Reflecting...

Following my GAME plan throughout this course was quite an interesting experience. I am a person who likes to set goals for myself, but normally do not do such a good job keeping track of my progress and monitoring how I am doing. Usually, after a while passes, I notice that I am not exactly where I wanted to be, but I do not really know where I went wrong. Following a GAME plan helped me to see step by step what I was accomplishing and what I needed to work on before too much time had passed.

The first goal that I wanted to work on was using technology to inspire learning and creativity, specifically for me, in the arena of vocabulary acquisition. In this goal, I made some progress, but maybe not as much as I had wanted. I think that the main thing that I accomplished in this goal was finding ways to use the Internet to locate authentic materials in Spanish to help students acquire new vocabulary in a more creative way. I found many different websites to help me with this, and I think that my students appreciate this more than just receiving a vocabulary list with words that I deemed important. The part that I still struggle with is student motivation. By using technology and giving my students a stake in deciding what vocabulary they would learn, I thought it would really motivate them to become more self-directed and interested learners, and while I have seen a difference in some students, I still have so many who are just disinterested. This might just be a process that I have to keep working on longer than the span of this class, and I suppose as I get more resources and new ideas, I might have some more student buy-in. I feel that I was more successful in my second goal, which was to use technology to communicate more with students, parents and peers in my schools community. In this goal, I have created my own website for my classes, through which students and parents can get information about the learning targets for my class, assignments and projects that are coming up, and also information on how to best contact me. I found this so helpful the other day when students were asking me when they were signed up to present their projects, and I directed them to my website to check out the schedule. Recently, I have added a page for the families who are participating in my school’s Costa Rica Exchange program, which has been extremely helpful in keeping everyone up to date with important information. In fact, at a recent meeting where families came in to fill out some important documents, they simply logged onto my website, opened the documents from there electronically, and emailed them completed to me, and families who were not able to attend could do this from home.

I really do feel that the work that I did on my GAME plan will have a positive impact on my instructional practice. Transparently, my practice will be positively influenced because I have worked on things that are helping me increase student creativity and learning. Through working on the first goal, I learned how to find more creative and authentic ways to teach my students, and through the second, I learned how to better communicate with parents and students. In a less transparent way, though, I learned about the process of goal setting and tracking my progress, and I think that this will impact my students in a positive way. This is a very important skill, and now that I have experience with it, I can help my students to learn how to master it, as well. I kind of liken this process to that of the writing process. We know that a piece of writing becomes better as we review it and get feedback and make multiple drafts in order to perfect it, and yet my students hate the drafting process and do not want to remediate work. I think that by employing a GAME plan with my students, having them set a goal, visualize what success would look like, keep track of their progress, and get feedback from others, might help them to realize how important this process is and that they really do need to be continuously revising their work and what they are doing in order to make it their best possible.

One immediate adjustment that I will make to my instructional practice regarding technology integration is to sign out the computer lab more frequently to get my students using technology. I found a great wealth of authentic sources and materials on the Internet, and would like to make these available to my students. Currently I am working on designing a Webquest for the Day of the Dead so that students can use authentic sources to learn about this holiday and build the skills of navigating websites, looking for main ideas, and finding their own important vocabulary. Another immediate adjustment that I will make is to get my students in contact with Spanish speaking students in Costa Rica. Some of my students will be participating in a Costa Rican Exchange program this year, and I think that it would be fantastic if they could start getting to know each other now, so an email exchange is something that I am really excited about and want to get started with right away!

The process of the GAME...

The GAME plan process that I have been working on and speaking about in my blog lately has really been quite interesting. In the past, I have been the kind of person who has set goals for myself, but I have not been so good at keeping track of my progress and measuring out whether or not I have reached my goals. The GAME plan process that I have been using to track my technology goals has really helped me with this, causing me to first realize what success would look like in these goals, then forcing me to keep myself on track and write about my progress, which was great.

I think that in order to use the GAME plan process to help my students work on the technology standards, I would first have to narrow them down. I think that the NETS-T list of standards is a little intimidating to give to students as is, so I would pick some of the standards that I really wanted to focus on with the kids, and have them decide from there which ones they would need to work the most on. Keeping these standards in mind, I would have them create goals to improve their proficiency in those areas in accordance to the PBL, social networking and digital storytelling lesson plans. Students would look at the work that they are required to do during the unit, and then see where goals for their technology standards would fit naturally. This could then become a part of the assessment process. As students are working on each individual lesson, they will also be keeping track of their game plans to make sure that they are where they need to be in accordance with meeting their goals. They could journal about their progress in individual blogs, and their blog posts would become a material for assessment. Also, they will get the chance to blog about any technology questions or problems that they incurred, giving the answer to these questions so that other students can benefit from their knowledge.

Checking In...

I am grateful for feedback that I receive through comments from my colleagues. I wanted my students to work on creating their own working dictionaries, and Tsenala gave me a great suggestion of further integrating technology! I am shifting directions on this a little bit to think about the different web 2.0 technology ideas that I could use for students to record their new vocabulary. A wiki would be a good idea, as the class could make a large dictionary accessible by all. A blog might also be a good idea, but maybe less cooperative than a wiki. I am not too confident with my “wiki skills” at this point, but it looks like I will be getting some more wiki experience this week through my Walden application, so that will be helpful. If I choose to use a blog, I might enlist the help of the English teacher on my 10^th grade team, as he mentioned earlier that he was toying with the idea of using student blogs for journaling. So in essence, the new questions that have arisen in this arena are: Which technology would work best for my purpose? and What are the logistics involved in making this work?

For my second goal, I have done some more work on my website by adding learning targets for each class section and also a section for assignments. I uploaded the project information for the current assignment that my Spanish C class is working on, including the schedule of presentations, so that if students forget, they can reference the website. And lets talk about stupid errors! As a colleague was perusing my website, they noticed that my email address was posted incorrectly! Well, maybe I was so concerned with making sure that my website was ascetically pleasing that I neglected the basics. So hopefully this will improve communication between my school community and myself :)

Hows the GAME going...?

As I work on my GAME plan and monitor my progress, I think that I am doing pretty well, considering all of the other things on my plate right now. Thinking about my first goal, which involves having my students learn vocabulary in a more creative way, I realized that there was a kind of uniformity in recording missing. I want my students to use authentic resources to find their own vocabulary that pertains to the topic in creative ways, but I did not give my students instruction in how to record this new information, and I have learned that if I am not making my students accountable for their work in some way, a great chunk of them will not be motivated enough to do it on their own. To work on this, I am thinking of having my students make their own dictionaries. In a small booklet, they could leave a page for each letter, and as they creatively acquire new vocabulary, they can record it all in one place. I think that this will make it easier for students to record what they are learning, and it can also serve as an assessment aide for me, as I will see that they are keeping up with the vocabulary acquisition.

As for my communicative website, I have not yet tapped into my resource of the library media specialist as she has been busy with all of the new technologies coming into our new building. I still want to increase my communication with parents through email though, so I have put up a “contact me” page onto my website with my phone number and email address. Even though I do not have a direct link to email, parents will still be able to easily access my email address. Through this process, I have learned so far that creating a simple website on something such as Google sites is not as difficult as I thought it would be, and that I should not be so afraid of technology that is new to me. This is an exciting revelation to me, as sometimes I am wary to use new technology as I have had some bad experiences in the past (really, who hasn’t?).

So far, So good...

The first part of my GAME plan was to find a way to make learning a more creative process for my students, more specifically through using some sort of technology. I started searching the Internet a little in hopes to find something that could make vocabulary acquisition a more creative process, and I came across a Spanish for Beginners drama called “Mi Vida Loca” on the BBC website, which looks like it might be a great resource for me. This mini-soap opera is divided into episodes by topic, and could be a great way to introduce new topic to my students, as it is seems interesting enough to hold the attention of my students, but also has enough supports, such as Spanish subtitles and options to stop for mini-lessons, that my students could benefit from watching these. Before providing new vocabulary, I could have my students watch the episode and see what they might come up with as important terms for the unit. To carry out this part of my plan, I would need an LCD projector (available for me from the library media center), or, to have students do this in small groups, I would need to sign out the computer lab.

The second part of my GAME plan involves using technology to communicate with students, parents, and peers. So far, I have signed up on my schools Google account to create my own website. I have a skeleton of a website so far, and I would like to develop this more so that from this site, you can go to a separate page, depending on what section of Spanish the student in taking. I am really unsure of how to navigate the creating of a website, so the resource that I need to carry out my plan from here is the help and expertise of the library media specialist at my school. I really enjoy this kind of collaboration with my colleagues, and so I am looking forward to working with the specialist to help me carry out my GAME plan.

My GAME Plan!

On the website for the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), the National Education Standards for Teachers are listed and explained (International Society for Technology in Education, 2008). After reviewing these standards and indicators, I discovered that there are situations in which I feel comfortable with, and there are some in which I feel that I could become more proficient, thus increasing my ability to effectively use technology in the classroom.

The first standard listed reads, “Facilitate and Inspire Student Learning and Creativity”, and the first indicator for this standard is to “promote, support, and model creative and innovative thinking and inventiveness” (International Society fo Technology in Education, 2008). I am not very confident in my ability to meet this indicator because I do not feel that my use of technology in the classroom always leads students to be creative and innovative. As a Spanish teacher, so many times I am stuck in the mindset that my students need to learn certain vocabulary items and grammatical concepts, and I do not always leave them room to be creative and inventive in their learning. My goal is to find a way to let my students become more creative in their learning, and not just during cultural units, but during every unit. Specifically, I think that I could find room for creativity in vocabulary acquisition, not just in the way in which students retain the vocabulary, but also in what vocabulary they are actually learning. In order to achieve this goal, I think that I will need to reach out to other language teachers, and see how they are using technology in a creative way in their classrooms. I could look to my colleagues in my building for help, and also to my Walden University colleagues. Another way to reach this goal would be to do some research online, looking for different foreign language resources that I could have my students use in order to learn new vocabulary in a more creative manner. I will monitor my progress by looking at my lesson plans and seeing if the work that I have my students doing is creative. Also, I will look at how they are learning their vocabulary. If I am still handing out lists that need to be memorized, I will know that I am not on the right track, but if my students are finding vocabulary in another, more creative way, I will know that I am making some progress. I will evaluate myself by seeing that kind of vocabulary the students have learned at the end of the unit, maybe through a writing or a speaking assessment. At the end of each unit, if the students have learned other words pertaining to the topic that were not expressly given to them by me, I will know that they have found a way to learn vocabulary creatively through the technology that I have provided them.

The third standard listed reads, “Model Digital-Age Work and Learning”, and the third indicator for this standard is to “communicate relevant information and ideas effectively to students, parents, and peers using a variety of digital-age media and formats” (International Society for Technology in Education, 2008). I am not very confident in my ability to meet this indicator because I do not use digital media to communicate with students, parents, only with peers. My goal is to use digital-age technology in order to communicate with my students and also with their parents. In order to achieve this goal, I will create my own personal website off of the website for my school. I would like to have a different page for each section that I teach. On this page, students and parents would be able to log-on and find the learning targets for the current unit, any homework assignments due, and any upcoming tests, quizzes, or assessments. Also, I would like for there to be a link to my email so that students or parents could ask clarifying questions at any time. I will monitor my progress by keeping up with my website and making sure that off the most relevant information is displayed. To evaluate this, I could take a survey of parents and students in the middle of the year and also at the end of the year when they come in for student-led conferences. This survey would let me know if parents and students are finding my website helpful, and would also let me know what other information they might like to see on there.

International Society for Technology in Education. (2008). The ISTE National Educational Technology Standards (NETS-T) and Performance Indicators for Teachers. Retrieved from http://www.iste.org/Content/NavigationMenu/NETS/ForTeachers/2008Standards/NETS_T_Standards_Final.pdf

"Hello!" to all of my Walden colleagues, both returning and new! I am looking forward to working with you all and checking out your blogs :)

- Jenine