes to a close, my personal learning theory has not changed. I still want students to learn how to adapt to society. This class has helped my to create better instructional and learning tools through constructivist strategies.

The immediate adjustments that I have made to my classes is to create instructional strategies that help the students learn using technology. I loved the different way to use tools such as VoiceThread and Webinspiration. These tools allow for students to become more motivated to learn.

Some long-term goal changes that I would make is to increase more technology in my curriculum and to create more project based learning using constructivist strategies. A more project based curriculum would allow for students to be able to work together and allow them to use their critical thinking techniques.

Connectivism and Social Learning in Practice

This is my Voice Thread link:

http://voicethread.com/#q.b1192126.i0.k0

This week's reading was about cooperative learning in the classroom. I have found that with 9th grade that learning in groups is very effective if done with certain structure. When students work in cooperative groups, they make sense of, or construct meaning for, new knowledge by interacting with others (Johnson, Johnson, & Stanne, 2000.)

It is important for students to use all resources, including their peers to retain information. Collaboration of ideas are the best strategy for the long term knowledge of a certain topic. Social learning allows for students to see the big picture of the project or topic. It is best retained when students do not need to learn all the pieces and have to put them back together to understand the world around you.

Constructionism in Practice

Using Constructionism in the classroom allows for students become introduced to the process in building artifacts while learning the process. A good example of a constructionist strategy would be a Wiki. Wiki's allow students to create pages and are allowed to add on pictures and audio to enhance the cognitive learning experience. Wiki's are also published documents, when students here those words they feel the need to produce something great. They find that building Wiki's can be challenging but neccesary for students to grow and develop how to produce problem solving answers.

Cognitive Learning Theories and Strategies

As teachers, it is our duty to find the best way possible for students to understand, retain and recall the information given. Technology has become a powerful tool in creating these visual and auditory information pertaining to a certain topic.

After reading chapter 4 in, "Using Technology with Classroom Instruction that Works," I have been enlightened by using explicit cues when allowing students to research or preview a project that they are ready to approach. In this chapter it explains how using software and online graphic organizers to reach a point as to why we are learning about a topic. In this case Ms. Douglas was talking about bridges and the properties to the structure and design of certain bridges. She would give websites and vocabulary terms to allow students to get a deeper concept of how and why bridges are built the way they are.

Cognitive learning through procedural application gives students a picture memory of how things work. The graphic organizer allows for students to gather the information learned and to create connections for the brain to store the information longer in the mind. This strategy gives students to understand and retain the information needed to visualize in their mind of how a bridge holds so many lives everyday.

Behaviorist Learning and Strategies using Technology

As I started reading chapter 8 of " Using Technology with Classroom Instruction that Works," I like the idea of keeping track of effort. Many teachers including myself do not have students keep track of their own effort. This will give students a chance to place a visual in relation to their effort of the course and the grade they receive. Hopefully this will set an alarm to some student's brains thinking, "wait you mean if I try I could also get good grades too!"

I also read chapter 10, in which incorporated a lot of strategies for homework and practice using technology to deepen the understanding of student content. I found no only was the reinforcement in these strategies positive, but allowed for students to relate information to something they enjoy. For example, in this specific strategy a coach was using a spreadsheet to keep track of the football teams lifting workouts and how much they could lift in a certain time period. Well a math teacher thought it would be interesting to take those numbers and convert them to parabolic functions using Microsoft Excel. I found this very interesting how this math teacher could not only take a real world application, but also to put the information in using software where her students could then practice adjusting the numbers and time in order to create different parabolic graphs.

The amount of instructional strategies using software that has been on the market for decades is unbelievable. Incorporating this into a behaviorist learning style would allow for students to broaden their minds to readdress the problems using other techniques.

Reflection

As I reflect back on my recent course at Walden University I see myself more advanced in the field of communication online and how to use web based tools in my Technology courses here in Dansville, N.Y. I have the skills now to develop curriculum in my classroom that incorporates the use of a Blog, a wiki, or a podcast. I am in the process of designing my final project around a Blog. This course has given me that insight to help me share these tools with students that are desperate for the use of technology in my classroom.

This course has allowed me to expand my knowledge on web 2.0 tools and also given me a way to collaborate with other teachers through the use of blogging. I will be increasing my research for new technology that I can incorporate into my classroom and reviewing blogs that are about different techniques that teacher’s have used to incorporate technology in the classroom.

One goal that I have set to benefit the students in my classroom is to create a blog for research and reflection purposes on the project that they do in class. I like that students would be able to add their own character into their assignments using blog, podcast, or wiki’s. This would also give a good knowledge of how to use web based tools for their future. The second goal that I set for myself is to start an online portfolio for student’s work that they have done over the years. I would hold a workshop for the Technology Department and show them how to use a Wiki to add students work to a folder online. I also believe this would give a good impression on college interviews for students to bring with them to physically show what they have been doing the past 4 years of high school.

21st Century Skills: Yeh or Neh

As I started reading the article "Learning for the 21st Century," I found some good insight of how the educational system wants to start directing students of the future. Mainly what this article was about, was how students have gathered the core information, like your Math, Science, English Literacy, and History and then need to ask how can we use those skills to think at problems critically with self-direction and be able to communicate their ideas and answers to other groups. This article does a great job structuring what 21st Century Skills really are.

In the information world that we live in today it is hard not to even walk down the street and see a half a dozen people with cell phones in their ears. People want their information now and they want the fastest applications, the newest gizmo's and a way to be connected to them 24/7. It has already come and the new generation of students need to be able to adapt to the new digital world. There is no bout in my mind that these skills need to be implemented into our school systems, but this could take a very long time to implement into schools that are in poor communities that cannot afford new technologies for everyone. It seems that this article is very realistic and actually 21st Century Skills are installed in my District, but students will not learn these skills without teachers that have prior knowledge to the technologies used today.

I believe that we need to implement these skills not only for grades K-12, but at the collegiate level of learners also. It should be required for college students that are majoring in education to take a class on 21st Century Skills and how to implement them into the classroom. If students were to integrate these skills they would have a better chance of adapting to the real world when that time comes. "Today's education system faces irrelevance unless we bridge the gap between how student's live and how they learn."

Using Blog's to Discuss a Hot Topic

When I started to think of Blogging and how to use it in my classroom, my mind was blank. Then I realized in my Design and Drawing for Productions course most of the time a current event topic arises leaves time for questions and a discussion as a whole. Like for example, What would happen if photovoltaic cells ( a fancy word for solar panels) could produce more energy from the sun rays than the current ones used today? What would happen to society? Would it be the next revolution? Where would you see them? Questions that are always left up for discussion and I think it would be a great blog for a group of students to post and discuss on the Internet instead of circling the desks and having me talk and ask questions until I am blue in the face. Maybe blogging could expand students way of thinking on these certain topics. It seems to me this generation are more apt able to see what is on their mind through texting and typing then in front of a classroom.

New Blogger

I am very new at this and I just wanted to get a post under my belt. I am a Technology Teacher from Western New York, and have been teaching for 2 years now. I work in a wood/metal shop and teach high school students how to produce hands-on projects throughout the semester. I coach three sports and work construction throughout the summer. I like to keep busy but sometimes I tend to overwhelm myself with so much that is going on.