This week's post...

Coming up with a GAME plan this week didn't seem that difficult.  However, as I created it, everything seemed to be a little vague.  I was having difficulty coming up with concrete plans to see my goals through.  Megan shared a great site that deals with technology and multiple intelligences It will take a little time to sift through everything the site has to offer, but it does offer concrete options that will help.

National Education Standards for Teachers and Putting Them in Place Personally

My goals are to improve in inspiring and facilitating student learning and creativity, and I also want to be able to promote and model digital citizenship and responsibility.  In order to achieve these goals I need to continue to come up with different types of technology to incorporate in the classroom that deal with different intelligences so students have opportunities to express themselves.  This will also allow me to help students use the technology in a responsible way so that they know what is acceptable and what is not.  Monitoring my progress will not be as easy.  I need to continually reflect after each unit and see what types of technology were included and what intelligences were addressed.  I then need to look critically at what I am doing to see if there is anything that could b added for the next time the unit comes up.  Monitoring the student digital citizenship and responsibility will be a little easier.  For example, with my student blogs and I can monitor what information they are posting and give them feedback.  As the year progresses students should need less feedback and will be able to monitor themselves.  Finally, I can evaluate my success at the end of the year through reflection once again.  How much technology have I introduced and incorporated in my classroom.  What else can I work with over summers to incorporate as well.  Also, I can look back at students digital responsibility and see how it progressed.  If there was a lack of progression I will know I need to spend more time focusing on that particular area the next time around.  This seems like a somewhat daunting task, but I have already taken the first step with student blogs and I'm seeing great results so I'm looking forward to pushing forward.

New class and new blog

I'm excited for this class.  I am now beginning to see results in my classroom from the courses I am taking at Walden.  I want to incorporate more technology in the classroom and this year all of my students are using blogs as an extension of our classroom.  They are using the blogs in a similar way that we use the blogs for this course.  Students have one post a week and must follow their classmates and respond to one entry a week.  So far students like the idea of the blogs.  They have had fun creating them and have commented how similar it feels to Facebook. I hope their enthusiasm continues throughout the year and I hope this class helps me improve my use of Blogs in the classroom.