Like the energizer bunny we must keep going and going and going...

How effective were your actions in helping you meet your goals? What have you learned so far that you can apply in your instructional practice?

For my first goal in technology based activities for every indicator, I would say I am right on target. I have identified a major weakness in our curriculum to be data analysis and probability. We have little interactive activities in this area that uses technology. So that will be my focus. And on Monday in my meeting with colleagues we had a guest come in and show us all of the benefits of assignment builder and quiz builder through discoveryeducation.com. This will be an invaluable tool.

Plan two was put on the side burner this week as I have much on my plate and my students can not access USATESTPREP.com due to standardized testing being held in the labs. SO I took this opportunity to focus on other issues. I still do have a question for everyone from last week: “we had another concern and I would like anyone’s opinion that has done research like this. Would it be better for one teacher to use one technique, while the other uses another OR would it be better for us to both try each technique with between different classes or within the same class? We had feelings about this but I would like to hear others thoughts before I share our ideas.”

What do you still have to learn? What new questions have arisen?

I feel at this point I can not learn much more and stay sane. I need to focus at this point on making lessons with this discoveryeducation.com, using video clips, stories and interactive activities to help support the data analysis and probability standard. My questions are about student use – will the students use this technology on their own? I really want to organize these lessons to be enrichment type things to put on my webpage and I am wondering how involved the students will be on their own. My other concern is how to monitor this in an easy yet productive way. Many times I have great ideas only to find out the management portion will put me over the edge.

How will you adjust your plan to fit your current needs?

Knowing that I expect to have finished products I need to allow myself some time during planning. This week I secured a definite way to do this because I was falling behind on myself. My cohort group is working on a “Center for Differentiation” and have been creating hands on activities based on RIT Band levels, but we needed time. My very self proclaimed "OCD" colleague and I have set a date every Tuesday during planning to work for 30 minutes on the center and 30 minutes on these activities. Knowing that I sometimes can let other things get in the way, having Joanna to keep me on task will be very beneficial to my success. I am honest enough to know my weaknesses and pushy enough to use others strengths to support me.

So far so good...

Looking at my action plans I am confident that all is going well with the first two steps of my first plan. I have been meeting weekly and even a little more with my colleagues, second I have a place to store all of our activities and just worked on a way to help make it easier to send through email and download onto flash drives in the event any one of us leave the school we can take this with us and so we can share with other teachers. My third and fourth actions which involve identifying objectives or indicators that do not include technology based activities and then planning out activities using a variety of technologies is my focus. I feel that I have plenty of resources for this process.

First and foremost, I have my technology coach, Wendy, who works very closely with the math/technology coach at another middle school in the district. One email and she is supporting me in anyway, this is an invaluable resource. Second resource is my network of colleagues through my school, this program and friends I have built throughout the years. I believe in sharing and have built a huge network of people to share ideas with. This is outstanding!
A third type of resource I have is professional development through our district. Through this program we have met an educator that works with the SCETV and the Unitedstreaming system. She will be coming to my school on Monday, March 29th to help us learn new ways to incorporate all of the technologies they have available including online assessments. Through Discovery and ETV we have access to thousands of video clips and then can give online assessments and get feedback even when students work from home. Terrific resource!

My only concern is that I make sure I make time for actually producing finished projects, so I am making a Wednesday planning requirement for myself. If I have not created at least one activity by Wednesday then I have to spend Wednesday planning creating one! I just decided this as I reflected on my plans and realize that time is the only thing holding me back!

For my second goal, I felt confident also. However, I just met with a colleague about this and I have concerns about my plan. I was planning to focus only on the USATESTPREP.com data but she brings up the assessments we are getting evaluated on. We should be looking at those results and have students focus their practice based on this MAPS data. I would have to agree with her on this but also feel that these one day one time tests should not be the entire focus on my year. We discussed trying to have her focus on the MAPS scores and me to focus on the sites results and then move from there if we see a difference in our results. Only problem is our MAPS data is being taking next week for the year. This would be something we would have to try next year as soon as we start the year and begin with these students.

Then we had another concern and I would like anyone’s opinion that has done research like this. Would it be better for one teacher to use one technique, while the other uses another OR would it be better for us to both try each technique with between different classes or within the same class? We had feelings about this but I would like to hear others thoughts before I share our ideas.

Aside from this concern, I am loaded up with resources on were to get quality questions and have started to look over the site and learn how to make assessments and how to use them. We will however, be totally focused on Forced-Choice (Cennamo, Ross & Ertmer, 2009) format questions using this assessment. As I mentioned on my discussion post -- these type questions keep all the parents happy though so at least I will not battle a parent issue!!

Good luck to everyone and PLEASE share your thoughts and advise! And as always any and all ideas are welcome!!! Specifically in data analysis - as my colleague and I reviewed and really have a weakness on available activities on data analysis! Thank you!

LORI POWERS

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

Lori Powers : Planning out my actions!!

May the luck of the Irish be with you today!

Although luck doesn't always help you accomplish your goals ... planning does!

Making plans are easy … it is following through with them that creates the conflict. I feel very strongly that a well thought out plan that is attainable provides the best possible opportunity for success. So as I look over my plan to incorporate technology into new curriculum and new areas of focus, I will need to set up several steps that can be measurable and realistic.

First I will need to continue to meet with colleagues every Monday to share lesson plans and activities. Considering this is a district mandated requirement, I can easily hold myself accountable for that and can consider that a definite resource in the future. I also sit on the district leadership team and meet monthly with math colleagues to share and support and communicate so that is yet another opportunity to learn from others.

Second, I will need a place to store the activities and plans already designed and those that I will be developing. Our group has already created a share drive that is South Carolina State Standard specific, I have that portion of the goal taken care of and can easily add to it.

A third step I must take would be to identify those indicators that have technology related activities and those that do not. This is the most important step for me right now. I do not want to jump right in to creating plans because I want to assure that I am not doubling up on some indicators and never completing other indicators, as my goal is to eventually plan an activity for each indicator. Now that does not mean I will not be open to a perfectly good completed activity if an indicator already has one but I will not spend my time creating technology driven activities for indicators that already has one attached to it. As A teacher I have that “license to steal” all awesome activities and lessons that anyone is willing to share!!!

My final step would be to look into the variety of technology available at my school and in the world. I might learn how to work certain software for example, Geometer’s sketch pad, to do an activity on transformations and could plan a fabulous activity but if my school does not have access to Geometer’s Sketchpad, then my efforts were for nothing. So accessing the technology leader at my school to assure we have the technology, the capability and the support and permission will be an integral part of the process.

My question to all of you is what type of technology should I make sure I incorporate? List cool activities that you have done with technology to spark my interest for my first activity!


The second goal I have will not require much more preparation but will require more time as I will need to develop good assessment questions for each unit in order to produce a USATESTPREP.com assessment for each standard.

First steps have been completed already as I have the standards list and know the indicators. I also have access to a bank of assessment questions that my district is working on but may need to add to it throughout the process. I have already set up my teacher account and my classrooms online and have looked through the tutorial and feel comfortable making assessments and assigning students to use them.

I would like to include a partner or assistant as my next step in this project, so I am going to have to entice some colleagues with the benefits this will provide. This is easily done however through the sales pitch of the program, having hardcore data that is accessible to parents, administrators and students that is computer scored and stored almost makes me feel unnecessary but provides the ease that will make my colleagues want to help. Yet the game like atmosphere to move up levels based on these assessments and practice activities has the students begging to participate. I feel a partner will help me to stay on track and focused and will keep the level of the assessments at the desired level. Everyone knows two heads are always better than one.

The last step I need to work on would be finding a way to collect and record all the statistics to evaluate the program. Usually a simple excel file will help pull all of this together but I want to take some time to see if the website will pull all of the information I want together on one form for me. I feel certain it should, it will require me looking through the tutorial section of the website and that just requires me to sit down and research it! If the tutorial does not provide what I need, I think I will contact the sales rep. as usually they are willing to figure out a way to make their product work for you.

I would love to hear everyone’s suggestions on how to decide what would be an acceptable measure to determine success? Last week I posed all students achieving an 80% on the tests but I am not sure I like that one. Please give me your ideas!

Continuous Improvement is my GAME plan!

As I reflect on the material we have been reading and think about the GAME plan introduced by Cennamo, Ross and Ertmer in our text, Technology Integration for Meaningful Classroom Use, (2009) I constantly am reminded of my trusty ole educators’ mantra “modify and adjust”. Educators have always been expected and encouraged to reflect upon lessons plans and assessments and adjust accordingly for each group and for new technologies, this is still true today, yet somehow a bit more important because we are left in a situation that requires us to do a lot of this adjusting or tweaking on our own without supervisors requesting updates and checklists. We are increasingly expected to keep up with the times by learning the material ourselves or seeking out the support we need to make it work within our classroom environment. Simply closing our doors to this new age of technology and global learning will not be acceptable when trying to prepare our students to become successful twenty-first century learners.

Gibbons’ (2002 as sited in Cennamo, Ross & Ertmer, 2009) concept of self directed learning is not new to education but is being highly recognized now as teachers are having to rapidly increase their own knowledge and skill without formal university specific instruction. Often teachers are having to set short goals to encourage themselves to continue to grow and then hold themselves accountable.

Having a guideline or set of standards such as National Education Standards for Teacher (NETS-T) set by the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) provides educators with a path to hold themselves accountable to. As I look through these standards I am fairly comfortable with most of them however, I have been actively working towards improving my learning activities and classroom assessments. I have chosen to challenge myself to further develop my skills in the following two indicators in the second standard of the NETS-T. The second standard to design and develop digital-age learning experiences and assessments, indicators (a) and (d) are my focus for this challenge. My GAME plan is listed below in a bulleted form yet I struggle with how to evaluate myself.

My goal, the actions I plan to take and my monitoring flows through fairly simple however, I am not sure if I am creating an evaluative system that is concrete enough to hold myself to an honest evaluation system. I would love to get everyone’s feedback and suggestions.

Indicator (a) states that teacher can: "design or adapt relevant learning experiences that incorporate digital tools and resources to promote student learning and creativity" ( NETS-T, 2010).

South Carolina adopted new textbooks this year so therefore we adjusted our curriculum to this new textbook. Over the summer our district had a team develop the pacing guide and curriculum guide for each course this year. Working as a team we had colleagues divide up the lessons and plan out each chapter and the assessments to use this year and then we evaluate the plans and assessments after we had worked through the chapter. These plans have been rather generic and very textbook driven; even though we had successful activities from the past that we incorporated we have not branched out as a department and looked for new and creative ways to introduce these concepts. I am certain that the skills required for this indicator can definitely be strengthened and my plan is as follows.

• Goal: to create and carry out one new activity or lesson that incorporates technology for each unit for the remainder of the year. Specifically focusing on areas that I have not attempted to use before.
  
• Actions: As each unit is shared with the members of the department I will look over all of the lessons, incorporate any plans I currently have in my files to include and modify any that can have technology easily integrated. Then choose an indicator or concept that does not have an interactive activity and create a technology enriched activity or lesson. I would like to try to use a variety of resources too but will not limit my creativity at this stage if an activity involves a wiki in two consecutive units. I would like to have one experience with digital storytelling, web conferencing and increasing experience with simulation software (Cennamo, et al., 2009)
  
• Monitor: I will be responsible to myself only for this but will make sure I keep track and look for concrete plans that I have tried and evaluated and more importantly reflected upon. I need to be self directed and motivated to assure that I grow as an educator and continue to provide optimum learning activities for my students. Would it be realistic here to include a checklist or rubric for myself? Would I use it and would it help be remain on task and accountable to myself? I know the text suggests this but I wonder would this just be one more thing I have to keep up with and make the process become a hassle.
  
• Evaluate: As with monitoring, I will be responsible for evaluating any new activities and lessons. My focus will be on student engagement, and success based on course assessments. I will also be noting whether I thought this activity was better than prior attempts, trying to be honest regarding time and energy exerted in relation to academic growth achieved. I want to assure that I am not blinded by my desire to involve technology because sometimes first attempts do not reach the goals you originally hope and adjustments could be very beneficial. I must be willing to admit what did not make improvements as well as what did.
  

Finally and most importantly, I feel, I need to share all of my results with colleagues. I think too much energy is spent by too many people recreating similar things. We need to be willing to learn from each other and improve on everyone’s attempts and experiences. That creates a truly successful learning environment as Ertmer stated in the video, is one of the four main things needed for teachers to learn and grow (Laureate Education Inc., 2009).


The second indicator I would like to work towards developing is (d) "to 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" (NETS-T, 2010).

Our district has been focusing on assessments both formative and summative. We are planning to move towards quarterly summative assessments but my district coordinator is concerned with our daily formative assessments. His goal is to get us to be focused more on the indicators and our daily assessments and for us to use these assessments to form our lesson plans. More specifically he is interested in us building a database of appropriate assessment questions and a variety of ways to carry out assessments. Using technology would greatly improve our assessment databases and offer us assistance as we try to differentiate instruction and assessment for students at their individual level.

• Goal: To use technology and innovative ways to assess curriculum standards on an individualized basis. We just purchased USATESTPREP.com and I plan to create several online standards based assessments that the students can take independently. Based on their results I can direct the students to an individualized plan. I should also have this ability through our united streaming account but I need to focus on learning one first. Once I am confident and comfortable with the USATESTPREP.com I can move on to another site.

• Action: Create one appropriate assessment to use on USATESTPREP.com for each of South Carolina standards, making sure there were questions at least two questions for each indicator.

• Monitor: As a self directed goal, monitoring my own success will be my own responsibility, so it is important that I have a concrete plan that can be measured easily. I will need to give myself deadlines so I have the assessments available in a timely manner for the students to use. Again a simple check list should work here to help keep me on task and accountable.

• Evaluate: I will be using questions from our district assessment database or submitting my new assessment questions to the database, so I will know if my assessment questions are appropriate. To evaluate the success of the use of technology to administer, score and record these assessments I will be looking at the data offered from the site. I would like to see that my students are completing the assessments and the suggested activities to improve. I want to record the data of in class time and out of class time that students are participating. IF these assessments and activities are being used outside of classroom time, I feel results can only improve. I would like to see the students make an improvement in all standards areas and improve to a better than 80% accuracy rate from the pre-test to the post-test. I have struggled with this percentage. Every time we have to put a goal for our evaluation program we are always instructed to put 80% but I am not sure if that is acceptable or over the top expectations. However when I bring this up to my administration they are not concerned and recommend leaving the 80%. My concern is, if I have a history of having better than 80% improvement and success rate why would I settle for this percentage now? I would love to here some concrete measureable numbers that you have used in the past to compare this data to or hold myself accountable to.

Today teachers have an important role but must realize that our position of instructor has been modified more to a facilitator over the past decade and we must learn new skills and techniques to carry this position out successfully. Most of the time this has to be done independently and on our own time so we must have a plan and the acronym GAME (Cennamo, et al., 2009) provides an excellent model to follow and hold ourselves accountable in this self directed learning environment.

References:

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

Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (2009). 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.