Week 7 Reflection of the GAME plan

In this class I have learned to use the GAME plan to assist me to plan my professional development and also to structure the preparation of some lessons using techniques such as project based learning, collaborative learning and learning through digital storytelling.  The GAME plan is an excellent way of promoting self-directed learning both for the student and the teacher.

In this course I developed a personal GAME plan to improve a couple of areas in my teaching. My GAME plan goals were to:

·            Give my students the skills to reflect on their learning and findings to improve their understanding, critical thinking skills, planning and creative processes,

·            Become an advocate for and model best practice of digital citizenship and responsibility with my students.

The actions that I determined I needed to complete in order to achieve my goals were to find out more about different and new technologies that I can use to motivate and improve the performance of my students, and I also wanted to learn more about responsible digital citizenship.

Initially I found it quite difficult to locate new technologies that I could use at my school as I am in quite a bubble living and teaching here in Indonesia and relied mostly on finding out about new technologies from new International teachers coming to the school each year. This course along with the expertise and experiences from other teachers studying on the program has really helped me to locate new technologies that I can use in my classroom to improve the motivation and performance of my students. I have learned about a range of new technologies that are freely available on the Internet that have real applications within my subject area and really help to motivate my students to complete particular tasks.

Some of the new technologies that I have discovered in this course and have been experimenting with my classes have been:

·            Spiderscribe – This is an online mapping and brainstorming tool that allows students to share ideas and collaborate online. I have found this particularly useful at getting students to work together to analyze a particular problem or product.

·            Flipsnack.com – This is an excellent resource that allows students and teachers to create a digital flipping book. These flipping books are a great way for students in my design class to create a portfolio of their best works and share these online.

·            Pixton.com – This resource allows students to create their own online cartoon storyboards that can be shared with anybody connected to the internet.

·            VoiceThreads – This resource allows students to create an online presentation of images, comments and ‘real time’ commentary as the presentation is being watched. Students can then share their VoiceThreads with other students and viewers who can leave written or audio comments about the content.

·            GoogleDocs – GoogleDocs are an excellent resource for sharing and collaborating on a particular document. These documents can be spreadsheets, ‘word’ documents, presentations, drawings or tables and multiple parties can concurrently work them on.

As I have learned about these new technologies and have experimented with their use, my awareness and understanding of how I can become a better advocate of digital citizenship and responsibility has improved. I now understand how resources should be sourced and the reasons for referencing authors of information or media, and I will endeavor to model best practice in all of the resources and documents that I produce for my students in the future.

I think that the GAME plan is an excellent way of enabling someone to think carefully about the learning and to give themselves targets and goals that they need to achieve. The GAME plan has really helped me to reflect on my teaching and highlight areas that I want and need to learn more about whilst also making me think of ways to ensure that I meet these goals. The GAME plan is definitely something that could be used with students when completing their projects or units of work in my classes and it will also help me to personalize and tailor my teaching to suit their needs.

Over the past few weeks I have developed some lesson plans that use the GAME plan as an outline for structuring my thinking and preparations for the lesson. The lessons that I have used the GAME plan to help me design have been a project based learning lesson, a collaborative lesson and a ‘storytelling’ lesson. These can be viewed at the following wiki: http://techwithteaching.wikispaces.com/.

Each unit for my course comprises of students being presented with a problem that they need to analyze, research, synthesis, design, model, manufacture and then test and evaluate. All of the topics that I have learned about in this course can be used at different stages in this design process and from the short time that I have experimented with these new technologies in class I have found that they have really helped to motivate my students to produce some excellent pieces of work that they can then share with a larger than usual audience.

Week 4 - Monitoring my GAME plan progress....

This week I need to monitor and assess the progress that I have made to reach the goals that I set out two weeks ago. The two goals that I set for myself were to:

·      Give my students the skills and knowledge to reflect on their learning and findings to improve their understanding, critical thinking skills, planning and creative processes,

·      Be more of an advocate for and model best practice of digital citizenship and responsibility to make sure that my students' use of technology is safe, legal and ethical.

Most of the units in my curriculum are project based where students research, design, manufacture and evaluate a solution to given problems that I present to them. I have found that project based learning activities have enabled me to provide learning opportunities that are personalized for all students in the class and they can take the project in the direction of their choice and use their choice of learning style in most cases.

This week I learned about four different categories of assessment formats and it is clear that the project based format is most suited to my classes as I could make very distinct connections between what was stated and how I already assess my students in all of my classes.

The projects that students complete each year requires them to use higher order thinking skills to research, synthesis and design a realistic and workable solution to the problem. Other assessment formats such as forced-option assessments do not allow me to adequately assess the higher order thinking skills of my students and although I could use open ended response assessments, my subject is so practical, I find that my students can better express themselves and are much more motivated to physically demonstrate and explain their designs and end products.

The progress that I have made over the past two weeks in order to meet the GAME plan goals that I set out have been to start designing a database that my students can use to easily look up resources that I have sourced and that I think would be useful for the projects that they undertake. Designing the database is quite challenging because I need to consider all of the variable and information that may be stored, the relationship between each of the variables and also what I can use as the unique identifier (Primary key) for each piece of information. Any tips or suggestions for how I should structure this database would be most welcome!

As a matter of chance, this week I discovered a resource called flipsnacks (http://www.flipsnack.com/), and think that this is a fantastic resource for demonstrating the achievements and pieces of work that students have produced throughout a year of studying my course.

With regard to being a better advocate and modeler of digital citizenship I have started to modify the resources that I provide for my students so that any resources such as images or statements are fully cited, I have also built digital citizenship into my assessment rubrics for next year so that students realize the importance of being a responsible digital citizen.

Carrying out my GAME plan...

Last week I defined my game plan for becoming more competent in two areas of the National Education Standards for Teachers (NETS-T) in order to better inspire my students to reflect on their learning and also to teach them to become more mature and responsible digital citizens.

The goal that I have set myself to do this are:

·      To give my students the skills to reflect on their learning and findings to improve their understanding, critical thinking skills, planning and creative processes.

·      To be an advocate for and model best practice of digital citizenship and responsibility to make sure that my student’s use of technology is safe, legal and ethical.

All of the students in each of the classes that I teach have differing levels of ability, working strategies and learning styles and in order for me to fulfill my goals, I need to design the learning experiences so that they can be easily personalized for each of these students. As such, the resources that I will need to enable me to do this are:

·      To create a database listing details and locations of useful online resources and media segments that students can use based on key themes or topics,

·      New technologies that enables and motivates students to communicate, collaborate and reflect on their findings and learning,

·      To find expert teachers within my school and also online that can give advice, feedback and suggestions of ways to fulfill these goals.

Currently, I have a Delicious.com account that my students use to access websites that I have bookmarked as being useful and pertinent to their studies. Although this is a useful resource, I feel that I could improve it by embedding this information into an online database of other resources such as video clips and audio files. Students could then also collaborate and add comments to these resources to better the understanding and learning of the whole class. I have just started to develop this resource on my schools VPN (Moodle) and students appreciate having just one place that they can go to in order to access all of the information needed for their class.

I am constantly on the lookout for new technologies that I can use in my classes and thankfully I have learned of quite a few this year by taking this masters course. As I there are so many fantastic resources constantly being invented and created, I intend to continue my professional development and focus on new technologies throughout my life as a teacher so that I can better prepare and teach my students.

Developing a Personal GAME plan…

The GAME plan is a series of four main stages that are recommended for self directed learning, each letter in the word represents a different stage in the process:

1.     Setting Goals,

2.     Taking Action to meet goals,

3.     Monitor progress toward achieving goals, and

4.     Evaluate whether the goals were achieved and Extend your learning to new situations.

For this assignment, I have studied the National Education Standards for Teachers (NETS-T) and have selected two indicators that I feel that I could improve in my own teaching performance. Using these two indicators I have set out a GAME plan for how I will make and implement these improvements.

The two NET indicators that I have chosen are to:

•             Facilitate and inspire student learning and creativity by promoting student reflection using collaborative tools to reveal and clarify students’ conceptual understanding and thinking, planning, and creative processes
•       Promote and Model Digital Citizenship and Responsibility by advocating, modeling and teaching safe, legal and ethical use of digital information and technology

I teach a practical subject where students are presented with a design problem that they need to solve by following key steps in a set design process. When students start a project, they begin by analyzing the problem and then need to actively research answers to any questions raised from the analysis. Once this research is completed, they need to synthesis their findings so that they can use this to inform their design decisions. Currently I find that my students are less than motivated when it comes to synthesizing and summarizing their findings from the research and as such this has negative consequences when they start to design because their designs do not consider all aspects of the problem. I feel that by facilitating and inspiring student learning and creativity to promote student reflection I will be able to better prepare my students for the design stage of the design process.

The reason that I have chosen to set the promotion and modeling of digital citizenship and responsibility as another area that I need to focus on my teaching is because I realize that I have some weaknesses in this area and in the past have not expected my students to cite their sources to respect copyright and intellectual property rights.

The GAME plan that I have set out to help me improve in these two areas are defined below:

GOALS

I want to be able to give my students the skills to reflect on their learning and findings to improve their understanding, critical thinking skills, planning and creative processes.

I also want to be an advocate for and model best practice of digital citizenship and responsibility to make sure that my student’s use of technology is safe, legal and ethical. I already know of some technological resources that can be used to help promote reflection and collaboration such as mywebspiration.com and would like to find out about more resources that are available.

I will know that I have been successful when my students demonstrate that they are more motivated to complete the task and when their performances and design ideas improve in their general level of quality.

I will also know that I have been successful when my students demonstrate that they respect, understand and exhibit the traits of being a responsible digital citizen.

Action

What actions will you take to achieve these goals?

I need to know more about how I can motivate my students to collaborate and reflect on their findings and the different types of technology that are available for me to use to do this.

I need to know more about how to teach responsible digital citizenship and have clear and defined examples of why it is necessary.

In order to achieve these goals I need to complete more research in these area and have discussions with other experts to get advice on how I can improve on these areas in the classroom.

Monitor

How will you monitor progress?

As I find out additional information, I will experiment with new resources and monitor the changes in performance, understanding and motivation of my students. If something works then I will continue to use it, and if it doesn’t then I will look for alternatives.

  

Evaluate & Extend

How will you evaluate and extend your learning?

I will compare the changes in my students performance over time and will look closely at the extent to how much I have achieved my goals and the effect it has had on the performance of my students.  

Final Reflection for the course: Bridging Learning Theory, Instruction and Technology

This blog posting reflects on my perspective of personal theory of learning and how this has developed due to content that I have learned in the Walden University course the past seven weeks. I started this course by identifying my personal theory of learning in which I stated the need for using visual, auditory and kinesthetic examples for students of all learning styles to more easily engage and learn from. I also stated that learning needs to be student centered and that teachers should act as the facilitators to guide and direct their students through quality learning experiences of discovery.

At the start of this course my personal theory of learning was based on my teaching experiences and advice from other teaching mentors that I have had. This course has exposed me to four main types of learning theory, how they should work, how they can be applied to teaching practice and how technology can be used to aid the learning process. I also learned about ten tried and tested instructional strategies that have been proven to be effective at raising student attainment to varying degrees. This course has also introduced me to a range of different technologies that are both instructional tools and learning tools and I can use with my classes to increase the interest, engagement level and efficiency of the learning experiences that my students undertake.

The subject that I teach largely revolves around students following a ‘design process’ to design, develop and manufacture a working solution to a problem whilst learning the necessary theory for the course on a ‘need to use’ basis as they work through the design process to solve the problem. I have also learned that my classes are highly suited to constructivist and/or social learning theory. It suits constructivist learning theory because the theory states that students learn best when they are actively building or constructing something and this is main process that all of my students are working toward in all of their classes at the moment. I think that social learning theory is the next evolutionary step of learning that I will use with my classes, instead of working individually, I will have my students learn the content by cooperating to design and develop solutions to a problem. Cooperative learning has been stated as a strategy that “helps students make sense of, or construct meaning for, new knowledge by interacting with others” (Johnson, Johnson, & Stanne, 2000).

There have been two technology learning tools that have had an immediate impact on my classes, these have been VoiceThreads and the use of concept maps online using http://www.mywebspiration.com/. VoiceThreads have been a fantastic resource for my students to use and it has really improved the pace and motivation for my students to complete their work. I have used it to experiment with social constructivism by having my student share their learning by uploading videos or pictures of their final product with an explanation of what the problem was and how their final product fulfills the specified requirements of the end user. Students are then able to peer evaluate and comment on each other’s products, allowing everybody in the class to learn from each other’s experiences, perspectives and knowledge.

The other technology that was new to me and has helped me transform some of my teacher centered approaches to my students into more student centered learning experiences is the use of online concept maps . This technology is an online resource and allows me to create concept maps that students can interact, edit and develop either individually or in groups. I have found that this has really transformed the way that I teach new content to my students. I recently used this resource to introduce a new unit to my students where we started by looking at the fundamental functions of a house. In the past I have had an image drawn on the board and have just lectured to my students what each of these functions were and how it will impact their design stage of their project when they develop their own ideal living spaces. Instead I used this technology more as an interactive tool that students were able to add to and edit from their laptops in the class. I then used the instructional tool of collaboration to create groups of students and have each group research each of these functions in greater detail and then add summarized information to the classes concept map. Groups were also required to create powerpoint presentations to present and explain this information to the rest of the class. This activity was really effective at speeding up the research process (as in the past I had each student individually researching each fundamental function individually), and it allowed students to share expertise and develop many of the 21^st century skills that students need to be leaving school having mastered.

In the long run I would like to become a master at using each of the ten instructional strategies covered in this course. Dr Marzano says in the video resources that teachers should aim to select and master one or two each year, and build up their skills and ability to select from these strategies to suit the learning objectives that the teacher wants the students to achieve (Laureate Education, Inc., 2011). I am very familiar with using non-linguistic representations, identifying similarities and differences, generating and testing hypo thesis and summarizing and note taking but I think I still need to focus on developing my skills and ability to use reinforcing effort, providing recognition, providing feedback and cues questions and advance organisers strategies in order for my teacher toolkit to be complete and fully functioning.

References

Johnson, D. W., Johnson, R. T., & Stanne, M. B. (2000). Cooperative learning methods: A meta-analysis. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota. Retrieved May 4, 2006, from http://www.co-operation.org/pages/cl-methods.html

Laureate Education, Inc. (Producer). (2011). Instructional strategies, Part one [video webcast]. Bridging learning theory, instruction and technology. Retrieved from http://sylvan.live.ecollege.com/ec/crs/default.learn?CourseID=6072034&Survey=1&47=8842714&ClientNodeID=984650&coursenav=1&bhcp=1