Reflection - GAME plan

The GAME plan that I developed at the beginning of this course has been helpful in making me realize some important factors I need to change in my teaching. When I developed my GAME plan, I set my goals on improving and increasing the amount of creativity that students will be encouraged to use in their learning. As I have stated before, I truly believe that students must learn to take existing knowledge and leverage it in a creative or ingenious way in order to be successful in the future. By providing opportunities in school for students to come up with creative solutions to problems, I can help them become comfortable in this process.

Problem based learning (PBL) is a great tool for getting students to think creatively. It has all of the necessary elements for students to be engaged in their learning. When students work on real world problems in a collaborative way and then create solutions to the problems and work to implement them, they are really practicing many critical skills that they will need in the future. I will use the PBL process in my classes next year to help my students learn all of these critical skills. This will be a major part of my action plan for the future.

As part of the PBL process, I will also work to have my students do more collaboration when working on problems. This collaboration will take the form of local collaboration within their student groups, as well as distance collaboration with peers from around the country and world. Although I have never done any online collaboration with my students before, I am more confident now that I have found some resources during this class.

Teaching students to be creative involves reducing some of the structure in the classroom. If we truly want students to come up with creative solutions to problems, then we need to let go of the traditional way of teaching where the teacher knows where the project is heading and simply guides the students to “the answer”. As a teacher, this will perhaps be the most difficult aspect of teaching creativity. The key will be providing the right amount of structure so that students understand their task, but allowing them the freedom to follow their own path towards the solutions to problems. This balance between structure and freedom may take some time to get right, but once it is found I believe it will be the key to supporting students in learning critical thinking and creativity skills.

My immediate plans to implement my GAME plan are to become more familiar with some of the social networking program we looked at during this class so I will be able to help my students with online collaboration with their peers. This will be an interesting challenge for me and I look forward to using some of the sites in the fall.

I am glad I have had the opportunity to develop and begin to implement this GAME plan during this course. With the plan in actions in place, I need to continually monitor my progress and evaluate the effectiveness of the plan with respect to improving critical thinking and creativity with my students.

Social Networking

In my original GAME plan, I set goals to increase the amount of creativity and innovation that my students are required to use in their projects. In last week's part of the problem based learning unit I described how I wanted to utilize a social networking site like NING to help the students collaborate with other students from around the country. Collaboration can be such an important part of teaching students to be creative because they can see how other people have worked to solve similar problems that they are facing. It forces students to think "outside the box" and I believe this is a critical skill they need. During the remainder of the summer I plan on spending some time learning more about NING and Moodle so I can use them with my classes next year for collaboration.

PBL and Social Networking

I am excited about using problem based learning ((PBL) projects with my classes when we start up in the fall. One of my original goals was to promote creative thinking and inventiveness and I think that PBL can be a great way to achieve this. Over the summer I will have some time to think of some more local problems that we can use to work on solutions.

I really like the collaborative piece in the problem based learning. I can start by having students work in groups to discuss and analyze a problem and then work together to develop potential solutions. I will be able to use technology tools to further allow students to then collaborate with other students from around the world. For example, once they develop their potential solutions to the problem they can get online to see if others have experienced similar problems in their communities and how they have solved their problems. Students can solicit feedback on their problem and solutions and gather information from different areas of the country and world. This will give the students not only information on the problem at hand, but also different perspectives of problems from different areas of the world. I am excited to try this out with my Internet Skills class this fall.

My next step is to familiarize myself with some of the social networking tools available to use and to start finding different groups that my class might be able to collaborate with. I have set up a Ning account and plan on checking it out this week.

Chris Lorenz-

GAME plan - update

This week we had a technology training conference in my district. It was a two day conference with national speakers and local presenters. It was a lot of good information and training but at the end I was ready to be done for awhile.

Right now, the progress on my goals will be in deciding how I can best utilize the technology and other tools I am learning about. I am fortunate that I have attended the district conference, I will be attending the ISTE conference in Denver later this month, and I am taking these courses through Walden. I have three sources from which to draw from. Certainly I cannot take everything I learn and implement it into my classes, so now the challenge is to choose what works best for the classes and students I will be teaching.

Summer is a great time to try new things and get a new perspective on things without the daily distractions that we deal with during the school year. My plan right now is to take several new ideas into next year and implement them with my classes.

Chris Lorenz