During my eighth course of my master’s program at Walden University I incorporated a GAME Plan to improve my instructional practice. This involved setting Goals, taking Action, Monitoring progress, and then Evaluating the success or failure of my strategy. For my personal GAME Plan I chose to look at two standards from the National Education Technology Standards for Teachers (NETS*T) guidelines: Increasing student use of technology in my classroom and becoming a technology leader in my community. This course directly impacted both of those goals.
The great thing about the GAME Plan is that it forces a teacher to look critically at what they are doing in the classroom to determine whether or not it is effective practice. The best teachers have a strategy to make themselves better, they do not simply try new approaches just to see what happens. Constant monitoring and evaluating are keys to building a great curriculum. Teachers should strive to make students lifelong learners who are self-directed – and that is what the GAME Plan forces teachers to become themselves. Students need to think both critically and creatively so as to incorporate the new content into their schema, and technology offers great opportunities to do just that. Further, it is easy to adapt technology to meet the instructional needs of diverse learners by using Universal Design for Learning, or UDL. When students are thinking for a solution to a real world problem, they are not just thinking about the content, they are using the content.
These new skills and idea will easily make my second goal, that of becoming a building leader in the use of technology a reality. Digital storytelling, for example, is an easy sell to other teachers. It does not require too much tech experience and the potential benefits are enormous.
These new skills and idea will easily make my second goal, that of becoming a building leader in the use of technology a reality. Digital storytelling, for example, is an easy sell to other teachers. It does not require too much tech experience and the potential benefits are enormous.
A few adjustments I will be making to my instructional practice regarding technology in my Civics classroom will be the incorporation of digital storytelling and problem based learning activities (PBL). As a teacher it always frustrates me when my lessons do not go according to plan, but when students are using the content in a PBL or telling a story – they are using in the content. Oftentimes, they are doing so while working collaboratively with their peers in some form of social/educational networking. They may not be using exact wording that the state test will be incorporating, but their learning is deeper into their personal schema and so will require less review later in the year. My hope for this coming year is to integrate one new technology program with every unit I teach. In this manner I can choose the strategy that works best for that particular content. I can already foresee a digital story project during my study of the Judicial Branch – students will be following themselves through the criminal justice system. Our study of the local government will not be complete without some type of problem based learning experience that makes the students look at their community with a critical eye.
