GAME Plan resources

The first goal of my game plan was to create online inquiry activities. The biggest resource I need for this goal is my school district’s Moodle account. I have recently gone to Moodle training to learn how Moodle works and to get my own Moodle pages for my classes. Now I need to choose a topic what I can create a Moodle page for and prepare my students to use Moodle in the lab. I can use help from one of my science colleagues who was with me at the Moodle training and who is very excited about using Moodle in a variety of ways in her class. Together we can brainstorm many different ways to use Moodle effectively in our classes.


The second goal of my game plan was to facilitate and inspire student learning and creativity. This goal went along with my first goal and I wanted to inspire creativity in students by having them create projects to display what they learned in their online inquiry activities. I have many ideas for ways that I can do this which include using tools such as PowerPoint, screencasts, blogs, podcasts, or videos. If anyone has other ideas for technology based projects I would love to hear them. The more tools I have available, the more options I can give my students when they are creating projects.

GAME Plan for Technology

When I was introduced to the GAME plan strategy (Goals, Actions, Monitor, Evaluate) it was given as a strategy a teacher could use to help students with self directed activities. Because many students rarely get the opportunity to be self directed in high school, without guidance students can often change self directed activities into do nothing activities. This often occurs, not because the student is lazy, but because the student does not have the tools to be self directed. Teaching students the GAME plan gives them steps to follow when they are engaged in a self directed activity so they will stay on task and succeed at enhancing their own learning.

Well, that was a longer introduction than I had planned on making but the point that I want to get at with this blog is that the GAME plan strategy can be used in all self directed activities, even those of a teacher. If you want to improve in an area of teaching, break out the GAME plan and determine a strategy to facilitate your improvement in that area.

I am going to look at my need to increase the integration of technology into my teaching. To help me I am going to use the National Educational Technology Standards for Teachers (NETS-T). You can view NETS-T at this website: http://www.iste.org/standards/nets-for-teachers.aspx.

First I want to design and develop digital-age learning experiences and assessments. I have spent a lot of time in classes and at workshops learning about different technologies and even creating lessons or units that integrate technology but I am still hesitant to use many of these technologies in my classroom because I am concerned about time restrictions and the possibility that students will not stay on task in these situations. My first goal is to create online inquiry activities that students can use to learn a topic on their own. To achieve this goal I recently set up a Moodle account within my district. I want to take small steps to get to a full inquiry lesson with a product as an assessment. The first step I will take is to make a very structured investigation lesson using Moodle and spend some time talking with my students about the importance of staying on task during the Moodle session so they can get the most out of it. I will have predetermined different websites and activities (such as a class forum) that students will be required to participate in. For each website or activity students will be given a few specific tasks they need to perform to show that they completed the assignment. Once I have had a very structured lesson I can start removing some of the structure. I could give students choices of websites and eventually as them to find a website on their own. I will monitor my progress by comparing each of my Moodle sessions to see if I am allowing students more freedom with each session to be self directed. At the end of the year I will see how far I have come and evaluate to see if the lessons are actually self driven online inquiry or if I am still controlling too much of the activities. Once I have determined where my lessons are at I will see what I need to change. I will also spend some time looking at how I should start the next school year when I introduce students to inquiry activities.

Second I want to facilitate and inspire student learning and creativity. This goal will go hand in hand with the first one. As students are becoming more independent in my lessons I want to increase the amount of flexibility students have to showcase what they learned. I am going to start by giving students specific media with which they are going to present their knowledge. For the first online inquiry students might be required to make a PowerPoint. With subsequent online inquiry lessons I could introduce students to other project options like screencasts, blogs, podcasts, or videos. To begin with each lesson will have a specific project requirement like ‘you must make a screencast’ and once students have been introduced to several media they will be given projects where they can choose their own way to share what they learned. The monitoring and evaluation of this goal will be done in conjunction with the monitoring and evaluation of the first goal. I will make sure throughout the year that I have students do many different projects. One students have been introduced to all of these different options I will then be ready to give my students more creative freedom. I will evaluate how the projects went at the end of the year and think of ways that I might have to adjust the projects.

That’s all for now,

Ryan

Online Inquiry Reflection

During this course, the most surprising thing I learned about teaching new literacy skills was the amount of care needed when teaching lessons that use new literacy skills. It is not enough to give students a project where they look online and find answers to questions. The process is much more involved, starting with teaching students how to ask the right questions and productively search for the answers to those questions, and moving all the way to teaching students to take what they learned and communicate that information to others through several different mediums.


This is by no means an easy task. Because I am a subject area teacher at the high school level, I cannot take a long period of time to teach a lesson on new literacy skills. Instead, I now realize that I have to create ways to integrate new literacy skills into my lessons starting at the beginning of the year. As the year progresses, my lessons will add additional new literacy skills until my students can do an entire project from beginning to end using new literacy skills to teach themselves a mathematics topic.

The professional development goal that I will take away from this course will be to successfully integrate new literacy skills into my lessons so that by the end of the year my students will be able to showcase their own ability to use new literacy skills, and will be able to learn more independently with these skills. To reach this goal I need to break the new literacy skills that I want to teach my students into these smaller steps:

    1. Asking good questions
    2. Productive searching
    3. Finding information in different mediums (tutorials, videos,
        applets, etc.)
    4. Evaluating resources for correct information
    5. Viewing multiple resources to learn a new topic
    6. Communicating new information to others using multiple
        methods

I need to look at my current span of lessons and determine where I can add each new step until I get to a point where students can successfully complete all six steps. After that I can choose a few more topics on which students can utilize all of their new skills. To make sure this integration will be successful, I need to evaluate the time needed for each part of the integration and determine how much time I have to give to each step by substituting new literacy skills in place of previous methods of teaching.

Bridging Learning Theory, Instruction, and Technology Class Reflection

The question that I always ask when I get done with a class is ‘How has that class affected me or changed the way I am going to teach. At the end of my Bridging Learning Theory, Instruction, and Technology class they asked me how I would modify my personal theory of learning after taking the class. After some thought, I realized that the class did not change my personal theory of learning but it did give me more tools to help me diversify my instruction more than I currently do.

In my personal reflection that I complete at the beginning of the course, I said that mathematics is a tool chest. When students are learning math, they are filling their tool chest with mathematical knowledge and mathematical thinking so that in the future they will be prepared to use mathematics to solve problems that I did not teach them. Even though I have not changed my personal learning theory through this course, I have added many tools to my teaching toolbox. I have discovered many new things to do with tools like Excel and PowerPoint and I have learned about many online tools that I had not used before like VoiceThreads and virtual field trips. In the future I will use these tools to become a better teacher.


The two biggest tools that I have focused on in this class that will use immediately with my students are Excel and VoiceThread. I have used Excel personally before, but I have never used it with a class. Next year I am going to integrate Excel into several lessons. VoiceThreads are a technology that I have never used before and next year I am planning some activities for students to make individual VoiceThreads and at least one activity where we are going to make a class VoiceThread.

The last thing that was asked of me in my reflection for the end of my class was to list two long term goal changes that I would like to make in my instructional practices regarding technology integration. My first goal is to continue diversifying my instruction so I can do a better job reaching my students. The more I add technology into my classroom the more I will be meeting this goal. My second goal is for me to become more evaluative of my classroom activities. When something works well one year I need to recognize that and build more of that into the class. When something does not work well, I need to do less of it in class so I can reach my students in ways that help them not in ways that seem good to me.

Success in Word Problems Voice Thread

Here is the link to my voice thread for a method to begin teaching word problems to Algebra students.
http://voicethread.com/share/1198374/

Social Learning Online

Today I want to focus on tools that can be used for social learning between students within a class. What I am not going to do is discuss all of the different ways students can learn from other students around the country or around the world. I am going to focus how students in a class can use social online tools to enhance their learning. The easiest way for me to do this is to paint the picture of a learning situation from both the teacher’s and the student’s perspective.

I often come across videos, applets, math comics (or nerd comics like Dilbert), and other resources that don’t find a place in my class lesson due to time or because I already used something similar in class. I could put links to all of these goodies on a bookmarking site such as blinklist.com or delicious.com. My students could then go to this site to find links to additional resources that will help them if they are struggle or if they want to see a problem done in a different way. I could also require my students to post links, perhaps 1 per month or 1 every two weeks to sites they found that pertain to a class topic.

With everything posted on the bookmarking site, I would expect my students to visit the site often. To monitor their visits I could create a course management system (CMS) that students would have to access periodically and comment on these additional resources. For a CMS I could use moodle.com or I could create a wiki and have a page for each student where they could post their comments after visiting the bookmarking site.

Here finally is where the social learning comes in. On the wiki I could create group pages and in those group pages students could share which resources they like, which resources they didn’t like, and any issues they are having with the topic. Using the CMS and the bookmarking site together I can create an environment where students are looking at resources at home, searching for new resources, discussing resources with fellow students, and discussing difficulties and successes within each topic.

Independently of the previous example, I am a huge fan of strategies/puzzle/logic games. Games that engage students in thinking through a problem inherently help students with their math skills. There are probably hundreds of these games online and all very in their difficulty and the actual amount of strategy involved. One game that has a fair amount of strategy but also using social learning is a game at girlsinc.org/teamup. It is a game made for girls so male students will have to get over it, but what ii does is it has you go through levels with different characters that each have different abilities. You can play the game by yourself but it works very well if you have a different person control each character. Then the team of students needs to discuss what they need to do to finish each level. As a teacher you can also restrict conversation to increase the challenge. Perhaps students are only allowed to say what their player should do and are not allowed to tell other players what to do. This would increase the level of difficulty and would increase the amount of focus from each group member.

So there you go, two different ideas to use in class for social networking while still focusing on instruction.

Constructionism uses for Excel

Two weeks ago I talked about using Excel as a behaviorist learning tool. Today I am going to look at using Excel as a constructionist learning tool. Constructionism is “a theory of learning that states people learn best when they build an external artifact or something they can share with others” (Laureate, 2009). In constructionism students create something in order to learn.

In the book Using Technology with Classroom Instruction that Works (Pitler, Hubbell, Kuhn, Malenoski, 2007), an example is given using Excel software to teach about investments. In the example the a social studies teacher creating a lesson on economics set up a spreadsheet that has three savings plans for students to choose from. Students can put values into each savings plan and see how much money they will have in 30 years. The first plan has an investment of $1000 a year into a bank account with 4% interest. The second and third have a one time investment of $10000 into accounts with 8% and 12% interest. The main focus of this activity was to show students the importance of investing, especially early in life.

For my Algebra class, I like this lesson as a beginning lesson that I could expand. For a social studies lesson, the actual math is a secondary function. For my Algebra class I need to make the math the main focus. I would start my lesson with a spreadsheet similar to the one described above. I would then have my students transition to a spreadsheet that allows them to put different values into an interest equation to get out different totals. Students would spend some time looking at how changing each variable affects the total in the account. Once students are comfortable with the equation and how it works I would have them create their own formula to find the total after a certain length of time and a formula that would find the amount in an account after each year. This creation of their own formulas would help students to better understand how the interest formulas work.

I could expand this lesson even further with my pre-calculus students who study annuities. In that class I could have students create a spreadsheet that would keep track of a retirement account if additional money is put in every month. Students could then use different numbers for monthly deposits and interest rates so they could see what they would need to retire with x amount of dollars.

Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (2009). Bridging learning theory, instruction, and technology. Baltimore: Author.

Pitler, H., Hubbell, E., Kuhn, M., & Malenoski, K. (2007). Using technology with classroom instruction that works. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.