Week 6 Revising my GAME plan

This week we are to look back at our original GAME plans, and revise them. So I looked back at what I have learned so far. My original goals were to become better at facilitating and inspiring student learning experiences and creativity, and to design and develop digital age learning experiences and assessments. The first thing that I did was look at my lessons, and try to develop some new lessons where I could incorporate some digital age learning that would challenge my students creativity. So I began to collaborate with some of my colleagues in my department about what types of problem based learning activities they do in their classes. Some did mock trials, and others explored problems in the community. I then began to look at their lessons, and began to get some ideas of ways to add these lessons into the units that I have already developed. This still was hard since I had never developed these types of activities before. But there are some really creative people in my department, and in a department meeting I asked for help developing the lesson, and I got many ideas from the group that I would not have gotten by myself. This got the ball rolling. I then wanted to design some digital age learning experiences that could go along with either this project, or some of the units that I teach. Some of my colleagues were able to help me with this, but for the most part I had to do the majority of my research on my own. I decided to focus on podcasts and video conferencing/distance learning. Here is where I have to make new goals. I want to begin using podcasts in my class when school starts next year. To have my students use this next year, I will have to teach them the ins and outs of podcasts. I am currently exploring this for myself. After I teach my students how to make and use podcasts, then we can use them with our content. So I must continue to work to be able to teach myself and all my students how to do podcasts. The second thing that I need to do is to continue to try and learn how to use distance learning in my class next year. I have a friend who also teaches history in another high school, and would like to come up with a distance learning activity that we could do with their class. But I am currently not sure how we would do this, let alone have any idea on the lesson or topic of the learning activity. So I will have to talk to my technology department and see what our options are, and try to come up with how we will do the activity. After that is decided, we can begin to work on the lesson itself. Now that I have narrowed down what I have to do, I must continue to work to implement these tools into my classroom this year.