Reflection of my GAME plan

In the past few months I have been focusing on a GAME plan that involves the incorporation of the NETS-T and NETS-S standards into my daily lesson plans. During this course I designed a GAME Plan for myself, set goals and created unit lesson plans to support my goals and integrate technology in the classroom.

The intention of this GAME plan is to integrate technology in the classroom without necessarily re-inventing the wheel. I felt that the teachers in my county needed to collaborate more often to share ideas and lessons as there are many innovative and creative teachers with successful lessons. I first had to reach out to the health and PE teachers with the intent to set up a user-friendly way to share lessons. The appropriate tool for this became a teacher wiki to share our ideas for integration that was created by just a small group of teachers. The only challenge to this is to ensure teacher participation. So far, it’s off to a great start. In our up-coming in-service our group will propose our idea to the other teachers. We continue to discuss, with our small group, ways to assist the teachers and students using technological tools in their classrooms. These discussions have helped a lot of teacher to gain confidence and be compatible with new technologies. We created a wiki for our group and have begun documenting lesson and feedback from those lessons that we have shared in our classroom.

My second goal was also a challenge as it required me to present to my administration ways in which I feel are appropriate consequences for students if they were to use the internet in unsafe or inappropriate ways. This took a lot of time and I needed help from other teachers. They provided me with instances and consequences that they encountered. This GAME plan is still a work in progress. But in the end should help reduce the risk of plagiarism, bullying, and other possible cyberspace threats to our school system and students. I am still working on improving my GAME plan and goals.

This course gave me insight on how to effectively integrate technology in the classrooms and ways to support teacher and student learning by providing many useful ideas for integration. The media support really supplemented my understanding for ways to enrich my lessons with technology. My GAME plan was developed to increase my level of engagement with peers who either want to know more about how to use technology in their classrooms, or who have information to share with me. This course gave me the guidelines and the opportunity set goals and plans for a better integration in my classroom.

Using the GAME plan process with students

GAME plans simply help both students and teachers become more reflective learners. They help provide a focus and purpose for assignments which allows learning to become more meaningful. We, as teachers must set the stage by modeling the appropriate behaviors of a digital citizen. When reviewing the NETS-T and NET-S standards I feel that they have similarities of one another and can easily be placed in my lessons. I can see many areas where I could incorporate a GAME plan but first I will need to introduce all of the standards to my students and discuss each one with them.

One of my main focuses for my students would be for them to understand human, cultural, and societal issues related to technology and practice legal and ethical behavior. Too often students use copyright material without permission of proper citation. Sometimes this is done on purpose other times it is because they were not taught to research appropriately. Here is where my modeling comes into play. For this particular issue, I would ask them to use a GAME plan that would implement this standard by having them begin to set goals, take action, monitor, and evaluate their work towards this goal, they can start showing me that they have used technology in a proper and ethical way.


National Education Standards for Students (NETS-S) located at http://www.iste.org/Libraries/PDFs/NETS_for_Student_2007_EN.sflb.ashx

Revising my GAME Plan

What have you learned so far that you can apply in your instructional practice?

Thus far I have learned that I need to purchase new software in order to view videos for my discovery cart in physical education. I have access to a flip camera and have video taped students demonstrating skills for basketball, badminton, and football. The next step is putting these clips into powerpoints. The software I mention previously is required to do this.

What goals are you still working toward?

I received helpful feedback from HanNa in regards to my second goal. Before meeting with my administrators and instructional facilitator, I plan to have some ideas for consequences to inappropriate internet usage. I am working up a list of consequences that I feel are fair for certain offenses. I am also still working towards creating a screen capture that will show students how to navigate through a website to determine if it is a valid source.

Based on the NETS-T, what new learning goals will you set for yourself?

At this time, I am working on a bunch of things as the end of the school year approaches. We have had teachers retire mid-year and I have recently become our department chairperson. Quite honestly, I have been swamped and have not set any new learning goals as I am trying to clear my current plate.

If you are not ready to set new learning goals, how will you extend what you have learned so far?

In order to extend my knowledge about social-networking, I am going to set up a wiki for all health and physical educators in our county. This way teachers have another outlet to share lessons or express concerns about their lessons. By providing another avenue for communication, I feel that I am increasing the opportunity for participation and collaboration.

What learning approaches will you try next time to improve your learning?

As I am gaining knowledge about many different technology tools throughout this course, I still have roadblocks and hesitation about incorporating wikis and utilizing voice threads. I really enjoyed creating voicethread but I have yet to use them for my classes. I want to try to step out of my comfort zone a bit more so that next year, I will have the kinks out and will be less likely to run into problems.