Week 4 Game Plan Progress

Burton, Maureen

November 22, 2011

This last week I have continued to make progress on my goals.  For GAME Plan one, I divided students into research teams to locate current information on recycling, reducing, reusing, composting, storm drain pollution and the danger of plastic bags.  Each group has been doing Internet research on their topic and right now I am having the create PowerPoint presentations for their topic.  I am having them do the PowerPoint presentation as a means of collecting their data.  These students are struggling readers and writers and I know that they enjoy creating PowerPoint presentations so I decided that rather than telling them to simply take notes.  We can use their presentations to write the script of our multimedia presentation.  What I did notice this week in doing the research is that my students were struggling to find good Websites.  I ended up creating a list of links for sites that would provide them with the information they need.  Providing scaffolding like this will help students find success rather than frustration.  I also got in touch with the man who made the original Earth Day movie for our town and he is on board for helping us create an updated version.  He invited my students to come to the recycling center and transfer station and is getting us one of the original copies of the movie.  I will plan that field trip when we are closer to pulling it all together.  All in all, I think we are making progress.

For GAME Plan 2, I have not done that great on moving forward with the Mimio Board.  I am struggling with how to incorporate its use with social studies content.  Most of what I have done is with my remedial reading class.  I use video clips, images, sound tracks, etc., in class all the time, but I do not need it for those.  I did a lesson this week using the textbook page to have students highlight the topic sentence and underline supporting details. It went fine, but when used with the whole class, only a few students got to come up and use the Mimio pen.  I was hoping and expecting it to be more engaging.   In struggling for ideas, I went back to re-read the page on using interactive whiteboards in our textbook.  I think I need to focus on having my students interact more with my instructional material.  Teachers can use their whiteboards to interact with documents, images, video, and animation (Cennamo, Ross & Ertmer, 2009, p. 93).  They make it sound so easy to come up with ideas. I did find and join the Mimio Connect Community so I am looking forward to exploring their ideas this next week and collaborating with others using the same technology.  I am still open to any ideas anyone in this community has too. 

Have a great Thanksgiving everyone!

Reference

Cennamo, k., Ross, J., & Ertmer, P. (2009). Technology integration for meaningful classroom use: A standards-based approach. Mason, OH: Cengage Learning.