Reflection: The GAME Plan

I believe that my initial thoughts on my GAME plan had many positive aspects, and the biggest issue I have had in executing the plan was my own ability to process what I was trying to accomplish.  Perhaps a bit overwhelmed, I did not have firm grasp on the ultimate goal of the unit until it was underway.  There have been many positive learning experiences for me along the way, and while student results were not what I had desired, there was a lot of learning happening in my classroom.  Issues with technology impeded some of my intentions with blogs and wikis, but as all teachers must, I was able to detour around the difficulty and find another way to accomplish our goals. 

This is my first year teaching at the high school level, and after five years teaching 13 year olds, I am now responsible for almost one hundred 18 year olds.  It is quite a drastic difference as I assumed it would be, but my awareness and preparedness did not line up.  I allowed too many excuses to interrupt the flow of our work, and this has caused some hiccups along the way.  In the future, I will have a more deliberate plan developed for reading the novel.  While Lord of the Flies is a challenging read, I allowed that to influence some of my plans.  I recognized early on that my students would have the ability to seek out reading aids such as SparkNotes since they each have their own Netbook.  However, I believe that by providing them access to this resource, many students chose to rely heavily upon it rather than attempting to understand the novel.  In addition to this, I made a digital copy of the novel available,  but required students to visit the school media center if they wanted a paperback copy.  I have mixed feelings about student responsibility in this as I recognize that in less than a year, many of them will be in college where this independence is required.  I feel that by not having a stack of books available in my room, I may have taken away some sense of urgency which many students may need to push them forward.  I need to create a classroom setting that pushes students to be responsible for their own learning while still providing them multiple avenues to find success. 

Two revisions will be needed for future use of this GAME plan in regards to technology.  These are:
 

• One blog will be made for each class, and students will respond to my posts.  These responses will stand in as their own blog posts.  This will create an easier way for them to view what their classmates are writing and discuss ideas.  It will also make my evaluation of student understanding easier as I will not have to visit over one hundred separate student created blogs. 
• Wikis will be created by student groups.  Students will be divided into groups at the very beginning of the unit and will start develop their wiki projects at that time.  This way, the project will have the opportunity to evolve with student learning and will provide students with the ability to recognize how their understanding has changed over time. 

GAME plans are really about metacognition; it is teachers or students setting goals, taking action to meet those goals, keeping an eye on progress towards those goal, evaluating how well this was done, and taking that understanding forward to accomplish new tasks (Cenammo, Ross & Ertmer, 2009).  In the future, I plan on presenting the unit project from the very beginning.  As soon as students are aware of the novel they will be reading, they will know every goal they must achieve.  If this is applied to the Lord of the Flies character campaign that I have been developing, students would need to sort out how they are going to develop a political campaign for their character.  This would require them pay special attention to character details and relationships in the novel, as well as behaviors and responses to conflict.  As they continue working through the novel, they would have to monitor their work on their group wiki to make sure that the material they have created aligns with the goals that must be met.  And at the end,  student groups could evaluate how well these tasks have been accomplished.  The idea in translating the GAME plan process to what students are doing  is making sure students are thinking about what they are doing and why they are doing it.  Using this will allow students to place their assumptions on the table, break them down, and use new understanding to develop a deeper, richer understanding of the material (Tsao, Takahashi, Olusesu, & Jain, 2006).

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Any adjustments I would make involving technological integration in the classroom revolves around developing student competence with technology.  I have made the same mistake many teachers make, and perhaps because of my awareness of it, I am the bigger fool.   Availability of technology does not translate into productive use of technology.  Thirty students in the classroom who can access Facebook with their phone does not mean that those same thirty students have an understanding of how to recognize a website's reliability or how to create a meaningful digital product.  This is the same mistake I feel my corporation has made by placing Promethean boards in every classroom in the city without providing any meaningful professional development for teachers (of which I have been highly critical).  Students need to know how to use the technology, and it is my job as a teacher to recognize their preconceptions about technology and address those.  I believe one of the biggest reasons make mistakes with technology, especially when gathering online resources, is that they do not recognize they are making mistakes.  Teachers need to help students to recognize preconceptions, evaluate them, have them challenged and restructure their understanding (Davis, 2001). 

Technology has always been a part of my classroom.  Before I began teaching, I thought I would have a computer related career, perhaps in networking and maintenance.  I have always recognized the value of understanding these tools.  The biggest issue is making sure that the technology is used in a way that enhances the learning as using technology just to use technology serves no purpose (Cennamo, Ross, & Ertmer, 2009).  In order to make the learning more meaningful for all of my students, I have to be able to take the skills they are to learn beyond the four walls of my room.  Lord of the Flies as a novel may have no worth to many of my students who find no joy in reading literature, but the practical lessons of social organization, societal rules, and values are present for all.  Using problem-based learning and addressing real-world problems that correlate with the novel can provide all students with the opportunity to acquire the skills required by academic standards and an understanding of the world in which they live.  Social media would then allow students to take that learning beyond the school and perhaps make an impact in our city and beyond. 

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.

Davis, J. (2001). Conceptual Change. In M. Orey (Ed.), Emerging perspectives on learning, teaching, and technology. Retrieved October 20, 2012, from http://projects.coe.uga.edu/epltt/

Tsao, J., Takahashi, K., Olusesu, J. & Jain, S. (2006). Transformative Learning. In M. Orey (Ed.), Emerging perspectives on learning, teaching, and technology. Retrieved October 20, 2012, from http://projects.coe.uga.edu/epltt/