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.