And the GAME Continues...

Although my school year is over, my GAME plan (Cennmao, Ross, & Ertmer, 2009) definitely is not. I may not be able to truly evaluate how effective my plan has been in helping me to achieve my goals since I no longer have my students and will not implement the true efforts of my GAME plan until school starts again in August, but I can still evaluate how I have progressed so far.

During this week alone, I have been able to take steps toward reaching both my goal of establishing a collaborative blog with another classroom to help my students develop cultural awareness and my goal of integrating technology into my assessments. One of my major concerns last week was simply finding a teacher who taught the same grade/subject matter as me and who had a similar interest in establishing a collaborative blogging effort between our classrooms. Based on the feedback from my peers in my blog last week, I have determined that since this is my first attempt at such a collaboration, it will probably be in my best interest to connect with one teacher and establish a year-long blogging relationship between our classes. Therefore, this week I made it my mission to work on finding such a teacher with whom I could connect.

When conducting my research, I came upon a website that listed several examples of classroom blogs from around the country and even the world. Many of these blogs were already well-established and gave me a lot of good ideas. As I perused these sites, I came across one that stood out to me. It is a middle school reading/language arts blog--which is right up my alley! I decided to e-mail the teacher to see how using a blog in her classroom has benefited her students and to see if she knew anything about online collaboration between classrooms so that I could use her expert advice in achieving this goal. To make a long story short, although she has never engaged in a collaborative blogging effort with another class, she is excited about having the opportunity to do so and offered to take on the effort with me. What is even more amazing is that we both do units on the same novel, although I typically teach my unit during the second half of the year and she teaches hers during the first part. However, the novel (The Giver) fits in nicely at any point in my curriculum and one of my colleague’s and I had discussed moving the unit to the beginning of the year, so it actually works out quite well. At this point, she and I are both e-mailing one another back and forth to determine how we want to approach working through the novel study together. She is also providing me with advice about how she has utilized blogging in her classroom, so it is nice to gain insights from someone who has experience with using this technology.

As for my second goal, my progress has been a little less obvious, but still worthy of mentioning. For my goal of integrating technology into my assessments, I think it is important to remember that I do not have to re-create the wheel. Instead, I can take my current units and revise them so that my assessments are technology-friendly. Therefore, I went and spent half a day in my classroom yesterday at school to work on organizing myself for taking action on this goal over the summer. I studied my curriculum guide and picked out two beginning of the year units that I would like to work on revising during the summer. I gathered those unit notebooks and other resources that I believe will be helpful as I work on revising the assessments and brought them home with me. I believe that by setting my goal to work on these two units this summer, I will go into the new school year having a good head start and then can gradually work on revising my other units as the year moves forward. It feels good to know that I have decided on which units I want to work on and that I have the materials with which to work during the next couple of months.

Each week of this course, I continue to learn new, refreshing ideas about how technology can be used to enhance my instructional methods. As I continue to work on my GAME plan (Cennamo et al., 2009), I look forward to implementing more of these approaches for the benefits of my students. At this time, I do not have any major questions and do not feel the need to make any major changes in my goals or my action plan. My main concern is just remembering that even though it is summer and I do not have my students, that does not mean my plan of action has to stall out. By gradually working on my goals now, I will be able to walk into the new year with a head start.

Although I feel like things are moving along nicely at this point, I still welcome any feedback/advice from all of you. Thanks!

Amanda Bryant
8th grade reading/language arts

Reference:

Cennamo, K., Ross, J., & Ertmer, P. (2009).Technology integration for meaningful classroom use. A standards-based approach. Mason, OH: Cengage Learning.