Monitoring My GAME Plan Progress

It's important to remember to monitor your progress when beginning a journey or plan like this.  So far, I am very proud of my growth and learning experience.  This past Wednesday at school, my 1st grade team had our usual collaborative planning afternoon.  During this time, I made a point to have a discussion about integrating technology into our content areas.  We shared ideas that we have found to use with the SMART Board and various assessments that we had created to use with our iRespond remotes.  I was excited too because not only did I gain new SMART Board ideas/lessons, but I learned about some great resources to use that will get my students up to the SMART Board more rather than me just using it for a teaching tool.  On Thursday and Friday, I taught my students about different things that I learned.  An "Aha!" moment for my 1st graders was when I used the words "I learned something and I want to share it with you...".  My students were so amazed that "I" am still learning about things and I explained to them that even adults still like to learn about new things.  We are all life-long learners.  I think this "mini" lesson turned out to be a "huge" learning lesson for my 1st graders.  :)

Carrying Out My GAME Plan

Through this journey, I will work through the process of developing, implementing, monitoring, and evaluating my personal GAME plan.  In order to carry out this plan, I will need recources.  Something that I am currently doing in my GAME plan, is discussing and sharing ideas with colleagues.  I am fortunate to work with some incredible 1st grade teachers with whom I am constantly sharing different SMART Board activities/lessons with.  We do a great job of communicating ideas with one another to better our students.  I have also been to two trainings since beginning this GAME plan.  The trainings were about using the technology in my classroom and sharing SMART Board activities/lessons that will get the kids up more and not just me standing there talking and using it.  I plan to continue my online research of finding more ways to use technology with my students on a daily basis.  Since the beginning of this school year, I can already tell a difference in how I teach and how much more my students are learning.  This makes me excited to continue this journey and see where it takes me.

Developing Your Personal GAME Plan

Teachers are often self-directed learners…

We create lessons plans (Goals)

We teach lesson plans (Actions)

We monitor student learning (Monitor)

We evaluate student progress and teacher effectiveness (Evaluate)

After examining http://www.iste.org/ and the NETS-T, I chose to focus on number two…

2. Design and Develop Digital Age Learning Experiences and Assessments

Teachers design, develop, and evaluate authentic learning experiences and assessment incorporating contemporary tools and resources to maximize content learning in context and to develop the knowledge, skills, and attitudes identified in the NETS·S.

My goals are to design or adapt relevant learning experiences that incorporate digital tools and resources to promote student learning and creativity and also to provide students with multiple and varied formative and summative assessments aligned with content and technology standards and use resulting data to inform learning and teaching.

The action that I plan to take is to search for research-based lessons using technology tools to help give me some ideas of how I can better use the technology tools that I have in my classroom with my students.  I also would like to become more fluent on our iRespond to use with my students for assessment and data collection. 

I will monitor my progress by making sure that at least once a week I designing, developing, and evaluating authentic learning experiences and trying something new and different each week with my students, whether it’s a lesson or a type of assessment.  (This I feel is the hardest part of the GAME plan.  I’m not sure how I should monitor myself and would love feedback or ideas for this.)

I can evaluate my progress by making sure that my students are still learning the content and by looking closely as student data from assessments.  I could also ask for a peer or administrator to observe me using technology tools in a lesson to evaluate my effectiveness and offer me feedback for growing more as an educator.

http://www.iste.org/