NETS-T: My Personal GAME Plan

As I continue my Adolescent Literacy and Technology program at Walden University, I continue to learn new ways that I can improve my instruction by integrating technology so that I can enhance my students’ learning experiences. As Ertmer suggested (Laureate Education Inc., 2009), integrating technology effectively requires knowledge, confidence, beliefs, and a supportive culture. I am fortunate enough to already have the latter two; however, I recognize that it is important to constantly build my body of knowledge, as technology is an ever-evolving tool (King-Sears & Evmenova, 2007). Additionally, gaining knowledge about the utilization of instructional technology will gradually help to build my confidence about my ability to implement these tools effectively to help my students gain content area understandings, while also fostering their twenty-first century literacy skills.

One way that I can begin building my knowledge and confidence in reference to integrating technology into my content area instruction is to examine the National Education Standards for Teachers (NETS-T) (National Education Standards for Teachers, 2008). Though there are several of these standards in which I believe I could work to strengthen myself, I know that it is important to gradually begin this process so that I do not get overwhelmed by the process. Therefore, I have identified two areas in which I would like to become more proficient:

Standard 2.d: provide students with multiple and varied formative and summative assessments aligned with content and technology standards and use resulting data to inform learning and teaching

Standard 4.d: develop and model cultural understanding and global awareness by engaging with colleagues and students of other cultures using digital-age communication and collaboration tools

To assist my efforts with becoming more proficient in these areas, I have developed a personal GAME plan to guide my self-direct learning (Cennamo, Ross, & Ertmer, 2009). My GAME plan is as follows:

Goals: In other words, what do I want to know how to do? This one is easy. Pertaining to the standards above, I want to integrate technology into my assessments much more than I am doing now. Unfortunately, my assessments have been so geared lately toward following standardized test formats that I have eliminated almost all technology in my formative and summative assessments in favor of multiple choice question exams. While there is certainly a need for students to practice these types of assessments, they should not be the sole format for my evaluations of student learning. Therefore, I want to strive to implement projects at the end of my learning units that will allow my students to utilize their creative thinking skills by using technology to demonstrate their learning. Additionally, I want to integrate technologies such as blogging to enable my students, many of whom have never even been outside our small, rural town, to collaborate with students from other cultures to develop their global awareness, which I have sadly noticed to be quite lacking in my eighth graders each year.
Actions: What actions will I take to achieve these goals? For standard 2.d, I will examine my content standards and learning units to identify at least two units where I can develop assessments that will allow my students to creatively share their learning through the use of digital technologies. Though I will continue to assess my students’ learning using some standardized forms of assessment, I will also integrate culminating projects where my students can use tools such as digital storytelling, designing WebQuests, and so on to demonstrate their content knowledge while utilizing their twenty-first literacy skills. For standard 4.d, I will consult teacher collaboration sites and forums to reach out to educators from other areas of the country and, hopefully, the world to find someone with whom I can build a collaborative relationship between our classrooms. I would like to engage in a blogging project with this other classroom so that our students to interact with one another, engage in shared learning experiences, and gain cultural awareness from each other.

Monitor: How will I monitor my progress? As my students are engaged in developing their culminating products that integrate digital technologies and as the students engage in their collaborative blogging projects with students from another classroom, I will have to work alongside my students, determining what problems might come up with the use of the various technologies or in posting their blogs or maintaining online etiquette. As any problems come up, I will need to ensure that I am self-directed enough to have worked with the programs so that I can guide my students through the process toward being successful. I will also examine the levels of thinking demonstrated in my students’ technology-infused culminating products and at the content of their blog posts. By monitoring these, I can assess whether technology is merely being used for technology’s sake, or whether my students are actually using it as a tool to enhance content knowledge and their abilities to share it. If the first proves to start happening, I will need to be ready to step in and provide further modeling for my students about how the technologies should better be used.

Evaluate and extend: How will I evaluate and extend my learning? While I will be interacting with and working alongside my students as they work on their assessments and their collaborative blogging partnerships so that I can monitor how things are going, I think it will be critical to get feedback at the end of the learning experiences as well. I will ask my students to share their thoughts about how both projects went and what they think could have been improved, perhaps in their reflective journals. By reading these, I will be able to evaluate what I can do to enhance my proficiency in both standards before implementing the assessments and collaborative blogging projects the next year. Furthermore, I will reflect on my own as well about how I have met my goals and whether I feel ready to move on toward making new goals or whether I need to modify my GAME plan for the current ones so I can make improvements in the future.

I believe that developing this personal GAME plan will enable me to integrate technology more effectively in my content area instruction, and I look forward to doing so!

References:

Cennamo, K., Ross, J. & Ertmer, P. (2009). Technology integration for meaningful classroom use: A standards-based approach. (Laureate Education, Inc., Custom ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.

King-Sears, M., & Evmenova, A. S. (2007, Sep/Oct). Premises, principles, and processes for integrating TECHnology into instruction. Teaching Exceptional Children, 40(1), 6–14.

Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (2009). Program three. Enriching content area learning experiences with technology. Integrating technology across the content areas. Baltimore: Author.

National Education Standards for Teachers (NETS-T) located at http://www.iste.org/Content/NavigationMenu/NETS/ForTeachers/
2008Standards/NETS_T_Standards_Final.pdf