Reflection

My GAME Plan was focused on Design and Develop Digital-Age Learning Experiences and Assessments and Model Digital-Age Work and Learning. With the first standard, I worked on finding more interactive lessons to incorporate the use of the Promethean Board. I researched sites to find activities and collaborated with other second grade teachers. The second standard that I focused on was communicating more with parents through my website and finding out what parents needed most from my website. What I learned from this experience is that I have many options to try and sites to use. I am more aware of the process of setting goals and identifying the steps I need to take. The evaluation process is the most valuable step as I step back and reflect on what it is that I have learned. What can I do differently or how do I redirect my focus are two questions that I should be asking myself.

By using the GAME plan (Cennamo, Ross, & Ertmer, 2009), we practiced a strategy that we can then use with our students. Setting goals and planning the steps to reach those goals are very important to self-directed learning. The goal of any teacher should be to help students become more self-directed and life-long learners. In addition, the monitoring and evaluation is extremely important. Learners need to describe what they have done and explain what resulted and why. This is because when we stop to think about what we have learned and to reflect on how we learned it, we actually achieve a deeper understanding of the knowledge in different situations (referred to as transfer), which is yet another hallmark of creative thinkers (Cennamo, Ross, & Ertmer, 2009). The GAME plan is a great tool to use to help our students focus, monitor, and evaluate. By experiencing it ourselves, we are better able to assist our students as they work through it.

This class gave us the opportunity to learn from our colleagues about different ways to use assistive technology, integrate technology in the content areas, and share ideas for lessons. Technology can be used in many ways to establish authentic contexts for learning and to engage students in authentic intellectual work including the construction of knowledge, disciplined inquiry, and in finding value beyond school (Cennamo, Ross, & Ertmer, 2009). In sharing our ideas, we have gained new insights for the use of technology, not just for the sake of using it but instead to integrate it into our content areas to better support our learners and facilitate growth and learning.

Key to effective reflection is the ability to go beyond a simple description of what happened to consider why it happened, how it is connected to other events, and what adjustments should be made to subsequent actions based on this understanding (Cennamo, Ross, & Ertmer, 2009). In reviewing this course, Integrating Technology into the Content Areas, I am amazed at how many different things I have learned and want to try in my classroom. I am very excited to use my Content Unit Plan at the beginning of the year. I purposely created the plan for this unit for the beginning of school in the fall so I could engage my students and incorporate technology right away. With the Unit Plan, I will be using Problem-based learning, social collaboration, and digital storytelling to hook my students and get the ball rolling. I hope to continue using these strategies in other content areas.

Cennamo, K., Ross, J., & Ertmer, P. (2009). Technology Integration for Meaningful Classroom Use. (M. Staudt, & M. Stranz, Eds.) Mason, OH, USA: Cengage Learning.