Reflect and Revise

Well another week as gone by which means it is time to take a closer look at how I am progressing with my GAME plan.

This week I was able to overcome a couple of significant barriers that would potentially get in the way of achieving my plan. My school unfortunately has very limited access to technology in our classrooms so even though I had big plans to get my students making digital storybooks and viewing a large variety of United Streaming videos that tie into our curriculum, it does get difficult to schedule ample times in our schools shared computer lab. So after doing some research to see what others have done to break though this very same barrier, I came across an excellent substation for the expensive smartboards that all of the teachers in our school wish for on a daily basis. Using johnnylee.net as a resource, I was able to build my own interactive whiteboard in my classroom for less than $70. Since this was about $1500 cheaper than the actual Promethean Boards themselves, our principal has agreed to help get all the teachers in our building funding for this project! My students can now have unlimited access to this useful tool so they can share, edit, view videos online, all while working hands on.

After seeing how much time my GAME my game plan is taking at this point, I have decided to modify it a little bit and take things one step at a time. Originally I wanted to set up a digital portfolio online of all the student artifacts that were created over the years. Now I have decided to just keep my basic digital file folder of all student material and notes from the lesson. I do still hope to create a digital portfolio that can be shared with teachers, parents, and students, but at this time, I would like to focus on the creation of the actual lessons, and then later on, work on getting them out there to the world.

The main question that I am still pondering over is what real-world scenario I want my 1st graders to create digital storybooks about. I want a topic that excites them, pulls out their creativity, but also does not make them feel overwhelmed. Any good suggestions out there? I would love to hear them!

Magan

GAME Plan Update

On a continued note from my last post, I have reviewed and revamped my GAME plan a little bit as I went through this week’s resource materials. First, a few things that I feel are going to be essential to accomplishing my goal…

Resources I will need to carry out my GAME plan: Internet access, promethean or any other smart board technology that will allow students to work interactively together on websites, software programs, and collaborative works, as well as a subscription to United Streaming in order to expose my students to real-world videos that tie in with our curriculum. I will need access to a document camera or scanner, as well as audio recording software. I will also be needing help from my colleagues as well as experts in the education field to collaborate with to get better ways I can expose my 1st graders to real-world problem solving while using technology. Additional Information I will need: How to step up a working digital portfolio that tall students, parents, and teachers can access, and how to assist my students in creating digital storybooks.

So, what have I done for to work toward my goal? Research! Being a self-directed learner I’ve always been one to gain as much information about a topic as I could before jumping into something that I have not through all the way through yet. So through talking with my own colleagues and searching online for ideas of what other teachers have done to use technology to help expose their lower elementary students to real-world situations, I’ve been able to piece together a few ideas for my 1st graders. One of the ideas I had gotten from a colleague was to have my students create a digital storybook on how to solve some type of real-world scenario. I am still working on what topic might be the best for my 1st graders so any suggestions would be great! I’ve used United Streaming in my classroom for a number of things, so I have been sifting through some of the videos available on there for some ideas.

Magan

Keeping up with the standards?

Does anyone else find that just because you have grown up in a digital age, teach in a digital age, and even study to learn more of the latest technologies out there, that it is easy to assume you are on top of it things? I don’t know about any of you, but I appreciate the opportunities when I am forced to take a step back and look at the areas of where I can even improve more in my knowledge and teachings using technology.

After going though the National Education Technology Standards for Teachers, there were two main standards that I can see that I need to be more proficient in. So I have developed a little GAME plan to help me achieve higher confidence and proficiency in the standards that I will “Facilitate and Inspire Student Learning and Creativity” and “Promote and Model Digital Citizenship and Responsibility.” They both may seem like simple tasks, but I think because of that, I have tended to overlook the importance of making a point to spend conscious time on each of these standards.

My GAME plan is as follows:

Goal: Expose students to solving real-world problems using technology while using professionalism and responsibility of their use of the web and other technology tools.

Actions: I will continue taking class and keeping up on the latest research to improve my knowledge of the available tools in the digital world. I will collaborate with other teachers in my district as well as on various teacher forums and blog sites to gain and share ideas of how other teachers have integrated real-world scenarios and projects with the curriculum and technology tools. I will develop lessons that keep students engaged, include appropriate technology tools, and make clear connection to students’ lives. I will teach specific lessons and model year long proper citations of courses, the seriousness of plagiarism, and proper netiquette.

Monitor: I will keep a digital portfolio of student work that allows me to see how well they are applying proper citizenship and responsibility on their projects. I will constantly take note of the amount of respect students have for the tools they are using. I will take time to reflect on a consistent basis how many of the strategies and suggestions I am applying in my own classroom that I have learned though discussions and research about integrating real-world situations into the curriculum.

Evaluate: I will compare lessons that I have planned and taught to the student products to evaluate if outcomes were met to the highest standard or not. I will make notations as to how I can improve lessons the next time around.

So that is my plan for now. As with everything, I’m sure it will need tweeking along the way, but we all know we have to start somewhere, right?

Supporting Information Literacy and Online Inquiry in the Classroom

It is now that time again to take some time out to reflect upon all that I have learned throughout the seventh course of my master’s program through Walden University. This course focused on the teaching of new literacy skills to our students and the importance it has. I have to say, I was surprised to find that many of the literacy skills that are considered to be new, were in fact skills that I not only have been teaching all along, but many of them were skills that I was taught during my own schooling. For those skills that are new to my students, such as evaluating websites for reliability and validity, they really aren’t so scary when the teaching process is done step by step using easy to follow methods.

As with all schooling, there always seems to be courses that teach helpful information, but that information isn’t always to applicable to ones profession. Fortunately, this course was not one of those courses! This course really helped remind me that we simply cannot let our students jump onto the web, head to a search engine, and get what is going on. There are evaluations and synthesizing that needs to be done, and of course, the citing of all the sources. I think many of us, myself included, sometimes take advantage of the fact that the information on the web is so easy to come by, that we sometimes forget to give credit where credit is due. I think if I can do a better job of modeling how to cite sources to my students, and teaching them that even the simplest thing such as taking a picture from clipart needs to be cited, our students will develop a second nature of giving credit for their resources.

One professional goal that I have made for myself after taking this course is teaching my students how easy and effective it is to evaluate websites when conducting any kind of research. This evaluation has been one of the hardest things for my students to grasp in the past few years of my teaching. Students get frustrated, and so do I because up until now, I really did not have a simple and effective way to teach Internet research. Now, I fortunately have an easy to use, step by step method, that was shown to me by Technology Specialist, Beth Phillips, in one of the video resources of this class. The method shown consisted of checking every website for five major components: Author, Bias, Content, Dates, and Editors. I practiced this method on a few websites and it really took a matter of 5 minutes at most to complete these steps and determine if a website was quality or not. Obviously, I expect this to take more time for my students, especially in the beginning of their learning. Students will need some great modeling for this process, as well as some time to work with partners, but I think after enough practice, students will be able to evaluate websites on their own, with very little frustration.

I’m happy to say, this course was undoubtedly one that has increased my abilities as an educator in the 21st century!

A Moment of Reflection

Well the time has come where I have reached the end of yet another course through Walden University. This most recent class, Bridging Learning Theory, Instruction, and Technology, I have to say has surprised me with how beneficial it has been. I was actually quite skeptical of the course the first couple weeks because I had the impression it was going to be just another one of those classes where I read about all the same theories I have already read about during the earlier part of my schooling career. Much to my great surprise though, it has turned out to be one of the most beneficial learning experiences I have had yet throughout my graduate studies. Not because it caused me to recreate my personal learning theory; because that is still fairly well intact to the way it was at the beginning of the course. I still believe that students need hands on experiences and need to be able to make numerous connections between their prior knowledge and new the learning in order for deep understanding to develop.

So what is it that made it so good? While there were certainly many valuable lessons that I have learned, and will most definitely take each of them back into the classroom with me this fall, there were a couple of key points that I found particularly enlightening, and both just happened to be brought to mind by Dr. Debra Pickering in our video resource materials. The first lesson was that the thing that makes all these theories of learning and all the strategies that teachers use so successful, is none other than practice. We must teach our students how to use the learning strategies before we can expect them to achieve mastery. They need modeling, practice, and much guidance along the way. Technology tools like concept maps, venn diagrams, and word processing tracking options, all make it not only possible to help our students with this practice, but it also makes it very easy. The second adjustment I plan to make in my classroom this fall, is more of something that I was in desperate need of being reminded of. It was that we cannot expect our students to master every single learning strategy out there all at one time, just like we as teachers cannot try every teaching technique all in the same day. Sometimes it is easy to get wrapped up in all the great new ideas that we come across, that we forget to take a step back really give one or two things a shot before we move along to something new.

This brings me to the first long-term goal that I have set for myself. While it is important to really give our students the opportunity to master strategies, it is equally important to not just simply stay in those strategies that we are comfortable with. As a teacher, it is my goal to continue staying up on all of the latest technology that is out there to help me do my job better so that students are getting the most out of their education. My second goal is to not just use these new technologies as instructional resources, but to allow my students to use them as learning resources. Even at the 1st grade level, I need to allow my students to use the tools that are out there, and not just have them watch me as I use them. It have always been one to strive to have a student centered classroom rather than a teacher centered one, and this goal will help me achieve just that.

Magan

Voice Thread

Here is a link to my first ever created voicethread. Take a listen and let me know what your thoughts are on helping to teach literacy to elementary students. I am debating on whether I want to use Centers in my classroom or try out a newer method called "The Daily 5."

http://voicethread.com/share/572736/

Thanks,
Magan

The Social Part of Learning

So far throughout this course we have looked deep into some of the most well known learning theories in education. This week however, we’ve dipped into something that is a little bit more debatable as to whether it is actually a learning theory in the sense that it is a primary means to how people construct meaning. What it is that we are looking into now is social learning theories. Really? Could socializing actually be an asset to learning in our classrooms? Well the jury might still be out on whether or not some of these ideas will actually make it to becoming leading learning theories, but there are indeed some very beneficial instructional strategies that correlate closely to the principals of social learning theories.

The text Using Technology with Classroom Instruction that Works, offers a large variety of cooperative learning suggestions that give students the abilities to connect with and learn from people all over the world. Setting aside the obvious strategy of grouping students together to work through problems, there where a couple strategies that really stuck out to me within this book. The first was something called Keypals or ePALS. These items are much like the time old activity of pen-pals, only our students are using technology and have the options to communicate with people from all over the world almost instantly. Through an Internet community at http://www.epals.com/ our students can collaborate with other classrooms, without boundaries, about their cultures, interests, experiments, projects, and life in general. This sort of thing fits very well into the social learning theory as students are making network connections and gaining knowledge from them.

The second resource that I made note of was bookmark sharing. Sites such as http://del.icio.us and http://www.kaboodle.com/ allow students to both create collaborative lists of sites they have found useful on given topics, and get lists of websites that other people have found to be good resources on any given topic. I can see this being a great way for members of a group to share resources easily. No longer do students have to wait until they get back into the classroom to share a site with their friends. They can simply put it on a shared bookmark for all to see immediately.

So to sum up, with these social learning tools, not only are students using the techniques of making connections and constructing artifacts that are suggested in the congnitivist and constructionist theories, but they are doing so while using some of the latest available technologies to expand their resources and connecting with other people through networks.