Reflection

When I developed my GAME plan at the beginning of this course, I had two different goals. My first goal was to develop more personalized learning activities to address the needs and interests of various types of learners. Developing lesson plans for this course has aided me in accomplishing this goal. When creating my lessons, I truly considered the various types of learners I have in my classroom. With them in mind, I tried to develop activities that would appeal to many different types of learners. My lessons allowed for great creativity, and each of them required students to create a product to show their learning. I was also careful to consider the needs of students of varying ability levels, and allowed for accommodations accordingly. As I move forward, I will continue to put careful thought and consideration into developing personalized learning activity for the diverse students I have in my classroom.

Using technology more effectively to communicate with parents and students next school year was the second goal I created. I began working towards this goal at the end of the school year with my grade-level team. Together, we decided to obtain all parent e-mail addresses and develop a weekly team newsletter to increase communication with parents. As a whole, it does not seem that my team is ready to develop a website in addition to the newsletter. Therefore, I am going to make it a personal goal to create and maintain a classroom website with information about my class. I would like to involve my students in the updating of this website as well, and because I will be teaching language arts this coming school year, my idea is for them to participating in writing updates about our classroom to be posted to the website.

I came away from this course with new ideas about how to incorporate problem-based learning, online collaboration, and digital storytelling into my classroom. This course helped me realize that these instructional methods fit very easily into the content I teach. Furthermore, authentic learning strategies in social studies “provide opportunities to foster creative thinking skills in the social studies classroom” (Cennamo, Ross, & Ertmer, 2009, p. 295). Many of the lessons included activities that could have been done without technology, but were enhanced through the inclusion of technology and encouraged student creativity. For me, the easiest way to plan these lessons is to determine the content I need to teach and then see how I can incorporate technology to make my lessons better and more engaging for my students. In social studies, technology allows students access to materials they otherwise might not have access to, which plays a vital role in facilitating real-world connections for students in social studies (Cennamo, Ross, & Ertmer, 2009).

Resources:

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.