Wednesday, July 20, 2011

The GAME Plan Continues

This week in my Walden classes I am looking into assessments of the GAME plan and how that affects my overall strategy.  As I am hoping to incorporate more student uses of technology I feel as though I need to look specifically at assessing students while they are using technology.
The first thought that comes to mind is having students take a formal, forced-choice test online.  I have seen a couple on online websites that do something on those lines (surveymonkey being a free site that I have used for informal surveys in the past).  I also have a set of Renaissance Responders that I use sparingly - they are a little cumbersome to input questions and then exporting them is not easy.  My school uses ROSworks for its testing documents (scan-trons and test review qualities).
I would like to implement more technology for assessing performances and project-based learning as I know that those are highly effective ways of achieving student learning.  If I am truly going to digitize my student's experience in my classroom, I have to implement more projects and performances that are real-world applicable.   I have to get a little out of my comfort zone to find additional formative assessments.  As Cennamo, Ross, and Ertmer (2009) state: "Formative assessments can include video-taped performances, electronic journals, checklists and rubrics, as well as many other formats."  This is where I am going to have to look into getting more information and ideas to expand my proverbial bag of tricks.  As I am the senior member of my district in the areas that I teach, I am going to search the web for other teacher's sites and ideas.
This is not really a modification to my GAME plan, more of an incorporation.  In order to be a leader of technology in my building and provide a tech-based learning environment for my students I need to expand what I have learned in the past.  I will be incorporating these new ideas and modifying to fit my specific classroom.  "There are a variety of methods for incorporating project-based assessments in a classroom, as well as many different tools to support them" (Cennamo, 2009).  I am positive I can find several authentic assessments, simulations, portfolios, and problem based learning ideas to benefit my classroom goals.
My GAME plan is right on track.  As the school year begins I will be sharing with other teachers many of the new technologies that I have learned during my studies at Walden University.  My classroom website has begun construction and will continue to get worked on before school starts.  I think it is important that if I am to take this activity I must go all in.  If I were only to implement a couple of my ideas I would not be able to assess whether or not my plan was effective or was it simply the group of students and colleagues I had.
Resources
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.

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