The GAME plan process has helped me
focus my learning and planning by keeping two very targeted ideas in mind –
teaching my students to use technology to investigate and solve problems and
using technology to differentiate my instruction and assessment (ISTE, 2008). It
has also presented me with some challenges to overcome including learning the
technology myself and staying focused on content learning.
As I explore the opportunities for
implementing problem based learning in my classroom, I go through a cycle of
emotions and thoughts that include excitement, panic, frustration, and
uncertainty. I know that I will need to provide my students with significant
scaffolds to support their learning because of the shift in focus to
student-centered, student-driven learning (Ertmer and Simons, 2006). The instruction
my students will need includes the use of the technology tools and the
independence needed to complete a PBL lesson. I become frustrated by the amount
of content and required reading the school district requires which limits time
for learning other important skills. The uncertainty of the support of my
administration and colleagues is becoming less of a concern. As I have started
to work on the implementation of technology use in my teaching, my content team
has become increasingly supportive and invested in these same goals. Teachers
from other content areas have also reached out in the interest of using the same
technology tool across content areas, thereby allowing for the instruction to
be shared between us. My administration is also supportive as they see the
immediate effect of increased engagement and are willing to give me some leeway
in order to see if there is also a long term impact on student achievement.
I have already begun implementing
the use of technology for differentiation and am finding great success. While
many of these are teacher created and only accessed by students for listening/viewing
purposes, the impact is already apparent and I feel like I am able to provide
an exponentially increased level of support to my students digitally. While I
would like students to eventually use the technology tools themselves, I am at
least exposing them to the tools while using the tools to scaffold and differentiate
my instruction.
The adjustment that I have already
made and will need to stick with is limiting the number of technology tools
that I will use. In order to ensure that my students are mastering content and
using technology in meaningful ways, I must limit the amount of time used for
teaching the technology and increase the opportunity for the technology to be
fully integrated in the classroom, not just a novelty (Ertmer and Simons,
2006). While participating in a collaborative planning session recently with
two other teachers, we began exploring the use of Voice Threads in a Functional
Life Skills classroom. We created 5 different Voice Threads that ranged in the
level of student interaction. Two were problem-solving; they presented workplace
problems and asked students to contribute ideas about how to solve the problem.
Two were scaffolds to support students with background information and/or
review as they worked on a series of related tasks. One was a digital
fill-in-the-blank where students with limited writing and physical abilities
could record or type their answers in the voice thread. All this in 2 hours of
planning?!? I am confident that over the next year I will be able to implement
more technology in my own classroom and encourage the use of technology by
others around me.
References
Ertmer, P., & Simons, K. (2006). Jumping the PBL
implementation hurdle: Supporting the efforts of K–1 2 teachers. The Interdisciplinary Journal of
Problem-Based Learning, 1(1), 40–54.
International Society for Technology Integration (2008). National Educational Standards for Teachers. Retrieved May 15, 2013 from http://www.iste.org/docs/pdfs/nets-t-standards.pdf?sfvrsn=2
