As I reflect upon this course, I am excited to say that I am ready to go forth and use my new knowledge in the classroom setting. Throughout this course, we as students have been required to develop our own GAME plan, which involved setting GOALS, taking ACTION, to meet those goals, MONITORING progress towards our achievement of those goals, and EVALUATING whether our goals were reached (Cennamo, Ertmer, & Ross, 2009, p. 3). My original goals involved creating an interactive website for my classroom and exploring current research to expand my usage of the MIMIO in my classroom. By taking action I found that my school offers teachers the ability to host their own site through the school's website and that I could, with the help of tech personnel, turn it into the collaborative site that is part of my original GOAL. As the school year has not started yet, I have not been in contact with my tech guy, so I will continue my part of the GAME plan by monitoring and evaluating this goal far beyond this course, throughout the school year. My second goal is coming along great. My classmates suggested several websites to use to interact with other teachers who use MIMIOs or Smart Boards so that we can trade ideas. I have found these sights extremely helpful and I plan on using them throughout the school year. This course has also given me ideas to consider to improve my use of the MIMIO. Recently, we delved into the topic of digital story-telling and learned that the use of digital story-telling can incorporate art and creativity, strengthen visual literacy, and enrich content area knowledge all while allowing the students to share their ideas with a wider audience(Laureate Education Inc., 2011). It is my plan to have my students create digital stories and present them on the MIMIO, as well as upload them to the class website so that their parents have the opportunity to view their project as well.
This course has been very beneficial regarding changes that I plan to make to my instruction this upcoming school year. I plan on creating a classroom that focuses on creating independent learners where students learn the ability to solve a problem by using the resources available to them as opposed to regurgitating what their notes say. I look forward to working with my co-teacher to create a global learning project in our sixth grade math class. Our plan is to choose a country to collaborate with our students from the website Epals.com. From there we would like to call the project, "Math Around the World". We want to be able to give students from both classrooms the same problem and then analyze how each student chooses to solve the problem. We would like the students to collaborate using a WIKI as opposed to a more open social networking tool since our students are only 11. Overall, this course has created a fire in me that makes me excited to begin the new school year and see what my students have in store for me!
Resources:
Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (2011). Digital story-telling . [Webcast]. Integrating technology across the content areas. Baltimore, MD: Author.
Cennamo, K., Ross, J., & Ertmer, P. (2010). Technology integration for meaningful classroom use: A standards-based approach. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.
