Week 5 GAME Plan Update

There has been little progress in reaching my GAME plan on the school front, however, I have seen some improvements with my students and technology. I have mostly completed research throughout the last week in order to find new approaches/ideas to incorporate technology into my school.  

Students completed their choice Dr. Seuss projects and they will begin presenting them on Friday.  Students were very successful with creating projects in Power Point and were very creative in what they produced.  I had some students create poems, others songs, and still others wrote their own Dr. Seuss story.  One group created a Power Point birthday card for Dr. Seuss including a poem and then added their voices using VoiceThread.  While, I have not been able to convince administration to use more technology, I am trying to introduce many new ideas and strategies to my students in the form of technology.

I have also begun to discuss possible PBL’s to complete at the end of the school year.  The Reading teacher and I have been bouncing ideas off of one another and I believe we have created one great idea for a PBL and an exciting project to use technology with.  Maybe input from you all will lead us in the right direction.  The first incorporates reading, writing, and social studies.  The project will explain that all social studies books have vanished and it is up to the students to create instructional materials for teachers to use to instruct history.  Students will need to choose an event from the 21st century, research the event, create a product, and present it to classmates.  This project will have students practice research, a task we have already done, and then apply that information to a final product.  The second incorporate math, reading, writing, geography, and possibly science.  We will ask students to choose any place in the world to visit.  After researching the place, hotel, flight, geography, climate, etc., students will need to create a brochure persuading students come visit their destination site.

As for the latest update with administration- no such luck.  The G&T teacher and I have sat down to have our initial conversation about making progress in the world of technology.  When I discussed some of the many ideas, materials, programs, etc. I have learned throughout this course, she was just as eager as I am to implement them within our school.  I have started to think of ways to communicate with the community after viewing the video in this week’s resources.  I thoroughly enjoyed hearing about Chan Gray’s third grade class, in which students chose an organization to donate to and then had to retail shop for materials needed.  Each year our school chooses organizations to donate to and we collect materials.  I liked the idea of asking parents to contribute money and then my class can shop online to find the most materials for the least amount of money. The only way in which I can communicate with the community is by sending out a flyer.  As you can imagine, most flyers do not make it into the hands of a guardian once my students receive them.  With an interactive school site, I would be able to relay this information directly to parents, explain what is going on in the classroom, respond to any questions, and visually show parents the work the students are completing.  I plan to use this activity when I approach administration during the summer.

Laureate Education, Inc. (Producer). (2010). Spotlight on technology: problem-based learning [Webcast]. Integrating technology across the content area. Baltimore, MD: Author.