In developing my GAME plan and working towards meeting its
goals throughout this course, I have come to realize the significance working
with my colleagues can have. Prior to
this plan, I often avoided working with others because of different teaching styles
or a lack of other’s interest in utilizing technology in their lessons. However, after working with the ISTE
standards in this course, I’ve realized that a large part of preparing our
students for their futures involves collaborating and working with other
colleagues to develop meaningful units that enable students to use higher order
thinking skills.
Overall, I found my plan to be very effective and
realistic. While I do not feel the need
to revise it, I do need to modify the timeline in which to achieve my
goals. A large part of my goal involves
working with and training other teachers.
Since it was the end of the school year, there was little impact I could
make within a few weeks. I plan on
continuing to work on my goal throughout the summer and into the next school
year. I was asked to start a training
program for teachers who would be utilizing iPad carts in their classroom next
year during the summer months. In
addition, I will have a new title, in addition to my classroom teaching, as the
elementary school’s technology coordinator.
With this role, I would help my colleagues to incorporate technology on
a more regular, purposeful basis.
While I have always enjoyed incorporating technology into my
lessons, I learned in this course to utilize it in a more challenging and
motivating way. By creating a
lesson/unit that involves my students to solve a problem, I am allowing them a
greater sense of independence in their learning. Furthermore, problem-based learning also
allows for learning to take on a multidisciplinary approach that enables the
class to work towards multiple standards.
With today’s increasing demands on the content being taught in each
grade level, being able to cover many standards at once can be a definite
benefit. By creating a problem-based
lesson, I’ve seen how engaged my students became, even when it was the end of
the school year. Previously, I’ve always
thought that working with first grade students involved only teaching the basic
necessary skills. However, I now see
that the problems don’t necessarily have to be life-changing at this age level,
but they can help motivate students by using their natural curiosity to solve
problems.
In addition, having my students collaborate online and create
digital stories are two great instructional strategies I plan to continue using
in my classroom. I know another first
grade teacher from my previous school that is excited for this
opportunity. Working with ELL students
that are from a different background than my students will help expose them to
the world outside their small town (Laureate Education, Inc., 2010). It will also help push my colleagues ELL
students to challenge themselves to work at the level of the students in my
class who are not English Language Learners.
Having students reflect on projects they worked on throughout the year
by creating digital stories is a great way for them to process what they have
learned. I found that by having my
students create a reflective video using iMovie on their iPads was a fairly
easy process once we collaborated with the middle school students who modeled
to the students how to use the program.
This is a method of instruction that I plan to continue to use in the
upcoming years.
Overall, while I have worked quite a lot on integrating
technology in the classroom while working on my master’s program, I have truly
learned how to incorporate it in a more motivating, purposeful manner during
this course. By creating some goals for
my GAME plan, I can continue to work on improving my use of technology in the
classroom and in my district as a whole.
Reference
Laureate
Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (2010). Spotlight on technology: social
networking and online collaboration. Baltimore, MD: Vicki Davis
