Carrying Out My GAME Plan

Last week, I posted an outline of my GAME plan for personal professional development (Cennamo, Ross, & Ertmer, 2009). To implement my GAME plan in order to realize indicators “c. customize and personalize learning activities to address students’ diverse learning styles, working strategies, and abilities using digital tools and resources” and “d. 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” of the ISTE’s (2008) NETS•S Standard 2, to “design, develop, and evaluate authentic learning experiences and assessments incorporating contemporary tools and resources to maximize content learning in context and to develop the knowledge, skills, and attitudes identified in the NETS•S,” I will need a variety of resources (p. 1). I have been learning a great deal about the software and Web resources available to support this pursuit, but am still not able to provide computer access to every student in my classroom simultaneously. Unfortunately, I only have two computers in my room, my desktop computer and the presentation computer attached to the LCD projector. I also have access to a couple of computer labs in the building, each of which can accommodate about forty percent of my largest class. I could make use of the handheld devices my students carry if they weren’t strictly forbidden by the school system and my school’s “Don’t ask; Don’t tell” policy. Of course, teachers have always been able to find clever ways of working around limited access to materials, such as stations in rotation and small work-groups, and I have become fairly skilled at coordinating this sort of compromise. Having secured access to the necessary hardware, I will need software. Fortunately, the Internet provides free access to nearly infinite resources. But this, in itself, poses a problem.



With so much available, I need to gather information about what resources are appropriate to support my learning and assessment goals and how these can be used. These may take the form of materials specifically designed to support the curriculum I teach, or English instruction, or teaching in general, but it is equally likely that I will find valuable tools among applications never specifically intended for school use, including business, productivity, and entertainment applications. Microsoft Word, for example, has features such as built-in spelling and grammar highlighting and checking, Track Changes, translation, and thesaurus and dictionary features. YouTube, blocked at my school as a time waster and source of prurient content, is also a really valuable resource for instruction in the study of almost anything. Project Gutenberg at http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page provides online versions of public domain texts, many of which are in our curricular canon. The trick is finding the diamonds of useful material in the vast desert of data that is the Internet. To find the best resources and how they can be applied, I can get a great deal of information from coursework and formal professional development, but I can also learn much by consulting with colleagues. I can do this in person, talking to fellow teachers in my building or in professional development meetings, and I can take advantage of the collaborative potential of online tools such as weblogs, listservs, social media, and other Web 2.0 applications (Prensky, 2008). This sort of collaboration is one of the great pleasures of my current approach to personal professional development.


This process started long ago and will continue throughout my career. From the first time I used computer word processing to generate lesson plans and handouts for my students, I was finding ways to exploit technology in the interest of customizing learning experiences to meet their individual learning and assessment proclivities and needs. Back then, I was excited about creating customized graphic organizers with illustrations designed to guide my students’ transactions with assigned texts. As new digital technologies —Windows, Microsoft Word, the Internet, search engines, LCD projectors, PowerPoint, wireless input devices, portable computers with wireless Internet, DVD videos, handheld computers and communication tools, online image searches, streaming video, Web 2.0 tools--have become available and evolved, I have been able to find innovative ways to employ them to enhance the quality of my students’ learning experiences. In recent months, I have begun making more use of free concept mapping software to support collaborative analysis of texts. My students collaborated to construct a class wiki as an artifact of their learning in my AP Language course. I have built rubrics using tables in Word and based on models shared by colleagues on the Internet to support complex assessments of student learning taking many forms based on students’ interests and abilities—including PowerPoint presentations, videos, podcasts, and sophisticated musical productions. For years now, nearly every lesson has included a multimedia presentation in which students engage curricular content through images, audio, video, manipulable text, and a wide variety of note-taking, organization, and collaboration tools. Every day, I find a new way to help my students connect with and apply content in complex ways that reflect their individual learning styles. Since committing to the goals of my GAME plan, I have sought out colleagues and other expert digital technology users, both locally and remotely, to see how current technology is being applied in their classrooms and businesses to meet the diverse needs of learners. I have also benefitted from ideas presented in my coursework, particularly regarding easily accessible, web-based applications and features of productivity software already installed in computers at my school (Cennamo et al., 2009; Laureate Education, Inc., 2009; Prensky, 2008). And I have immediately applied much of what I have learned to improve my students’ learning experience. Just today, I presented my English IV students with an online version of the text they are reading, Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, at http://www.archive.org/details/siddhartha_ap_librivox. I played the first chapter in my classroom, and demonstrated how to download the MP3 chapter files to their digital music players. Yesterday, my AP Language students were sharing their reflections on a chapter in the text to construct collaborative notes in a table on PowerPoint. When a student asked how to spell a word, classmates pointed out the right-click option built into the program.


Although integrating technology into my instruction to meet today’s (and future iterations of) ISTE’s (2008) NETS•S Standards is an ongoing process that I expect to continue throughout my career, I am enjoying every small step.



References

Cennamo, K., Ross, J. & Ertmer, P. (2009). Technology Integration for Meaningful Classroom Use: A Standards-Based Approach. (Laureate Education, Inc., Custom ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.


International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). (2008). NETS for teachers 2008. Retrieved October 20, 2009 from http://www.iste.org/Content/NavigationMenu/NETS/ForTeachers/2008Standards/NETS_for_Teachers_2008.htm


Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (2009). Integrating Technology Across the Content Areas. Baltimore: Author.


Prensky, M. (2008, March). Turning on the lights. Educational Leadership, 65(6), 40-45.