Thursday, April 26, 2012

Field Experience Major Assessment

Part A Essay Question: Who are your students and what content and/or processes are you teaching? Share the overarching goals and standards of what you want your students to achieve and how you plan to help them achieve with high levels of success. Describe your own content and pedagogical expertise in relation to the subject matter and standards, share, environmental/cultural factors important for the reader to know prior to beginning the field experience activity. I have chosen to work with all of my fourth grade students. The content that I will be teaching them is understanding global economics. The goal of this unit is to teach the students what economics is and how important it is in our lives. I want them to understand various terms used in economics such as, goods and services, entrepreneurship, specialization, interdependence, trade, markets. I also want them to be able to apply their learning in the end of the unit project. Throughout this unit I will incorporate all levels of Bloom's taxonomy and meet the needs of all of my diverse learners and learning styles by using various types of activities and implementing technology.

Sunday, April 15, 2012

GAME Plan Reflection

With EDUC 6713 coming to a close, I want to reflect on the GAME plan that I have developed during this course. I also want to reflect upon my new learning from this course and how it has encouraged me to integrate even more technology into my classroom.

"The GAME plan requires you to think about and take steps to direct your learning process, specifically while learning about technology and how to integrate it into the curriculum" (Cennamo, Ross, & Ertmer, 2010). Throughout the past seven weeks, I have been able to develop and carry out a GAME plan that has encouraged me to step up to the plate and become a leader within my school. I have realized that in order to become a more effective teacher and a leader among my colleagues, I have to discover what my weaknesses are and seek out solutions for improving those weaknesses. One of those weaknesses became the focus for my first GAME plan goal, creating more effective assessments, both formative and summative. I have had access to numerous resources in my school for carrying out this part of my GAME plan. I have also learned throughout this course that they are many ways to use technology to create both formative and summative assessments. From classroom response systems to blogs and wikis to digital storytelling, creating assessments using technology can give us a great deal of information about our students and their learning, and it also encourages the use of the 21st Century Skills. When reflecting on my first goal and the progress I have made, I must say that I am on the right track and am learning a great deal. Therefore, there has been no need to revise or change this plan as of yet.

For my other goal, which is about becoming a leader of technology integration in the classroom, I also feel that I am well on my way to accomplishing this goal and do not feel the the need to revise or change this goal either. Technology is something that I am truly passionate about and I am a leader by nature, so it is only natural that I would want to become a leader of technology within my school. This course has opened my eyes to many new things that I will be able to share with my colleagues. They see my excitement when I talk about using technology into the classroom and they see that I am not afraid to take risks with my lessons. They see me using the PBL approach and how the kids are collaborating and communicating with one another and creating exciting multi-media presentations. Because of this, many of my colleagues have started coming to me for advice or to get ideas of how they could bring more technology into their lessons. This in turn has created more collaboration among us and we are communicating more so than we have ever done. So for me, setting these goals and striving to reach them has not only reignited the passion in me, it has spread amongst my colleagues and I am hoping that it will eventually spread amongst the entire school. It is because of this Masters program and this course, that I have strived to incorporate some type of technology into my classroom every day. I can't wait for the day when we have a one-to-one student/computer ratio and it is coming. That is why it is so important to teach the students how to develop their own GAME plan with goals that they can work towards and how to learn on their own. This is what self-directed learning is all about!

Cennamo, K., Ross, J., & Ertmer, P. (2010). Technology integration for meaningful classroom use: A standards-based approach. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.

Crystal Moyer