Reflection 6714

This course has taught me a great deal about differentiation, universal design for learning, and using technology to implement the aforementioned. The Differentiation Station social network itself was a perfect example of how to differentiate instruction, using technology. I am thinking of creating cooperative learning groups and having each group make their own social networking site so that they can bounce ideas off each other through this. As they are working on a project, they can post relevant links, ideas, or questions. They can engage in a chat outside of school to collaborate.
As far as the resources my classmates have shared with me, there is a great deal of websites on our own networking site that I have found beneficial to helping me understand the concepts in this course. I will use these sites to pull ideas for activities in my classroom.
I will immediately change the way I use laptops in my classroom. When I have the students work on laptops, I typically have them all working on the same assignment. Instead, I will now have them use them to work in stations, depending on what they need help with.

Reflection

Throughout this course, I have learned a more focused way of thinking. I think that the GAME plan provides a sound structure for development as a teacher, and for teaching my students as well.

Developing my GAME plan throughout the course via my blog allowed me to hone in on a few standards that I would otherwise not know how to improve on by myself. It is a great step by step process. I realized that it was important to evaluate and monitor my progress throughout the process. This helped me achieve my goal in improving in the NETS standards. The blog allowed me to share my ideas with my colleagues, and for them to provide me with feedback that could improve what I was doing. This collaborative piece was fundamental. I gained a lot of great insight from others that I would not have heard had I not integrated this technology. All of these new revelations will deeply affect my teaching as anything I set out to do will now follow a process. Most importantly, any goals I set for myself or my students will really be monitored and evaluated.

I am going to immediately implement a reflective piece at the end of each quarter for my students. At the beginning of the marking period, I will have students set personal goals. Midway through, I am going to have the monitor and adjust to see how they are doing to reach the goal. Then, at the end of the quarter, they will evaluate their progress.

GAME plan with Students

When it comes to helping my students meet the technology standards outlines in the NETS-S, I think it would be great to use the GAME plan. Take, for example, NETS-S standard 1b, “Students demonstrate creative thinking, construct knowledge, and develop innovative products and processes using technology. Students: create original works as a means of personal or group expression.”
To accomplish this standard with my students, I will first set a goal. The goal could be to have the students develop a digital story that demonstrates the qualities outlined in the standard. My action would be to teach the students how to create a digital story by modeling an example, and handing out directions. I could then let them play with the program and monitor them while they do so. To evaluate the assignment, I will look at their final product. The GAME plan works well for each of the standards, and will help the students become proficient.

Revising my Plan

• What have you learned so far that you can apply in your instructional practice?
• So far, I have learned that keeping parent and student communication simple is one of the best ways to keep it open. Too many sites to remember, or too many links to click through can be a turn-off to students and parents who have many other teacher sites to check, and many other things going on outside of school.
  
• I have also seen that participating in learning communities to push technology is challenging, but rewarding
• What goals are you still working toward?
• I am still working on my goal of communicating with parents and students with digital tools. I want to continue to reach out to more people this way.
  
• This Friday, I will work some more on my second goal as I will be attending a workshop on technology implementation
  
• Based on the NETS-T, what new learning goals will you set for yourself?
• I don't think I want to set new goals just yet. I would like to work on the ones I have right now.
  
• If you are not ready to set new learning goals, how will you extend what you have learned so far?
• I am thinking of teaching a technology workshop in the future to colleagues.
  
• What learning approaches will you try next time to improve your learning?
• I think I would like to participate in more online forums next time to gather information about what I am learning
  

Progress towards GAME goals

This week, a great deal of progress has been made towards my GAME goals. I continued to work with the school based professional development committee, and we finished our plan for next year's school professional development. In our plan, we have included school wide goals of: improving in writing, improving problem solving skills, implementing more technology, and implementing cooperative learning amongst our students. This is a big step towards working on standard 5a, and I think is quite effective towards helping meet this standard.
This coming week, on the 12th, I will be attending two in-district technology workshops to help me learn more strategies to use in my class. I am really looking forward to this! I hope to use this in my instruction immediately.
I am also planning to start experimenting more with the online grading program I use to communicate with parents and students instead of relying on my website. I think that since most people are already familiar with this site and use it often to check grades, this would be a better vehicle to communicate. The program (snapgrades.net) has recently implemented new features for teachers, so I am going to check them out.

Monitoring my GAME Plan

I can say that I have taken baby steps to carry out my GAME plan. For example, I started a class discussion board as a test run. I only did this with two groups of students (grade 7) and we only tried it out for one topic, but I think it was important to do this to become familiarized with the process. I realized through this how much work it is to moderate student comments/posts.

I also already have a website, which includes a lot of the information that I would like to include on my blog to keep students AND parents in the know. I think I will have to find out how many of my parents/students actually view the website to stay abreast of happenings in the classroom.

Finally, I have recently participated in a professional development opportunity to try to promote technology. As part of a recent state mandate, I have volunteered to be part of my school's professional development committee. The people I am working with on this committee and I will use data collected to determine next year's professional development plan for our staff. We will be working on this throughout the next couple of months. I will be trying to provide more technology opportunities for my colleagues, if possible.

I do not plan on modifying my plan, as I still feel the goals I have set are worthy and attainable!

Carrying out my GAME plan

To carry out my GAME plan effectively, I will need a site to host my blog. My district has already setup wordpress for everyone if we would like to use that. I think it would be a good place to start as our technology department would be able to provide support if I run into problems. I would also need information on effective uses of classroom blogs. Perhaps someone has done a research study on this already? It would certainly be beneficial for me to read up on this, or even talk to colleagues who already have blogs implemented and see what strategies they use. Video would be another great way for me to achieve my goals- I could find video tutorials on making a classroom blog, uses for a blog, or videos on the topics that I would like to attend workshops for. I have already explored the blogs of some other colleagues to see what types of things they are doing with them. I am going to try to also contact district supervisors to see if they could recommend blogs of teachers in the district who I may not know.