GAME Plan Reflection

Looking back at the Game plan I developed at the start of this course, I'm certain that I am heading in the right direction in my classrooms.  Using my blogs to address two NETS standards was a good starting point.  Students will constantly need the reminder in my class about what is appropriate and what is not.  My hope is that eventually they will have a firm understanding of digital responsibility and citizenship.  The blogs were also a good way to facilitate student learning and creativity.  Students had great discussions ver their blogs about the novel we were reading in class.  They will be using the blogs after the novel to create a multi genre project on their blogs.

I realized that students will do work willingly, such as blogs, if a couple things are present.  First, like anything else, they want to see the relevance.  It is important the students know why they are working on the blogs.  I will spend a period prior to working on blogs discussing NETS-S and what the blogs will accomplish here.  Second, students love the interaction with their friends in a forum that they feel comfortable with and can take ownership of.  The more I can do to facilitate online interaction the better.

This course showed me new ways to use the technology.  My seniors will complete a digital storytelling lesson.  This lesson will be spread out over the final grading period.  There will be writing pieces built into the assignment that varies from research to script writing.  The digital videos will be posted on the blogs that they already keep.  I also want to continue working with the wikis.  They are a great way to collaborate and I want students to take advantage of this free tool.

Really, in reflecting over this course, I am most grateful for its practicality.  I chose this graduate program because I knew there were tools that I could use to improve student interest and student learning.  This class has been the most useful class in the course yet.  The workload was extremely high, however, the payoff was just as high.

GAMEs and NETS

The GAME plan is a great way of planning what I do in the class and evaluating its success.  In order to develop proficiency in the technology standards, I will need to continue to find ways to introduce technology and use the technology with different lessons.  Moving forward with the new GAME plan, I have to set my goal.  The goal I want to continue with from the NETS-S standards is communicating and collaborating.

The actions that I am going to take to meet this goal I am hoping will be multifarious.  I will be using the wikis with research.  I think these are a great way for students to collaborate with one another.  I am going to continue my work with blogs in the classroom, and I want to have students do more projects with the blogs as they become more comfortable using them.  Digital storytelling is another way for students to work together.  It also gives the students a different way to communicate what they have learned from a given project.

Wikis and blogs are pretty straightforward as far as monitoring.  I can constantly check student wikis and blogs to make sure they are keeping up with work and working well together.  The digital storytelling is alittle more complicated to keep track of.  I need to create a checklist of due dates for the project so that I can see each step of the process.  This is important because students could get caught up in the process of making the video and lose focus of the content that goes within the video.  By having the students on a schedule, I can make sure students do not get sidetracked and lose focus of what is important.

Evaluating student success will come from looking at blogs and wikis again.  I will be able to see the interaction that occurred on both sites.  Seeing the finished videos from the digital storytelling will be another great way to gauge students' success.  However, it will be important to have students evaluate how well they collaborated with each other.  Again, I do not want some students carrying the workload while others do nothing.

The GAME plan is a great way to plan out the incorporation of technology.  As many of us have found out, it is not easy to just jump right into new technology.  It was the same with me.  I needed a plan and now I have one.  I am looking forward to putting my new GAME plan into action.

This week...

This week I got some great tips for my GAME plan.  I will try to group my students in the next week.  These groups will help me to eliminate cliques that have begun to develop with the use of blogs.  I also got some great feedback on issues I was having with one of my students who swore on his blog.  This was always one of my goals: teaching students digital citizenship and responsibility.  We have a Terms of Acceptable Use policy for technology that I will go over with students.  Students need to understand that the blogs are an extension of the classroom and the same expectations apply on the blogs as they would in the class.  I think going over the policy will help.  However, having this happen i think was a good learning experience for him.  It opened up the discussion about businesses monitoring what is on social networking sites for not only hiring but firing employees.  This was also something that came up in the blogs this week from one of my classmates.  Overall, I think this week has led to some great progress in my GAME plan.

Revising and Building on the GAME Plan...

My first goal of inspiring and facilitating student learning and creativity is coming along great.  Students started using blogs tentatively.  However, as they gained more confidence they began taking more risks and posting pictures and music with their posts.  Also, as students respond to each other and see that their classmates read the blogs they have increasingly wrote with more thought.  I have been very pleased with the progress of the blog assignment.

Vicki Davis spoke about using blogs to help with differentiation.  This is definitely something I can incorporate into my instructional practice.  I love the idea of allowing my students to post videos if they sometimes struggle with the typing.  It is definitely something I will try with my students.

I am still working on helping my students with digital responsibility and citizenship.  Just this past Monday I had to have a talk with one of my seniors.  He swore in his weekly post.  Speaking with him, he agreed he would not have swore in class, and he realizes now that he should not have swore in his post as it was for this class.  However, he did state that he would have no problems with saying what he said on his Facebook account.  I know that this is the mindset of almost all my students and this is something that I need to keep working on with them.

A new goal that I can easily work toward is increasing student communication and collaboration.  The more communication between the students in the blogs, the better the blogs have been.  I need to devise a way to get students to respond to different classmates' blogs each week.  In this way, the blogs are a true extension of the classroom.  I want to eliminate cliques in the classroom, but sometimes that is very difficult to accomplish.  Any suggestions as to how I can get students to communicate with different people each week?

I think a new approach I can take for this is to ask for student feedback on how I can make the blogs even more effective.  They are at the point now where they have a comfort and familiarity where they can offer up suggestions as to how to better use theblogs in the classroom.  They can also give input on how to get students to communicate with different people each week.

Progress and Possible Adjustments Needed

My GAME plan is yielding results when looking at my two goals.  Students have become more interactive with their blogs and their classmates as they have grown more familiar with blogger.  I love seeing students incorporate pictures in their blogs.  Students have changed the backgrounds of their blogs to personalize them.  The blogs have become an extension of the classroom and they allow students to show their own creative side which was one of my goals.  I have also been able top have discussions through the blogs about what is appropriate to post in discussions, in pictures, and in their personal information sections of the blogs.  This ties in directly with my hope to help teach students digital responsibility.  Implementing the blogs as weekly assignments for the students has been vital to helping me meet these goals.

One of the biggest things that I have seen that I want to incorporate more is students' love of interaction with their classmates.  Students love getting responses to their posts.  As the blog assignments have progressed, the more students have gotten comments on posts, the more they write about in their posts.  They also have increased their own interaction as they get comments.  I want to pull this into the class with more collaboration and group work.  They enjoy interacting and feeling a connection with their classmates.

I am still working on different ways to work with the blogs.  I do not want the blogs to be limited to a form of online journal.  I would love for students to be able to submit projects or papers with their blogs.  I need to figure out how I can do this.  I also worry that the more students do major assignments on their blogs, the greater risk for plagiarism will occur.  My students use turnitin.com, so this can still be a deterrent.

The biggest problem has still been access to computers.  I still have around three to five students complain about not having access to blogs on computers and not having time to see me before school because they ride the bus.  These students are often late with their blog posts or get discouraged and do not post at all.  I am worried about how long it is taking administration to unlock the Web site.  I am wondering if I need to be available after school as well for students.  The issue is that I am also a coach and basketball will be starting soon which will make this impossible.  My plan still needs some minor adjustments.  Any ideas?