Burton, Maureen
December 17, 2011
The use of a Game plan can be very effective in helping anyone develop new skills. By completing a Game plan, a person develops a plan of attack for their learning (Cennamo, Ertmer & Ross, 2009, p. 3). I found the process to be effective as I developed two Game plans for extending my use of the Interactive white board and real world experiences for my students. I think the key to its success is that you monitor and evaluate your progress along the way which keeps you motivated and on track for true growth. I think using the Game plan with students will prove effective because each student can customize their approach to the learning task and the specific skills they want to develop (Cennamo, Ertmer & Ross, 2009, p. 4).
Game Plan One Evaluation
We are progressing on our Earth Day project. I have had to do smaller projects to help my students get familiar with the new technologies. The digital storytelling in my social studies classes this last week has really helped my students with the technology aspect of the project. These remedial readers have benefited from working with a more heterogeneous group of students. This has helped build their confidence in the use of Windows movie maker. It has also helped with storyboarding. My students have been evaluating the old movie and using that to guide their research into current statistics relating to recycling and landfills. My students have begun storyboarding certain sections of the movie, but they still do not have a clear plan for the final product. Some of it will have to wait until spring because we will need to go out and do some filming around the community. We live on a beautiful 50 mile long lake and some scenes have to do with what boaters and lake visitors can do to protect our environment. All and all, I feel like I am well on my way to providing my students with a real world experience that has been engaging. I have found that this project has been motivating for my remedial readers. They seem to enjoy working on the project and are taking pride in what they are doing. Since they know their film will be shown publicly. I find it very difficult to engage remedial readers in school-work. I have learned that this type of projects does motivate them so I will be looking for additional projects of this nature to use in the future.
Game Plan Two Evaluation
I am well on my way to integrating the Mimio board into my instruction. I really think that I was hung up on the word interactive and thinking that I should have my students “interact” with the board during instruction. I think that this misconception came from seeing short videos of how they are being used in primary classrooms. I now realize that there are times when this will work, but for me it is much more of an instructional tool. My Mimio notebook is really a place to save all of my instructional materials that will make for stimulating, engaging, lessons. The rich visuals will help my English language learners as well as the many students living in poverty whose vocabulary is limited. Since this is really the first year I have done this, I now need to add all my resource into the Mimio board as I develop the unit. The number of visuals that can be uploaded and saved into the Mimio notebook is amazing. I have video clips, still shots, sound, graphic organizers, links to Web sites and eventually, I would like to add exemplars although, I need to put those in after the unit for use next year.
Reflection of Problem based Learning, Social Networking and Digital Storytelling
During this course I have implemented several new technologies through problem based learning. The key reason for implementing Project based Learning (PBL) is to connect engaging activities to relevant content (Ertmer & Simons, 2006, p. 48). I found this to be true. It was very engaging for students, therefore I will look for opportunities to incorporate it into my social studies instruction. I would like to try to develop three PBL’s to use throughout the year because it allows teachers to cover more standards than other curriculum (Laureate Education, Inc, 2011a)
Digital storytelling is a natural with social studies. My students enjoyed the assignment and their products, while not completely finalized, show a great deal of content knowledge. It will definitely become a part of the instructional strategies that I use with my students. Virtual field trips or tours of the geography of a region will help bring really my instruction alive. It will allow me to integrate reading and writing into my social studies content (Laureate Education, Inc, 2011b).
The use of Wiki’s and Blogging has been fun to use with my students. I liked it because everyone was able to communicate even though they were not in the same room or classes and everyone got to add their thoughts (Laureate Education, Inc, 2011c). As part of my unit plan, I had students working on collaborative research using a Wiki pages to pool their findings and then using the Wiki to produce a digital storyboard. I learned that using Wiki pages can be very beneficial for some parts of a project, but not others. I was amazed at the quantity and quality of research my students gathered. I liked the fact that my students from four different class periods were able to collaborate on the same research. I had students tell me that they enjoyed it so much they were on the Wiki page at two in the morning. My students also used a Wiki page to create a storyboard for their digital story. My experience with this lesson was it was a bit frustrating for students who were working on the storyboard because they were not able to collaborate face to face. When in this creative phase of the project there were a lot of small details that needed to be discussed and negotiated by team members. The students were frustrated in that they were not able to do this in real time. They each did what they could during their class period, but I did not feel like they were as effective as they would have been if they were working on it either face to face or at the same time in different rooms. Like any other instructional strategy, we need to make the professional decision about when and how to use it.
All in all, I found social networking to be a natural for working with adolescents. I can see many opportunities to incorporate it into my curriculum. I will make it part of my pedagogy. The most exciting one for me during this unit was the Skyping experience with the Egyptologist and her son. It was one of the most exciting new things I have done in years. It really opens up the possibilities for connecting with people from all over the world. An educators’ job is to provide opportunities for students to connect with experts from around the world (Laureate Education, Inc, 2011c)
References
Cennamo, k., Ross, J., & Ertmer, P. (2009). Technology integration for meaningful classroom use: A standards-based approach. Mason, OH: Cengage Learning.
Ertmer, P., & Simons, K. (2006). Jumping the PBL implementation hurdle: Supporting the efforts of k-12 teachers. The Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem-Based Learning, 40-54.
Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (2011a). Technology integration. Spotlight on Technology: Problem based learning - part one. Baltimore, MD: Author. Retrieved from: http://sylvan.live.ecollege.com/ec/crs/default.learn?CourseID=6072063&Survey=1&47=7892802&ClientNodeID=984650&coursenav=1&bhcp=1
Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (2011b). Technology integration. Spotlight on Technology: Digital storytelling - part two. Baltimore, MD: Author. Retrieved from: http://sylvan.live.ecollege.com/ec/crs/default.learn?CourseID=6072063&Survey=1&47=7892802&ClientNodeID=984650&coursenav=1&bhcp=1
Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (2011c). Technology integration. Spotlight on Technology: Social networking and online collaboration - part one. Baltimore, MD: Author. Retrieved from: http://sylvan.live.ecollege.com/ec/crs/default.learn?CourseID=6072063&Survey=1&47=7892802&ClientNodeID=984650&coursenav=1&bhcp=1
