Carrying Out My GAME Plan

Our application activity this week for Walden made me do a lot of thinking about how I would need to design my lesson plans to incorporate technology. My GAME Plan is to be able to design or adapt relevant learning experiences that incorporate digital tools to promote student learning. I realize that to be able to do this I need the support of the school corporation. As it is, they have so many blocks and filters in place that when the students are given research to do even the sites that they would need to find worthwhile results are blocked. This causes frustration on the part of the student and me the teacher.

In order to make the learning experience a positive one, I would need first of all the approval of the department head for the project. I am not sure how other schools hierarchy is organized, but at our school we have to first go through our department head. If he likes the idea then he will convey the ideas to the principal. I believe that instead of talking that it would be more profitable to demonstrate the uses of the voice thread or wiki in advancing student learning capabilities. To do this I would have to demonstrate its usefulness by doing a demonstration and possibly using tools like screen capture and possibly hold the demonstration outside of school property as once there the filters would block my ability to carry out the demonstration effectively.

Once I can get the department head, principal and my peers in the math and science department on board maybe as a group we can begin to effect the changes needed to incorporate the new technologies into the curriculum. As it is demonstrated how to teach students safe internet practice and ethics they will be more inclined to be flexible with the accessibility of the websites and the use of different web tools. It may be a long fight, but with perseverance I am sure that everything will work out in the end.

My other goal is to demonstrate fluency in technology systems and the transfer of current knowledge to new technologies and situations. In order to do this I have recently began using the graphing tool with the overhead projector. This is very useful as I do not have graphing calculators for everyone and the students get to come up and input data into the calculator and observe the graph as it is projected on the screen. I have also gone ahead and set up my geometry, algebra 1 & 2 school web page with resources for all my students including power points, video tutors and online quizzes in the content area. At the moment the school web access is so slow and frustrating that I will have to terminate the idea of online quizzes and revert to paper pencil quiz, but I also notice that the students are not making use of the video tutor helps provided to them. I am very discouraged by this, but I think it is a lack of exposure on their part why they are not using this resource and can only hope that over time there will be an improvement in their response.

It would be nice to hear from any of my peers about how they got their students to be comfortable with using these additional resources provided online.