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.