A Card Catalog??... Our Students Really Do Have the World at their Fingertips! We MUST adjust!!

What a great course this has been! Not only has this course helped me and my students directly, but my colleagues have been effected by the course and my GAME plan. Although I have not completed my GAME plan (Cennamo, Ross & Ertmer, 2009) , I have made huge gains and more importantly I developed a schedule to follow through on my plan and to use when developing other plans.

I have come out of this class with activities that I created but also many that I have “stolen” from my classmates. I really have had some great groups to work with and I believe I have accumulated some great plans to use directly or as ideas to send me in the right direction.

The key to being successful though is to start small. We need to remember to support each other and make reasonable goals we can be accountable for. Just as we would not expect our students to jump right into multilevel projects without support, teachers should not be expected to do this when incorporating technology. Teachers should however, be required to make an effort and using the GAME plan (Cennamo, et.al, 2009) makes this much more attainable.

Throughout this course I have been reminded that technology can be infused into all subject areas. To often mathematics teachers try to remove any guilt they have about not incorporating technology or other great learning tools because the content is too straight forward and needs to be demonstrated and practiced as it “always” has. We have proven that to be completely false and have learned many great activities and ideas to use specifically in math. It is important for teachers to remember to share and to keep an open mind and most importantly, teachers need to be confident enough to ask for assistance when learning new technologies.

I shared this story within the discussion groups but must repeat it again. My first grade daughter just spoke with an expert on Sea Turtles in California while her class sat comfortably in their South Carolina classroom. Her teacher, a self proclaimed novice with technology, sent a clip of this to the parents via email. We all sat and watched the clip in amazement and were shocked and excited for our children. Our children on the other hand treated it like no big deal – the truth is it really was NO BIG DEAL!

Technology has made these types of activities easy, affordable and efficient. Educators need to catch up and use this technology on a regular basis because the children just expect it. AS I read one of those feel good emails explaining the differences between children of today and the children of 1980, I had to laugh when they commented on televisions with dials and no remotes, phones with busy signals and no caller ID, and email and texting replacing the postal service “snail mail”. Just as our generation did not understand having to walk 5 miles to school, up hill, both ways in the snow, this generation has no clue that a search about past American presidents involved a trip to the library, a card catalog, several large references books that you could not take home and lots and lots of note cards. Our students can research information about any country’s past presidents in seconds and even take virtual tours of the grounds they walked.

Teachers do not have to bring the students the information any more, students have the information and can get it instantly! Our job is to assist with the gathering, screening, editing and presenting of the information to help our students learn how to learn and discover on their own as self directed learners (Cennamo, et.al, 2009). Technology in the classroom is imperative for our students because they are connected to this world outside of the classroom and they need to understand and know how to interact with it!

Good luck to everyone, this has been a great journey with you and I wish you all the best!

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

GAMES for my students

Using the GAME plan is a new name for a very similar technique that teachers have employed for years. Modifying and adjusting our plans and activities was the old term but now it is referred to as a GAME plan requiring a more official acronym but basically meaning the same.
Therefore following through with a GAME plan should not be difficult even for the most OLD SCHOOL teacher and this is refreshing for me as I have many OLD SCHOOL colleagues and I am tired of “fighting” them to get them to do the right thing for their students and themselves. The convenient part for us as teachers when trying to incorporate the NETS-S standards is that the Teachers (NETS-T) standards are similar and can be carried out regardless of the curriculum we teach.

My goal is to have a realistic outlook and start small. The ideas and stories that we saw teachers and students working on in the video clips are experienced people and we should not assume that we can start off just like that.

For example, when planning to introduce photostories, my suggestion or action plan will be to start with some simple photostories of my content and use them in classrooms to introduce a lesson or new concept. This way the students are seeing what am modeling and can have some ideas or examples to follow. I will follow up on my plan by making sure that I begin the photostory process myself with lessons or introductions and break my students in gradually, although in this day, the students would probably prefer not to suffer through my work and hop right on up to the plate and get cracking!

A break from MY BREAK!!!

Being that I am on Spring Break, I have happily put all my goals on hold even though I have to admit this in front of all my classmates. I am enjoying my break and thinking about the work that I have to return to but promised my children breaks are breaks and that is important. Although that is not our lesson this week, I will advise those that do not have children yet that this is a very valuable goal to make for yourself. My first years of teaching I could never imagine being able to be an effective and good teacher and an effective and good mother, I felt I could be great at one or the other but not both. Through the years though I have learned the greatest part of life is being able to balance life and work and in the long run, I think, now, I am the best teacher I have ever been and a self proclaimed best mom in the world!!!!

What I have learned though through looking at the NETS-T standards and NETS-S standards is that we do not do enough in my professional circle to support these. If you are not in a graduate class right now it is not stressed very much. The state has required proficiency tests but I have yet to see anyone suffer a consequence from not meeting this goal, so I wonder how seriously we are trying to achieve these standards. I can say that in South Carolina, I have started to see these standards incorporated into classroom curriculum specifically in elementary and language arts but not really with mathematics yet.

For the next prompt, I AM NOT READY TO SET NEW GOALS!!! I am seriously working towards finding and creating technology based lessons for all of the standards for sixth grade math and now fifth grade math as I may switch to a fifth grade position in an elementary school next year. (Wish me luck, I should be interviewing next week!) I want to finish this and I want to get proficient using the data from USATESTPREP.com to benefit my students. One thing I learned through this process is to not underestimate the importance of a good partner that you can relate to and work well with and one that does not necessarily always agree with you. Having Joanna as my partner these past few weeks has forced me to stay on task and to define some of my objectives for good activities. There have been activities that I thought would be great but after she looked at it, she agreed it looked cool and cute but was not sixth grade standards and not meeting our goal. Your partner needs to be confident to correct and critique you and you do the same, this is how we grow!!!

I hope you all had a break this past month too and if you did you enjoyed it. I am off to watch the dolphins jump in the Gulf of Mexico from a Condo in St. Petersburg, Florida. My heart aches for those of you up North cold enough to get snow this week. More power to you … I can not do the cold!!!