Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Revising My Game Plan Week 6

If you plan is for one year, plant rice;
If you plan is for ten years, plant trees;
If your plan is for a hundred years,Educate children ~ Confucius

The Game plan is strengthened each week as strategies are explored to integrate technology into the content areas. Progress is being made toward achieving goals in my Game plan as I implement technology into my unit plan. Designing a unit plan that involves a problem-based, collaborative and digital story telling lesson has enabled the evaluation of the effectiveness and understanding students will achieve during a unit plan.

The Game plan will be revised after observing the needs of my students and their reactions to the technology being implemented. A revision will be to implement the use of the Game plan lesson template to prepare lessons that will address implementation of digital tools. This template will help me structure meaningful learning experiences for 21st century learners.

The strategy that I have learned so far that will be applied to my instructional practice in the fall is implementing problem-based learning into my content area. Dr Peggy Ertmer (2009) describes benefits of using PBL in the content as developing the student as a self-directed learner. Students also learn to work collaboratively in an authentic context (Ertmer, 2009). I learned to create a content area unit plan that develops a technology integrated problem-based lesson using social networking and collaborative tools that helps student understand content area concepts. Finally, I learned to use technology to customize instruction and assessments in my culturally diverse classroom. The goal that I am still working toward is to learn about digital storytelling and how this tool can be use to enhance instructions for my students.

After reviewing the NETS-T, one new learning goal that needs to be set is to model digital citizenship. It is important to model responsibility and teach safe, legal, and ethical use of technology. As student interact on a more sophisticated level using different forums, students need to be equipped to handle situations that are not safe. Students also need to be directly taught how to ethically use information. They need to be aware of copyright laws and how to correctly site digital photos, website, and other forms of media that has been retrieved to develop their point. It is important that students are aware of proper conduct using educational networks and how to maintain their own safety.

The learning approach that I will try is using educational networking with my students. In this week’s DVD, Vicki Davis (2009) discussed the benefits of educational networking. Through educational networking students and teachers can interact using a variety of media with experts around the world and give and receive feedback. In an effort to increase my understanding, I will need to research blogs and complete internet searches regarding educational networking for elementary students. I would like to evaluate some sites that used educational networking to engage students from different geographical locations. Many challenges face teachers as we use technology to enrich learning experiences for student through technology the Game plan will help me progress toward these challenges.


References
Davis, V. (2009). Spotlight on technology: Social networking and online collaboration, Part 1. (Laureate Educational, Inc., DVD, 2009 release).
Davis, V. (2009). Spotlight on technology: Social networking and online collaboration, Part 2. (Laureate Educational, Inc., DVD, 2009 release).
Ertmer, P. (2009). Spotlight on technology: Problem-based learning, Part 1. (Laureate Educational, Inc., DVD, 2009 release).
Ertmer, P. (2009). Spotlight on technology: Problem-based learning, Part 2. (Laureate Educational, Inc., DVD, 2009 release).

6 comments:

  1. Michele,

    It's also a goal of mine to teach safety and ethics online. I know you mentioned that students need to be able to handle situations that aren't safe, but how do you plan to teach students about those situations without actually exposing them to it? What I'm struggling with is figuring out how to explain what's out there to my young students in an appropriate way. The problem is, things can easily just pop up. I don't want to just generalize that "bad" things are out there, because 5 year olds have a much more difficult time making that distinction and can end up seeing a lot more than they ever should before they figure out what to do. What are your thoughts on this topic?

    Erin

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  2. I am planning on modeling digital citizenship more often this year in my classroom. I would like to speak to my team about incorporating into all of our lessons. We are constantly finding assignments that are plagarized. If we model what we expect, there really is no excuse for stealing someones work. I am also going to try to enlist the computer and technology teachers at our school to do a unit on digital citizenship. This would help reach out to all of our students. Maybe even enrich our modeling a little bit.

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  3. Hi Chris
    It sounds like you have a great plan for your students and colleagues for modeling digital citizenship. It is important to continuously model citing information from other sources.

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  4. Michele-

    I know you have your own students, but also work with other classroom teachers. My question, do you plan on introducing them to the social networking as well? It would be fun for you to connect all of the classes your work with together.

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  5. Michele-

    I also love your quote... forgot to put that in my post.

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  6. Michelle-
    great ideas. I find that helping students learn about ethics and copywrite is crucial. I had a couple students last year that did copy information off the internet word for word during a research project. I found that teaching them about ethics and modeling is so important, there are some great videos on brain pop about this as well as other videos on the net helping students to gain empathy and understand how big the internet really is.

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