Week 3

I am almost finished with my technology GOAL. I have all of my student’s sound bites from the trial and now I am getting ready to post them to our website. The only thing that I have found to be a problem is that audacity has been very slow. I attribute this to the fact that I have ton of sound clips on one saved file. It seems to stream better when I cut and past the clips into one clip. I am wondering how many different recording programs are out there? I use audacity because I took it from one of the other classes we took and it is free but I would think there might be better programs that allow you to do more and it is my intention to look into it after the school year is done. Other than wondering about recording programs, my plan has worked to perfection so far. I have been able to do what I set out to do and I am now getting ready to watch my student’s blog about other class’s trials.
I have learned that my students are excited about this project and constantly ask me when the podcast will be up so they can blog about it. I also learned that whenever you incorporate audio into a lesson you need to plan to have at least a week for editing purposes. It has taken me more than a week this go around because it is new but in the future I think it will only take a week. Hopefully my student’s enthusiasm will spill over into their trial responses. We’ll see!

I think the only real modification that I need to have in this plan is the time allotment that I have given myself to complete it. Otherwise, it is working very well.

Week 2

Continuing the GAME plan (WEEK 2)

My GOAL this week is to Promote and Model Digital Citizenship and Responsibility through a lesson that has been ongoing throughout this semester. In order to do this I needed a microphone, audacity, a Smartboard, our class website with a blog and a computer to facilitate our activity from.

Many of you have heard me talk about podcasting a mock trial of Romeo and Juliet. Now what I want to do is take the activity a step further and have students blog under the podcast as to who they thought won or lost. Their responses will have to be thoughtful and respectful. In taking this ACTION, I will allow my students the ability to learn my desired standard for the week which is to Promote Digital Citizenship and Responsibility.

I will MONITER my class’s posts throughout the week to ensure that they are engaging in appropriate dialogue with one another. I will also give rewards to those who report any abuse on our blog by giving students who find abuse extra credit.

My EVALUTION of this plan comes through the quality of responses students give to one another in their podcasting blogging assignment. This assignment is unique in that students need to have their own voices on our website. It brings a human element that is inescapable. It will also require students to engage in healthy discussions and criticisms of their work, and not themselves. By doing this, I hope students make the link between people on the other side of the screen and themselves.

Nets T

One GAME plan I have is to strengthen my ability to Promote and Model Digital Citizenship and Responsibility. Since I have been a teacher this has been a major concern of mine. I want all of my students to understand how to use technology appropriately and take responsibility for the work that they create. Many times students forget that what they write is a direct reflection of them. Even in a controlled environment, such as our filtered school website, students feel there are no consequences for what they are saying online sometimes. I think with cyber bullying becoming more and more of an issue, my students need to know more than ever that what they say in the digital world has implications in the real world. I would greatly like to demonstrate this to my students and think that a virtual interview with those that have either been victimized by cyber bullying or those that have been caught cyber bullying might be the answers. I would love ides if anyone has some.

My next area of growth for my GAME plan is Digital Age Work and Learning. Demonstrating my fluency can be a challenge because I sometimes don’t have the tools at my disposal that I would like to have to learn more so that I can show my students more. This class is definitely a step in the right direction but some of the ideas we learn here, or technologies, will be outdated in a year so it is important to keep being informed and educated on how to use these new technologies. I have not even seen an Ipad in person yet. I think one way to strengthen my ability to model and have technology to model is to learn how to grant write. I can’t wait for money that is not going to come so it is my job, whether it is fair or not, to go get it for my classroom. Has anyone written a grant for technology before?

New Literacy

The most striking revelation that I will take away from this course is the fact that we are actually teaching our teachers that web literacy matters. This course reminded me that even though not all teachers in my building think of the internet as a viable source of information, teachers all over the country do as well as the academic institutions that produce those teachers. The question posed to us was “…about the teaching of new literacy skills to your students…” but to me, it is the fact that we will all know that teaching students how to be internet literate is what is important when we leave this course. Slowly, teachers are being held accountable for the web 2.0 world and beyond that our students will have to function in.

The fact that I had a chance to write a lesson plan which taught web literacy in my content is invaluable to me as a teacher. Even if I use parts of the unit plan, I will have it to take from. Teaching students to start with inquiry and then to check the validity of web sources is an experience that I use and will continue to use in my English classroom. Having my students synthesize their information and use multimedia forums to express what they have done is something that I will continue to build on in my classroom because it not only models new literacy techniques students may need but also allows students freedom to go further in their projects.

My professional goal is a lofty one, but one that I believe may be expected of teachers in the future, and it is to create a filtering system specific to a project. Schools have filters as do computer and internet companies but how powerful would a filtering system that allowed teachers to create the perimeters be? I have set this goal because of the discussions I have had with my classmates about the frustrations of filtering programs we currently use that do not allow students to search viable information. I believe creating a prototype and submitting it to the school board would have to happen long before an educator could implement it in the classroom, but I do think it will happen and this course made me think of how valuable it would be. I think the more our education and new literacy’s evolve, the more apt districts will have to be to trust their teachers and allow them to take more responsibility for their students and their studies on the web.

Reflection

It is hard to say that my beliefs have been modified in this class because to me they have either been validated or reawakened. The work of Skinner, Piaget and Garner are not new to any educators that have their undergraduate degrees in the last 20 years, but they are definitely ideas that, with expanding studies, add to our understanding of how to educate children. Allowing students to control their learning by experience has been a pillar of my learning theory since I first entered education, but it is also a theory that is very difficult to practice one hundred percent of the time in my classroom. Technological limitations, time restraints, testing requirements, etc. bog down my ability to do what I know benefits students the most. Knowing that increasing studies are lending further support for this practice rejuvenated my sense of purpose in students centered classrooms.
Voice thread and smart board interaction amongst students are the two tools that have enhanced my ability to use technology in the classroom. Allowing the creation of voice threads, combined with blogs afterwards, is a terrific way to create a sense of student centered learning. Allowing students to demonstrate those voice threads and allow their classmates to interact with them on a communal smartboard is yet another tool that will enhance my students learning.
When I look to the future I am always perplexed, because it is ever changing. I know the technological problems and advantages I had when I first entered education have drastically changed and will continue to change. They change with legislation, the economy, and the abundance of technology. I am supposed to make two long term goals for the future here, but I think my goals keep evolving with every course I take from Walden. The constant long term goals I have created from this, and all my courses thus far, are to be adaptable in and out of the classroom and to always ensure my students get the very best education I can give them. That education is one with student centered learning and as much technology as I can expose them to without it being instructional.

Connectivism and Social Learning in Practice

Every year I involve cooperative learning in my classroom because it works. Every year I have students that I have never had asking if they get to do what last year’s class did. My use of cooperative learning comes from a learning contract which allows students to form groups or work individually and present their allotted number of assignments together or alone. Every assignment has its own personal rubric for each individual student to insure they are doing just as much work as their peers working alone, but I have noticed in every class that I have ever taught using this project that students would rather learn together and learn from each other than not. The assignments are varied, but their enthusiasm to work together is not. I know that we were supposed to use a virtual example of classrooms using social learning theory strategies, but I have seen firsthand, through my assignments popularity, that students do indeed enjoy learning socially whether in a group, through technology, or an expert they choose.

Assimilation vs Accommodation