Reflection - Integrating Technology Across the Content Areas

Step 1

As I reflect upon the GAME plan which I have created for myself during this course, I am content with what I have set out to accomplish.  Although my progress has been quite limited due to not being in session, I have been able to take small steps towards fulfilling my GAME plan.
One of the targets of my GAME plan is to develop some learning communities.  Through interaction with colleagues and doing research on my own, I have been able to find some resources whereby I will be able to do so.  Though I still feel unsure about being part of these learning communities, I am glad that I am taking the step to do so and hope that I will see many benefits from them.
As I have walked through the process of setting up and implementing a GAME plan, I have realized the benefits if offers.  Setting goals and developing a plan to meet those goals is a rewarding experience.  I have never been one to set goals or have my students do so.  But I would like this to change.  I believe that the GAME plan structure would be highly beneficial to my students.  I think that I will try to have them use the GAME plan process to set one goal for themselves at the beginning of the year.  As they work and meet that goal, I will have them set another one.  My idea behind this is to always have them working towards something.  I realize some students will take much longer to achieve the goals than others, but the important part is they they learn to walk through that process that the GAME plan teaches.

Step 2

I do not see any immediate changes necessary to my instruction.  However, I have learned some new things in this course that I plan to use in my classroom.  One tool that I have never used extensively in my class is social networking.  I have done bits and pieces here and there, but nothing consistent.  This year I plan to use Edmodo in my Spanish 1 class.  Edmodo is a Facebook type program that allows the teacher and students to communicate.  The cool thing about it is that it is not blocked by my school and only people who I invite can be part of the group.  I plan to have my students use this as a way of communication, turning in homework, and collaborating with peers.  I also hope to get parents to use it as a way of keeping up with what is happening in the class so they can better help their student.

I also plan to use digital storytelling this coming year.  I have done so in the past, but have mainly concentrated on my upper level students.  This course has helped me with ideas of how I can integrate digital storytelling into my lower level courses.    I will also continue using it in my upper level courses.

Problem based learning is another tool that I will implement this coming year.  Again, I have meddled with it in the past, but have never complete a full problem

In conclusion, I have learned many things during this course that will make me more effective in integrating technology into my classroom.  As a result of this course I believe that I will be able to offer my students a better learning environment. 

My GAME Plan Progress

*Are you finding the information or resources you need?


     As I stated in my last post, the resources that I need to accomplish part of my goals is interaction with and observation of colleagues.  Due to the fact that we are on summer break, this is not possible at the current time.  However, I did speak with a colleague who I respect and believe would be a good model of creative thinking for me.  I asked her if she would be willing to let me come in her class at the beginning of the year and she agreed.  So, at the outset of the school year, I will be working with her to help initiate good modeling of creative thinking in my classroom. 

     I have not looked for information or resources for my other goal, which is to be involved in learning communities.  I do believe, however, that with the start of work on my first goal, I have effectively work towards my second goal as well.  Although my work with the aforementioned teacher will not be a structured learning community, it is a start. 

*Do you need to modify your action plan?

     At this time I see no need to modify my action plan.  I believe that I have two solid goals and an effective approach to meet these goals.  The only thing hindering me right now is that I cannot effectively begin to implement my plan until the school year begins.

*What have you learned so far?

     Becuase my plan is still in the infant stages, I cannot say that I have learned much specifically relating to my goals.  I have, however, learned some important lessons about setting goals.  This coming year will be my eighth year as an educator, but will be the first time that I enter the year with personal goals in mind.  I have never before set forth an action plan to meet goals.  In fact, I have never even given much thought to identifying weaknesses and working towards improving them.  I can see the importance of having a goal to work towards.  The benefits will help me, but will also help to make my students more successful, which is something I am always striving for. 

*What new questions have arisen?

     At this point in my GAME plan, I do not have any new questions.  I am sure as I move into the implementation phase, I will have more questions, but not at the present time. 

Carrying out my GAME Plan

* What resources will you need to carry out your plan?

In order to effectively carry out my my GAME plan, I will need a number of resources.  In order to model creative thinking for my students, I will need to see creative thinking being modeled in the classroom.  I think the best resource to use for this goal would be to observe how my colleagues model creative thinking.  I have a couple people in mind who I am sure are quite effective at modeling creative thinking so I plan to set up a time to observe them early on in the school year. 

For my second goal, which is to make myself part of learning communities, I will need to find the learning communities to join.  The resources necessary here are a group of colleagues willing to join me as well as some professional development opportunities. 

*What additional information do you need?

In order to carry out my GAME plan, I need to find information on the different types of professional development that are available that will help me to build a network of learning communities.  I have never been a part of an organized learning community and really have no idea what is out there or what a learning community looks like. 

*What steps have you been able to take so far?

Due to the fact that we are on summer break, I have not made much progress on my GAME plan.  In fact, the only real progress I have made is to compile a list of names of colleagues that I would like to observe when I return to school. 

GAME Plan

After investigating the NETS-T indicators, I have decided that the two with which I am most uncomfortable are indicator number one and indicator number five. The following is my GAME plan for each indicator.

Goal

            Indicator one – Learn to model creative thinking for my students

            Indicator five – Make myself part of various learning communities

Action

            Indicator one – As I have learned in this course, creative thinking involves more than merely coming up with something new.  Creative thinking involves decision making, being self-directed, and confidence (Cennamo et al., 2009).  This new meaning of creativity requires that I redo the way that I instruct so that I am modeling these skills for my students.  In order to accomplish this, I will review each unit of instruction this year before beginning and look at how I can incorporate the modeling of these creative skills. 

            Indicator five – I am by nature a person that likes to keep to myself.  It is not that I am opposed to others helping me or that I do not like people.  I just feel more at ease when I keep to myself.  This will need to change if I want my students to be successful.  Therefore, I will seek to become a part of two learning communities this coming year.  I would like to develop one in my school.  I will start with my department and see where it might go from there.  I will also seek to become part of a larger learning community.  The Ohio Foreign Language Association (OFLA) provides a number of opportunities for foreign language educators to interact, both through conferences and online.  I will try to be actively involved in the online discussion this coming year as well as attend at least one conference.

Monitor

            Indicator one – As a way of monitoring my integration of modeling creative thinking skills, I will keep a reflection log at the end of each unit.  I will critique whether or not I identified ways to achieve my goal of modeling these skills as well as how effective I was at carrying those out once I did identify them. 

            Indicator five – In order to monitor this indicator I will communicate my goals with my colleagues.  I will talk with my principal about my desire to attend a conference so that she can help keep me accountable in achieving that goal.  She has always been supportive in professional development opportunities and I am confident she will help me with this.  Also, at the beginning of the year department meeting I will express my desire to develop a learning community within the department.  We have done some collaborative group work in the past so I think that they will be receptive to this.  Having my colleagues and my principal aware of my goals will help me to ensure that they come to fruition.  As Dr. Peggy Ertmer (Laureate Education, 2010) pointed out, a supportive environment is vital in the development and execution of a technology rich learning environment. 

Evaluate and Extend

            Indicator one – Evaluating the modeling of creative thinking skills will come as a natural consequence of my monitoring plan.  My reflection journal will let me know how I am doing in that area.  In terms of the extension, I have two thoughts.  First, I will see if I have met the goal of incorporating creative thinking skills for my students. And second, I will look at how I can do the modeling differently or better to continue to improve my students’ abilities. 

            Indicator five –  In order to evaluate indicator number five, I will see what affect my learning communities had on my teaching and my students’ learning.  Did they help to make my classroom a more creative and effective learning environment?  If so, then I will seek to do more of the same and perhaps even expand my learning community beyond my department.  If not, I will attempt to determine why they were ineffective and see how tweaking the learning communities or looking for different learning communities could prove beneficial. 

Cennamo, K., Ross, J. & Ertmer, P. (2009). Technology integration for meaningful

classroom use: A standards-based approach. (Laureate Education, Inc., Custom

ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.

Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (2010). Program four. Enriching Content

Area Learning Experiences with Technology.   [Webcast]. Integrating Technology

Across the Content Areas.  MD: Author.

Final Reflection: Bridging Learning Theory, Instruction, and Technology

Throughout this course, I have deepened my knowledge and understanding of learning theory.  As I look back on my week 1 view of learning, I realize that not a lot has changed.  I still believe, as I did then, that implementing strategies derived from a variety of learning theories is the best approach to take in the classroom.  One way in which my view has changed, however, is with the addition of the social learning theory to my understanding.  While some of the concepts of social learning were evident in my classroom before this course, I had never studied the social learning theory.  Taking time to do in this course has helped give a backbone to some of the things that I do in the class and has helped me to evaluate their effectiveness. 

I have not identified any immediate adjustments that need to be made to my technology integration in the classroom.  I have always made it one of my goals to integrate as much technology as possible into my lessons.  I believe that I do a very good job at that with the resources available to me.  The fact that I do not see adjustments that need to be made does not mean that I have not learned this course, that I have not found any useful tools, or that I have integrated every possible piece of technology into my class already.  However, I am confident in the way I am approaching technology use in my class. 

There a few tools that I have discovered throughout this course that I would like to implement in the classroom.  One of these is Voice Thread and the other is Google Docs.

Voice thread will be very helpful in the foreign language classroom.  Not only will it allow students to collaborate with their peers and possibly others outside the classroom, but it will allow them to interact with the language in a whole new way. 

I can see that Google Docs will be very beneficial in the area of cooperative learning.  I really like the ideas of social learning theory and I believe that utilizing Google Docs will allow me to tap into those learning ideas.  Through collaboration and building group artifacts, students will work together to construct knowledge and enhance learning.  And the greatest thing about Google Docs is that all the students need is an internet connection.  There is no book to carry around or program software to load at home. 

A couple long term goals that I have for technology are to move my classroom to being a paperless environment and having students create digital portfolios.  The plan to make my room a paperless environment is something that is still unfolding.  Next year I will have the opportunity to teach in a brand new building.  I am also fortunate to be part of a district that puts an emphasis on technology in the classroom.  However, what exactly that technology will look like is still up in the air.  Due to budget reasons, we still do not know the number of computers that we will have in each room.  The ideal of one to one does not look promising.  Also, we still do not know what type of programs we are going to have.  It is my hope that we choose Google Docs for education.  This would help my goal of going paperless.  If we do not go with some kind of cloud computing as a district, then I will have the students use Google Docs in my classroom. 

My second goal, creating digital portfolios, will likely take place in the form of a blog.  I will have students use this blog consistently throughout the year for writing purposes.  However, they will also create podcasts, wikis, and other projects which will be posted to or linked to their blogs.  Because I believe in the social learning concept, it seems logical to pair social media with creating artifacts to help the students create a collection of learning at the end of the year. 

Social Learning

This week I investigated social learning theories.  According to Dr. Michael Orey, social constructivism is similar to constructivism in that it puts emphasis on a student creating an artifact.  It also focuses on the need for students to be engaged in conversation about the learning process (Laureate Education, 2010b).  One way to tap into this theory is to implement cooperative learning in the classroom.  Cooperative learning helps to prepare students to learn together in a way that they will be expected to do when they enter the work world (Pitler, Hubbell, Kuhn, & Malenoski, 2007).  Cooperative learning can take shape many different ways.  The teacher can choose to group students randomly, by ability levels, or by other criteria.  No matter the basis of the group, the importance lies within the fact that the students are working together to solve a problem and to create something.  Cooperative groups also work with the connectivist theory. This theory states that knowledge is based upon a series of networks and the result of learning is that knowledge must be shared (Laureate Education, 2010a).  Because connections must be made and knowledge must be shared in connectivism, cooperative groups make perfect sense. Students network their ideas and help one another to form their personal networks of knowledge, all while distributing the learning among one another.

This week I also took a look at some technology applications that would be great for a classroom where social constructivism or connectivism are being used as models of learning.  Voicethread is an online resource that allows a person to collaborate with anyone else on the web.  The creator can receive feedback and information from other users.  This is not collaborative group by definition because one user generates the initial content, but it becomes a group work once other users give feedback on the original artifact.  Another technology that I looked at this week is Facebook.  Obviously, Facebook is a tool that students are using every day to network their own social life.  So what role does it play in education?  I think that it has amazing potential to enhance the learning process.  Students are networking together and they are creating artifacts.  Both of these things are essential in the social constructivist theory.  One final tool that I considered, and one which is my personal favorite, is Google Docs.  Google Docs allow users to easily share information and collaborate in order to create new artifacts.  The idea of cloud computing and allowing users to interface with one another using on the web is one that has and is radically transforming education.  It gives teachers and students the ability to build collaborative groups within the classroom, within the school, or with students across the globe in ways that would not have been imagined even five years ago. 

With these emerging technologies and learning theories, teachers must keep pace with what is going on in the world in order to give our students the best possible education.  If social learning theories are a valid basis for learning, and I believe that they are, then technology is the perfect gateway to help students build networks of learning that will give them the skills needed for years to come.

In case you cannot view my voicethread to the right, the link to it is

http://voicethread.com/share/1702854/.

 

Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (2010a). Program eight. Connectivism

as a Learning Theory. [Webcast]. Bridging Learning Theory, Instruction, and

Technology.  Baltimore, MD: Author.

Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (2010b). Program seven. Social

Learning Theories. [Webcast]. Bridging Learning Theory, Instruction, and

Technology.  Baltimore, MD: Author.

Orey, M. (Ed.). (2001). Emerging perspectives on learning, teaching, and technology.

Retrieved from http://projects.coe.uga.edu/epltt/index.php?title=Main_Page

Pitler, H., Hubbell, E., Kuhn, M., & Malenoski, K. (2007). Using technology with

classroom instruction that works. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Constructivism in Practice

This week I took a look at Generating and Testing Hypotheses.  This is an approach to learning that goes hand in hand with the constructivist's viewpoint.  When I think of generating and testing a hypothesis, I think of a scientist diligently working away in his lab seeking a solution to a problem.  One of the main points of constructionist theory is that students are actively involved in creating something (Pitler, Hubbell, Kuhn, & Malenoski, 2007).  According to Dr. Orey, this idea, moreso than just being an active learner is what sets constructionism apart from other learning theories (Orey, 2001).  Other theories place emphasis on the active learner, but constructionism also places a large emphasis on the process of constructing an artifact.

This leads to the idea of project based learning (PBL) within the method of generating and testing hypotheses.  In PBL students are the center of the learning process (Orey, 2001).  There are a number of ways that generating and testing hypotheses may take shape in the classroom.  Some of the web resources that were looked at in the course this week demonstrated how it may play out.  One of the examples from this week (http://www.edutopia.org/start-pyramid) talked about a class that designed a new high school for the year 2050.  This would definitely involved making some hypotheses and then proving them.  For example, students would have to begin with ideas of how much the project would cost, what materials would be needed, or what resources would be needed in 2050.  Then the students would have to investigate the facts and validate their hypotheses.  All this was done in the framework of PBL in which the students created a rendering (this would be their authentic artifact) which was judged by a real life architect.  This is one example, but the options for a real life encounter with learning in which the students work towards a product are endless.  And whereas teachers were once limited to how many real life experiences they could create in the classroom, technology has opened a door that brings the real world into the classroom and allows students to explore learning in way that puts them in charge of the learning process while working on authentic issues and using real life situations.

It seems to me that PBL and generating and testing hypotheses are really inseperable.  While the approaches may vary, the end goal is the same.   Teachers want students to walk through the process of investigation and end up with a tangible product that demonstrates learning and understanding. 

Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (2010). Program seven. Constructionist and Constructivist

      Theory. [Webcast]. Bridging Learning Theory, Instruction, and Technology.  Baltimore, MD: Author.

Orey, M. (Ed.). (2001). Emerging perspectives on learning, teaching, and technology.

Retrieved from http://projects.coe.uga.edu/epltt/index.php?title=Main_Page

 

Pitler, H., Hubbell, E., Kuhn, M., & Malenoski, K. (2007). Using technology with

classroom instruction that works. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.