Modifications to My GAME Plan

Once I came up with the idea for me lesson plan on world peace, I was able to easily find information that my students would find useful to my students. I know that there is enough information on the internet for my classes to utilize. It was easy to plan, and the technology involved is easy to use and accessible to all students.

I actually have discussed my lesson with one of me fellow English teachers. He thought it was a great idea and had the idea of creating a class website on one of the free website pages, like geocities. I have never used this, so I will have to experiment to see how it works. This way, not only can my class see each others’ work, but the entire school and parents could also view our progress and final products. This enforces the concept of teacher collaboration. The more minds you have, the more ideas will arise. Each teacher will bring their own ideas to the table to help modify the GAME plan.

The question that I am pondering now is how to give more options to the students. They already have the option of what to discuss in their projects. They get to choose the world issues they wish to focus on. Now, I am brainstorming other options in the form of presenting. I have them creating a Power Point as or right now, but I might extend the options to include wikis and podcasts. I will have to develop this as I move forward with my unit.

GAME Plan Week 3

My GAME plan involves finding examples of real world problems that disturb the concept of World Peace. I will have some videos to prepare the students for the task, and to give them ideas of what to look for on their own. The students will need access to the internet to perform their research, and there must be a class blog site to post their ideas to the class as homework/study hall work. In order for my lesson to be successful I need to have the parents aware of our class blog site so they know it is a safe assignment consisting of only students and teachers from our classes. I need to know if it is possible to only allow certain people to post to our blog site so that no outsiders can interfere. Once I get this figured out we will be able to move ahead with our online collaboration. I also need to do some more research on how to include UDL principles in this unit.

My GAME Plan for Integrating Technology in the Classroom.

There are two areas that I need to strengthen in order to reach my goal of successfully integrating the use of technology in my classroom to best facilitate learning the content. The ISTE standard 2 states that we must be able to “design or adapt relevant learning experiences that incorporate digital tools and resources to promote student learning and creativity”. I am still learning about many of these new digital tools that I can use to teach material in the classroom. However, some of these ideas are a bit fuzzy in my mind. I need to become more familiar with these new ideas before I can successfully implement them.

That leads in to my next area of improvement. Standard 3 describes how we must “collaborate with students, peers, parents, and community members using digital tools and resources to support student success and innovation”. I do not know of many other teachers in my building that try to productively utilize current technologies. If I were to collaborate with them I am sure that we could come up with some great ideas. This leads me to the “actions” I would take to help our school be more technology oriented. I could suggest starting a group of teachers that could meet to brainstorm and develop technology integrated lessons and tools.

If the teachers in my building worked as a group to implement technology, we could easily monitor and share our progress. The evidence of our students’ learning would help us monitor and then evaluate our methods. If we were to meet once a month we could perfect our techniques over time as we share our input and evidence.