Reflection

The Differentiation Station social network has been a great resource and collaboration tool that has developed nicely throughout the course. We were able to learn with the help of colleagues. We contributed ideas and web links to resources about Universal Design for Learning and Differentiated Instruction. I can now look back at our social network site and use those resource links when it presents itself. The ideas on tiered instruction and real life examples of its use in the classroom has motivated me to add it to one of my teaching tools. The Differentiation Station also worked well to get feedback from fellow teachers on ideas and lesson plans.

This course has enlightened me on the ease of integrating differentiated instruction into the classroom. I had thought it would be a lot more effort and take up too much class time. I found that through tiered assessment, pre and post assessment, and varied assignments it can be accomplished and enrich the learning environment. Using technology in these assessments is also important because it will engage the learners, provide online collaboration, and help prepare students for the real world. I will review my students individual education plans with a means to adapt their lessons and assessments to provide more meaningful learning. I have learned a good deal over the course of this program and am looking forward to implementing what I have learned into the classroom.

Using the GAME Plan Process with Students

My GAME plan progress hasn’t had any real changes this week. I’ve started my classroom wiki and set it up to encourage student, parent, and community member participation. When I am teaching again it will be ready and in place. To keep it active I’m going to need to make sure to use it for assignments and have students post examples of their work on the wiki.

Using the Wiki and the technology associated with it will help students meet National Education Standards for students. I will continue to use the GAME plan lesson structure to create lessons and make sure that they are covering Maine State learning standards as well as NETS-T and NEST-S standards.

Revising My GAME Plan

Revising My GAME Plan

In review of my GAME plan to create a classroom wiki to use to encourage community, parent, and student communication and to create a worldly technology friendly learning environment. Over the past few weeks I’ve learned how to create and administer a wiki. I’ve also gotten feedback on wikis from classroom teachers and fellow classmates that I can directly apply to my classroom wiki. My goal for the future is to involve more students and parents on the classroom blog. I want to start adding educational links, virtual field trips, web quests, and student work to the wiki to give students educational resources to check out and or comment on in or out of the classroom. The next time I create a GAME plan to improve my learning I will go to fellow teachers for advice and suggestions on resources and their thoughts on the topic. Having experienced classroom teachers to use as a resource is an invaluable tool because you can’t learn experience in a book. And they have tried lots of things in the classroom and know what works and what doesn’t work in the classroom. I look forward to continuing to further my education with these masters classes and available resources.

Monitoring my GAME plan part deux.

Monitoring my GAME plan part deux.

I’ve continued to work on my GAME plan of learning and using a classroom wiki to connect community members, parents, and students with each other to create a positive learning environment for students. This past week I met with a 7th grade technology teacher about her use of wikis in the classroom. She has been currently using moodle for her classes and is working on a VoiceThread project. She mostly focuses on moodle and has the students post discussions and homework there. She allows parents access to some of the moodle site. She also uses the wiki for students to show finalized projects that parents and students can view. My meeting with her made me think that I should have some of my wiki such as some classroom discussions only assessable to students. I’ve decided that I want to allow everyone to be able to access the blog but to have limitations for different groups of users. I want the public, which includes parents, community members, and students not in the class to be able to view and comment on a few parts of the wiki. I want to set it up so someone has to approve the comments before they are posted for everyone to see. For classroom students I want them to have more access to the site and have them able to edit and place comments on the wiki instantaneously. I now need to learn more about how to set permissions for a wiki site to be able to accomplish my modified game plan.

Monitoring my GAME Plan Progress

Monitoring my GAME Plan Progress.

Cennamo, Ross, and Ertmer(2009) when referring to student use of wikis state that “If work needs to get done in the evening or on the weekend, wikis allow them to coordinate their efforts much more efficiently than sending a bunch of emails back and fourth. And they don’t have to know web authoring languages or other complicated tools to do so.” This means that wikis allow for a great deal of communication and participation and are easy to use. This is one of the main reasons I want to establish a classroom wiki for my classroom. This will provide an easy to access and use communication tool for students, parents, community members, and educators.

I found a good deal of information from the Technology Integration for Meaningful Classroom Use textbook as well as tips for using educational wikis. I wanted the classroom wiki to be available to everyone and now need to decide who is allowed to post and or edit the wiki. A new question that I found is that I need to set posting expectations letting the students know how much to post and what not to post on the wiki.

John Ross said, “Technology provides these many opportunities that are going to pull people in.” (Laureate Education, Inc, 2009). Wikis are a relatively new invention and studnets and parents will be more excited to use these tools of communication rather than more traditional methods. I’m meeting with a 7th grade technology teacher who uses wikis in her classroom later this week to discuss her and her student’s experiences with wikis.

My research and practice of wikis in the past week made me very comfortable in creating the wiki for our community learning group project. Where as before last week I wouldn’t have felt comfortable in creating it. I very much look forward into gaining more in-depth knowledge on the use of wikis.

Cennamo, K., Ross, J., & Ertmer, P. (2009). Technology integration for meaningful classroom use: A standards-based approach. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.

Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (2009). Assessing Student Learning with Technology. Baltimore: Author.

Carrying out my GAME plan

This week I starting carrying out my GAME plan for is "collaborating with students, peers, parents, and community members using digital tools and resources to support student success and innovation." (National Education Standards for Teachers (NETS-T).

The resources I need to use to implement my GAME plan are a computer with internet access, information on how to create a Wiki, a classroom Wiki, student and community involvement in using the Wiki for learning and communication purposes, and a classroom Moodle account. It will also be important to rely on the advice and experience of IT staff and fellow teachers use of Wiki’s and moodle accounts.

Areas that I need additional information on are how to best utilize a Wiki and moodle site and if the Wiki should be student run or teacher run? I also need to research more information on how to get students and community members involved with the Wiki and moodle account. I also need to know what kind of access students and community members have to the Internet.
In my quest to achieve my GAME plan I’ve created a basic classroom Wiki and included the objectives that I plan to accomplish using the Wiki. My classrooom Wiki can be found at http://mrgrayclassroom.wikispaces.com/.

Cennamo, Ross, and Ertmer (pg 97) stress creating student guidelines for technology-enriched learning environments and how having guidelines benefits students. I’m working on establishing rubics and guidelines for student participation on the classroom Wiki which will have students post comments on virtual field trips, take turns inputting the classroom agenda and homework assignments, and displaying student work.

Cennamo, K., Ross, J., & Ertmer, P. (2009). Technology integration for meaningful classroom use: A standards-based approach. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.
National Education Standards for Teachers (NETS-T) retrieved from http://www.iste.org/Content/NavigationMenu/NETS/ForTeachers/2008Standards/NETS_T_Standards_Final.pdf on

National Educational Technology Standards

The National Educational Technology Standards and Performance Indicators for Teachers provide direction for how to become a more effective educator. Teaching just like everything else of importance in the world is hard, and takes practice. There are always going to be areas that you can improve upon and it’s important to set teaching goals and create plans to achieve the goal. Technology is a large and growing component in education today. It is important that "Students should see their computer time as essential to their classroom work rather than an add on." (Cennamo, K., Ross, J., & Ertmer, p 102) To help show students technology is an educational tool I have made two National Education Technology Standard goals.
The first standard that I developed a GAME plan for is "collaborating with students, peers, parents, and community members using digital tools and resources to support student success and innovation." (National Education Standards for Teachers (NETS-T). Collaborating with students, peers, parents, and community members helps establish a stronger rapport with the student and the student’s education support team. This team comprised of parents and community members can be combined with the teacher to create an educational alliance. To get students, peers, parents, and community members onboard with the student’s education plan good communication is vital. I plan to give parents access to our classroom moodle site to see what we are doing in class, view a homework assignment list, and be able to send comments or questions to the teacher. Being able to see what we are doing in class could result in having a parent or community member coming into the class to be the expert on a topic we are covering. Having an expert on the topic and educational support team member would make the learning more relevant to the students. I will monitor the amount of views from the moodle site and email contacts to assess the progress of the goal.
Another standard that I developed a GAME plan for is to "Model collaborative knowledge construction by engaging in learning with students, colleagues, and others in face-to-face and virtual environments." (National Education Standards for Teachers (NETS-T). To accomplish this goal I plan to use interactive virtual field trips, have students use the VoiceThread application for a project, and have the students test out Second Life a virtual environment. Using an online moodle survey the students will be assessed to their thoughts on these types of educational experiences versus the traditional educational ways.
Cennamo, K., Ross, J., & Ertmer, P. (2009). Technology integration for meaningful classroom use: A standards-based approach. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.
National Education Standards for Teachers (NETS-T) retrieved from http://www.iste.org/Content/NavigationMenu/NETS/ForTeachers/2008Standards/NETS_T_Standards_Final.pdf on