GAME Plan Reflection

I started out skeptical about following a GAME plan. I usually have to create my own tools of organization for them to work for me; and yet here I am having accomplished several goals. It turns out that making learning goals that are relevant to me now, writing them down and then checking back in the monitor and evaluate my progress (Cennamo, Ross & Ertmer, 2009) has worked beautifully to build on my technology know-how and confidence. I believe that even though this was an assignment completed for a grade it has also become a catalyst for further learning for me in the integration of technology in my classroom.

New learning involved further detailed knowledge in how to handle a wiki and about several other applications that would work in parallel in my instruction using a wiki. Uploading files, importing YouTube videos and slide shows is now easy for me. I have raised my visual intelligence and speed for assessing work that has been done and evaluating the users of a wiki and have observed several different ways to organize the information on a wiki. An excellent support to what I want to accomplish on my wikis is epals and google.docs. These applications will bring more authenticity into student learning. After my current goal is reached, that of creating several digital stories of my own, I am confident of accomplishing even more after this class has ended. My method of teaching is newer and I was having trouble at first finding a way to adapt suggestions from the course resources to my particular style but now I have a clearer picture in my head of how to integrate technology into my curriculum.

As a result of my learning I will be starting my classes on a wiki the second week in January after sharing the GAME plan with them. I hope to get them signed up with an epal by then also but that will depend on who I can find to be our companion classroom. A month ago having my students creat digital story was intimidating because I didn't even know how to make one. Now, even though I have not finished any, I have confidence that I can figure it out so in February I will assign a simple digital story using slide.com. In March, their second digital story will require more and I hope to use photostory if it can be obtained for free on our school computers. If not then I will have my students use PowerPoint.

 

References

Cennamo, K., Ross, J. & Ertmer, P. (2009). Technology Integration for Meaningful Classroom Use: A Standards-Based Approach.  (Laureate Education, Inc., Custom ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.

 

GAME plan Progress

School is out! Hurray! And the family emergency continues to plague me...

But back to my GAME plan! I think I have figured wiki's out enough to lead a classroom full of students into a collaborative endeavor using one. There are still things I will continue to learn about them I am certain but I now feel comfortable enough to set another goal. I need to create a few digital stories myself. I will not feel comfortable having my students build one unless I can more or less do it myself and therefore do basic troubleshooting for them.

Powerpoint is one of the more common applications/software available that would work for this purpose so I will start with that. I will try to combine the effort with a great Christmas gift for the grandparents. This means that I will have a wonderful subject, my son, and incorporate pictures, video, music and narration. I think if I can get all four of those elements into a story/update about my son I will have mastered the most basic elements of a digital story. Also, burning it onto a DVD and or saving it to a thumbdrive will be another great accomplishment in my GAME plan. Woohoo! Progress in technology education!

I think the process of forming a GAME plan would be very beneficial to students. One of the digital stories I do could be about forming a GAME plan and the NETS-S with my students. Before doing the wiki or the digital story we could go over what the students want to work on. As long as I am modeling and supporting those goals through assignments that involve technology the students will find motivation and enthusiasm to meet the goals they make for themselves.

My GAME plan revisited...

Well, this blog is late due to a family emergency. It's much more work to be absent!

But about my GAME plan, otherwise known as my efforts to learn more about wiki's and integrate them into my instruction. Well, I have learned a little bit more about how to work a wiki but even more about some of the applications that would be wonderful to run in conjunction with the wiki. The idea is of course to get my students excited to use the wiki and motivated to use them (and thus continue learning content) outside of class time. I think Slide (http://www.slide.com/arrange?bc=0&fx=4&tt=24&sk=0&cy=ms&th=0&sc=0) is one such gem that students will have a TON of fun with. After having them write a short entertaining story in Spanish I will just "Let them loose" on this free online application that allows you to upload pictures and write in text students can create nice visual backdrop to their stories! It was so easy that even I was able to make a slide show quick and easy!

Epals is also something I am excited about because of the contact with native speakers that my students would get. I know how invaluable it was for me to travel to another country and get a broader world view and I hope that the experience with epals, possibly in conjunction with a wiki project, would engender some of the same benefits that travel had on me. The NETS T standards will take care of themselved, it seems, as I have my students working with each other and possibly other classrooms using technology.

I still have much more to learn about the wiki and what can go with it so I am not ready to set another goal for myself but I am ready to dive in again soon. In January I will unleash my Spanish 3 class on pbworks and we will see how smoothly I can get it to run. =)

My particular learning style is to get in and work with what I want to learn about so I hope to beable to more of this during the Christmas break. One week till Christmas break! Yay! Merry Christmas everyone!

Further technology know-how...

In trying to advance my GAME plan (and my homework) I have started a wiki page and some of my members have done some great things already! A new cool slide show greets the new viewer and is a great resource to any teacher (Thank you Sherrie)! Further, other comments and questions from my wiki-colleagues have helped me to further my thought processes in regard to how a wiki will work in my classroom. :)

I don't know if I need to make any adjustments to my plan yet. I have much more to learn and I believe the process of making this PBL, using the wiki and continuing to read and discuss is helping me to advance my goals.

GAME Plan progress...

...is slow. I think my "inner mental map" of how data transfer works is a little bit clearer but still lacking. However, I have made great progress on some of my other goals like improving my TPR-S instruction (see blog post below), aligning my lessons with my colleagues' and learning more about what I can do with a wiki. :) Yay me. Managing over 135 wiki pages does pose challenges but can be managed! I am very excited about the possibilities! I need to look up some other great resources! Through my Walden courses I have become acquainted with more great resources than I can learn at once.

The next assignment, involving a wiki, will be very useful in advancing my GAME plan. In a week or so I will have a much better idea about what a wiki can do and, more importantly, how!

My TPR-S Workshop-Blaine Ray-November 13, 2010

TPR-S is a method of teaching a second language that has evolved quite a bit in the last three decades but has proven to improve student fluency and raise test scores of all students by one standard deviation (that is 36%!!!) and is just much more fun than laboring and belaboring grammar and vocabulary lists. The main goal is to get as much comprehensible input in the time that you have in a class as possible. The teacher "asks" a story. This involves the teacher asking a lot of questions, some of which allow students to determine details and direction of the story. The rest if just to review the story and check for understanding and to put add humor. The key is to incorporate tons, tons and tons of repetition. Did I say repetition? Ways of keeping these repetitions interesting enough for the students are to use props, pictures, content that is about the students themselves and student actors.

Problems that I have had with using TPR-S: student not staying in Spanish, boredom (the death knell to all learning!), lots of work for me with little apparent return, department head not on board, difficulty adapting the method to the brand new text book.

At this workshop the necessity of going slow was emphasized. To bring this need into clarity a new language was taught, using this method, and I now know some German! (Es gab ein madchen. Das madchen heist Heidi. Heidi ist eine gutes madchen. Heidi mochte ein grosse kuh. Heidi geht zu Dingdong, TX. In Dingdong Tx es gab ein man. Der man ist Brad Pitt. Brad Pitt hatte drei kuh...All this a week later in two minutes and no previous German!) As I learned this German (one hour by the way) I realized how very slow Blaine was going and how fast it seemed to me.

Another point that was made clear was HOW to maximize repetitions! Frankly getting in 50-125 (range required to convert into long-term memory) repetitions of one word or structure without adding new material is difficult! There are ways to do it. First, after you ask the question, always restate the answer after the students have answered. Second, add another detail (when, where, how and/or why). Third, add in more characters if I have run out of ways to ask, state or reiterate a structure.

A further modification that has proven to get good results is to always, always use student actors and when using student actors: ask the actor the questions so that the change in perspective is demonstrated. A change in tense can also be used. The key is to
Another thing that became glaringly obvious to me is that the teacher is to be 100% in control of the story, class, content and atmosphere; My initial impression of the TPR-S method was that it was very relaxed. Upon further observation, I noticed how very strict the teacher actually was about how everything went, what was said and how it was said. Everyone had fun and was engaged but the atmosphere was very much under his control.

The benefits of TPR-S method are: less paper work, you get more grammar and students will be more fluent.

In one week of TPR-S the first day of the story should be all background, all kinds of details. The second day should be action but first review and add in details that "you forgot" to say yesterday. Again, as many repetitions as possible! As many repetitions as possible!!! You must go very, very slowly. Third day, read! The process will be similar to the story asking. Do rewrites, retells, draw the stories. Timed writes and relaxed writes are next. Quizzes should be as brief and focus on comprehension.

My GAME Plan Continued...

A very specific goal I have for my instruction is to incorporate class wiki's, one for each class. I want to get to the point that I maintain current information about each class on a regular basis so that those that are absent can access material they missed and students that struggle can get on and review. These wikis would also be the vehicle for learning. Students will create collaborative stories in Spanish for which they will add multi-media aspects and then future classes can access and "read" them. Further down the road we may even team up with a class in Spain or Guatemala or Chile.

To accomplish this goal I need access to a computer lab. I have that. I also need experience with wikis and how to teach using them. I have that (the hard way). Through the courses here at Walden I have played with podcasting and know how frustrating simple steps can become when the way to do them is not clear.

The only skill I lack is learning how to transfer different kinds of data from place to place. That act seems to be the one that gets me every time. I just need the data transfer skill. To try to develop this skill I need a tech hero (who doesn't). I could avail myself of the expertise of my school's IT guy. I don't have the mind map of how a podcast is moved and transferred (or transformed or why it even needs to be transformed) into different files that make it acceptable to other…platforms? I will keep you posted. If anyone knows of an awesome and very detailed "how-to" web-site please don't be shy. If the title is "Data Tranfer for Dummies" I won't be offended.

GAME Plan

One of my first lessons incorporating technology, a wiki page, flopped horribly. There was problem after problem that ranged from technical to bad management issues. I jumped prematurely into a lesson that would have been much more powerful had I been more proficient but I was eager because all the messages I was getting from Walden agreed with Cennamo, Ross, & Ertmer (2009): technology would make my instruction better, engage my students and prepare them for their future job market. I didn't know enough at the time to do it well but I didn't know it or even have a good clue about where to start to change it before just jumping in. I am afraid my plan mostly involves standard one of the ISTE Net's ("Teachers use what they already knew AND technology to advance student 21st Century learning" http://www.iste.org/standards/nets-for-teachers/nets-for-teachers-2008.aspx) but we all have to start somewhere.

Last time I had the students create their own separate wikis. This time I am going to have one wiki from which all groups create a page or series of pages; also I will have my students work in groups of two per computer instead of one per. That will not only help to foster the collaborative nature of the learning but also circumvent the common technical problems that we run into in the lab. When all else fails I can have them switch computers. Another way that I will improve that lesson will be to learn more and become more comfortable with the technology I want them to use. Peggy Ertmer (Laureate Education, Inc. 2010) asserts that knowledge of technology and how to teach my content using that technology is of primary importance. I have to spend time on wiki sites and figure out how thingswork. This is why I will be spending my Labor Day doing just that. (Happy Veteran's day by the way!).

As for reflecting and evaluating my work I am not sure because there are not any other people in mybuilding that I have a feasible amount of time to work with. Maybe I should take some time off my masters' studies! That sounds really good to me right now! I could spend a bunch of time developing my Game plan and then come back and evaluate with my cohort group! Learning takes time and it seems I have none at this time! Any suggestion?


Reference:
Cennamo, K., Ross, J. & Ertmer, P (2009). Technology Intergration for Meaningful Classroom Use: A Standards-Based Approach. (Laureate Education, Inc., Custom ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.


Laureate Education, Inc. (Excutive Producer). (2010). Program 3: Enriching content learning experiences with technology. Part 1. [DVD]. Integrating technology across the content areas. Baltimore, MD

Reflection on my first technology class...

Coming into this class I was not convinced of the true need to integrate technology into my classroom. After reading the course materials and participating in the assignments I now realize how imperative it truly is. The concept alone of "participating in an assignment" as opposed to doing it is germane to 21st century skills. The overall objective of schooling, thought of to be, preparing the students for the workforce, will not be accomplished without the integration of technology and the skills of collaboration and problem-solving (Laureate Education, inc. 2007). The workforce has evolved and the schools need to do so as well.

With this in mind I have to say that this class has successfully opened my eyes to the need and to some exciting possibilities. I also have my eyes opened to how archaic my mindset was and in a way how that created a disconnect between myself and my students. A great result of this discovery has been that I have dived into the deep end and have introduced wikis to my students just this Friday. I have decided this is the only way that my technological skill will keep moving forward and I will be able to provide a model of bravely stepping into new territory, problem-solving as I go and collaborating.

Stepping out of my comfort zone is also a way in which I can become a leader in my building and maybe even my district. The most important quality of a leader is usually that he or she has experience; they have done it before and can offer special tips and troubleshoot for those that do not have experience. Another way that I will become a leader (no matter how much experience, if no one follows you really are not a leader) is to target the biggest problem in our building: advisory. As with any state mandate that is not state funded there are headaches after headaches with this program. I have done some reconnaissance and found the perfect technological solution. I am confident I will be able to get other teachers excited about this program. The Washington State program called WOIS has the infastructure already set up for career paths, financial planning, space for portfolios and anything else necessary. It is easy to use (even for this digital immigrant) and on top of that there are even free training programs offered in the summer which I am going to attend.

This offers the perfect introduction to my primary goal; to have all freshmen and any other student who wants to, completely online for their advisory class. I have already done a lot of the work to accomplish this so I expect great results next year and beyond.

My second goal but just as important is to have a curriculum well supported by technology. This will mean that: I will have a teacher website that has useful information, current assignments and helpful links; I will require at least three collaborative projects that will be completed using web 2.0 tools; I will support the improvement of 21st century skills by providing time in the computer lab, require collaboration and complex problem-solving.

A third goal of mine will be to lobby for the money to get thirty iPads in my classroom with the keyboard attachment. In this economic climate my hope of reaching this goal within two years is not high but without any effort the possibity is zero. It may take three or four years to do and by then maybe the bugs will be worked out and the iPads will be that much better.

In many ways the majority of my goals entail doing things differently but as I grow and develop in my 21st century skills and confidence so will my vision for doing different things (Laureate Education, inc. 2007). I have now seen a glimpse or two of what is possible and have connections to new ideas and other teachers who are leaders online. On Friday, dealing with problems unforseen in a foreign setting, I did see a higher degree of engagement from my students. My ultimate goal after all is to transmit a passion for learning, discovering and problem-solving to my students. I have taken the first of some difficult but exciting steps to that end.

References

Laureate Education, Inc. (Producer). (2007) "The Emergence of Educational Technology." [Motion Picture]. Understanding the Impact of Technology on the Education, Work and Society. Baltimore: author

SCVNGR - XPLR - SANDBOX45551 - Scvngr XPLR Tutorial

SCVNGR - XPLR - SANDBOX45551 - Scvngr XPLR Tutorial

Posted using ShareThis

An experiment in podcasting...

With my Tech hero by my side I will try this again...

http://jlbp520.podomatic.com/player/web/2010-04-08T15_38_44-07_00

Critique of Partnership for 21st Century Skills

This website is attractive and professional looking and has some great information and materials to offer. It also provides a kind of vision for what everyone in the field of education should be working towards; and that is a vision for preparing our students to succeed in the world of work which has changed so very much in the last decade (or three).

Honestly I did not like the site at first and I think it had more to do with my own learning preferences. I did not see an obvious purpose or mission that told me "this is what you will find here" at first glance. There was a lot to read and I am a slow reader. My opinion warmed up, however, after I saw the video clips available under the tools and resources tab. Some of the wonderful results of what they are doing was great to see. I especially loved the kindergarten video, a must see, called "Data Collection." If I were asked for advice on how to format their home page I would say to make this one of the links and label it "21st Century Learning in Action." Also I would say to put the mission on the home page and boil everything else down into three to five points or areas that unfold further information if I click on it. Leave the drop down tabs at the top. Those are great.

I think the site has nicely outlined what education should look like. The site details everything that is necessary to educate our young people. I agree with the mission and am sad to say that my state is not one of the affiliates. Because of this the implications for my students are non-existent at this point.

I am finally and fully won over by the fact that teacher training and development is included in the overall plan. So many times that part is neglected (or omitted) in any new plan and teachers are left to sink or swim. More often than not they swim but can be so much more effective when given the tools beforehand.

Wiki possibilities...

Well, the experience of making a collaborative wiki was a series of extremes, everything from excitment and glee to frustration and aggravation; But apart from my spotty successefulness with it the wiki has so much potential in the classroom. I would call it the new "blackboard."



No matter what or who you teach this is definitely worthy of learning to use!

Hello Walden Colleagues! I need a hand (or rather part of a story...) I want to know what a story would look like if I just started it on a blog and you could help me see what it will be like and possibly trouble shoot. If you have a minute, stop by my blog and follow the link in the upper right hand corner.

The answer to all advisory "whoa's"...

The area where I see the most applications for myself is in advisory, also known in our school as navigation 101. I have a group of seniors right now and will get a group of freshmen next year. Attitudes towards advisory has been abismal. I think that most of the problems (maintaining a portfolio, relevance and attitude) could be solved by moving the whole process to the computer. The blog would serve both the purpose of storing and updating their portfolio for ALL to see as well as providing a much more interesting matrix within which to set goals, plan, and reflect.

Excuses, dragging feet and comments of how stupid advisory is could be eliminated or at least minimized. In many schools advisory is already online and portfolios are electronic and they span all four years but in my building it is not. I intend to change that. Not only will the whole process be more relevant but access to other sites about careers, colleges, volunteer work, online dictionaries, etc. will be available "right [there], right now" (Laureate Education, inc. 2007). Also, the idea of the "global audience" (Richardson, W. 2009 p. 30 as cited by Hetzel, Stacy 2010) adds not only interest but motivation to make any work fit for educated eyes. Best works could be scanned or photographed and downloaded onto their site. I think another benefit of doing this online would be that the "personal" aspect of the portfolio would actually get much more attention. This would also make the Senior Project presentation (recently integrated into advisory) go much more smoothly. The power point element would be a breeze to generate! I am very excited!


References

Hetzel, S. 2010 http://stacyhetzel.blogspot.com/2010/03/utilizing-blogs-in-classroom.html

Laureate Education, Inc. (Producer). (2007). “Technology and society” . [Motion picture]. Understanding the Impact of Technology on Education, Work, and Society. Baltimore : Author

Bogging Blugs

I posted a candid paragraph or two and didn't get any responses. Well, I am not easily discouraged so I responded to myself. I gave myself a rousing pep talk and now that I am not so fuzzy about the workings of blogs I think it now has a working RSS feed. I will figure out how to delete previous posts and feel even better about my page. I think I will really like it. I have seen how it can be applied on some of my colleagues posts (especially impressed by Francesca Muracas blogs and links) and look forward to learning a whole lot more!

Ambivalent...to blog or not to blog

Even as I type this blog Microsoft Word lets me know in red that blog is still not an official word yet. I started this masters program thinking that because the students will be thrust into a world where computers are used more and more I need to model and facilitate learning and adapting to the changes in my culture and times; However when Dr. Thornburg took it a step further and made the distinction between doing things differently and doing different things I feel resistant (Laureate Education, inc. 2008). I feel pulled too fast and do not wish to kick and scream but in the book by Drs. Marzano, Pickering and Pollock there are well established research-based practices that are known to increase student learning and none of them mentioned doing different things with technology (2001). Convince me. Persuade me. Cite some evidence (formal or informal) that supports doing different things with technology. Maybe some of my colleagues have already done different things and can share their successes.

References

Laureate Education, Inc. (Producer). (2007). “The Emergence of Educational
Technology” . [Motion picture]. Understanding the Impact of Technology on
Education, Work, and Society. Baltimore : Author.

November, A. C. (2008). Web Literacy for Educators. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin
Press.