Week 7 Reflection
Throughout this course, I was able to generate two main goals that I wanted to accomplish as an educator. I followed the steps of the GAME plan and was able to accomplish those goals while helping my students develop essential 21st century skills. I was also able to promote self-directed learning skills by giving my students an authentic learning opportunity where they were able to put themselves in the place of a scientist and investigate an environmental problem.
GAME Plan:
Just to review, my two goals included:
1. Work together with my students to learn new technology that can be used in the classroom.
2. Alter my lessons to best fit the needs of my students.
After taking action to meet goal #1, it was amazing to see how much the students and I were able to learn. Not only did we learn how to use the new lab probes, but the students were able to learn collaboration, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills. New (2005) stated that teachers should not spend a lot of time teaching technology, you should learn as you go, and this is exactly what I did with my students to accomplish this goal. I gave the student the equipment, and they learned how it worked by reading the manual and trial and error. Some students even experimented and found additional uses for the probes. To be honest, I was hesitant to do an activity like this, where the students were basically on their own to learn how to use a very expensive piece of lab equipment, but I let go of my control, and the result was highly beneficial. Since then, I have used this strategy with my students to explore the use of several other probes that I have never used before. I also learned that I can trust my students to stay on task and work together as a lab team to solve a problem. Learning together with students is a very worthwhile and rewarding experience and I plan to continue doing this in the future.
If I were to revise my plan based on my progress of this first goal, I would start the process of learning with my students at the very beginning of the school year. By doing this, students will become used to this way of learning early on in the year. I might also have the students do a mini-presentation in the front of the class and teach their peers one or two things about the new technology. After seeing how well this strategy works, my only regret is that I only got to use it towards the middle of the year.
Goal #2 Reflection:
After taking action to meet goal #2, I found that assigning the students roles during a group activity is a good strategy to give the students a few different options to do well with the activity (Cennamo, Ross, & Ertmer, 2009). While completing the group activities to accomplish this goal, I ran into the problem of group members not getting along with each other. Before we started our next group activity I decided to have a little discussion with my classes about working together as a team and working through some differences they may have. I meant for it to be a few minute discussion, but then it ended up being a whole class discussion that took an entire class period. Students were sharing their thoughts and ideas about how to work through problems and the importance of team work. Although this took up an entire period, it was probably one of the best class discussions that any of my students have ever had. After the discussion, the next group activity went a lot smoother. After reflecting on this event, I decided to start the year off with a similar group discussion every year. If students set their own guidelines for group work at the beginning of the year, there might only be some small issues, instead of screaming matches during a group activity.
I really like how assigning roles to students worked during a group activity, and the students seemed to like it as well. Cennamo, Ross, & Ertmer (2009) stated that when roles are assigned to students during a group activity, that activity is more “equitable and productive”, and this is exactly what I saw in my classroom (p. 90). I plan on adding a reflection component where the students reflect on how their group members worked together throughout the activity (Cennamo, Ross, & Ertmer, 2009). I then plan on having the students share the reflection with the other members. Of course the students need to understand that this needs to be done in a respectable manner, but I think it can teach the students how to collaboratively work as a group to accomplish a task.
Unit Plan Reflection:
After taking this course, I plan on integrating more inquiry and problem-based learning activities in my classroom. I have actually seen a great improvement in students work and attitude after doing my Chesapeake Bay unit plan. There are many areas where I can incorporate problem-based learning through lab experiments. I used this unit plan as a type of trial to see how the students would do throughout the process. I could not be more pleased at the results. I shared my plan and the benefits of these types of lessons with my colleagues and encouraged them to use them in their own classroom. I am in the process of working with our social studies teacher to do a collaborative project with her classes and mine. I showed the social studies teacher some examples of the digital stories the students made and she was absolutely amazed and asked me to show her how to make them. We plan on having our students work together and create a digital story on a topic related to debates and controversial science topics. This idea of incorporating science and social studies topics, while using technology, will serve as an excellent example of a holistic learning activity where students will be able to see the connections between different content areas (Cennamo, Ross, & Ertmer, 2009).
The administration at our school recently asked the faculty to start incorporating more current events related to our content area into our lessons. Because state testing is coming up soon, I am running low on time and needed to find a way to incorporate current events without taking a lot of class time to do so. I decided to have one of my tech savvy students set up a class blog where students can discuss current events outside of school. Richardson (2010) stated that “blogs can enhance and deepen learning” (p. 20). I plan on giving students a weekly topic every Monday related to a current event in science and have them discuss the current event throughout the week. I would set up the guidelines similar to how we conduct discussions during this course. Students will need to post an initial response early in the week, and then respond to their peers throughout the rest of the week. Through blogging, students will be able to read and respond to the posts more critically and learn to write more clearly (Richardson, 2010). I took a poll to see if students would be interested and the students were excited to use a blog for class.
In conclusion, the skills and strategies that I learned by taking this course, serve as an invaluable resource. Not only did my students become better self-directed learners, but I was able to grow as a lifelong learner. My students learned essential 21st century skills such as collaboration, problem-solving, creative and critical thinking skills. These are skills that students can apply to many different situations throughout their lifetime (Eagleton & Dobler, 2007). I can be confident that when my students leave my class that they will take these skills with them to their high school and college course, and eventually to a rewarding professional career.
Kayla Shandra
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
.
Eagleton, M. B., & Dobler, E. (2007). Reading the web: Strategies for Internet inquiry. New York, NY: The Guilford Press.
New, J. (2005, December 2). How to use digital storytelling in your classroom. Retrieved from the Edutopic website: http://www.edutopia.org/use-digital-storytelling-classroom.
Richardson, W. (2010) Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.
No comments:
Post a Comment