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.