In setting up my GAME Plan I followed the National Educational Technology Standards (NETS-T) and Performance Indicators. The Goals of my GAME Plan were to facilitate and inspire student learning and to design and develop digital age learning experiences for my students.
While the project-based learning experiences I have been facilitating for my 12th grade science students have been engaging, I cannot say that they have been inspiring. For over half my students, I see creativity and ingenuity in the projects they create, but actually little science learning. Incomplete explanation or information is common in a project - even though the photos and diagrams they have found online are beautiful. Formative assessment to give students the opportunity to correct errors gave me mixed results. Some students simply weren't curious (or inspired) enough about the topic of their own choosing to pursue more than a superficial understanding and correct their errors. But I am undaunted, I will set better parameters for projects...hand out rubrics earlier in the assignment period and become more expert in the Web 2.0tools necessary to design better digital learning experiences.
I very much feel as if I have to grow into the connectivity available on the web. I would love to be involved in connecting my classroom to other cultures, to experts, and to other projects around the world but do not have the time yet to find the resources. I will seek out epals and contacts in the online community when I get some free time to explore eduwiki.us.
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Christine
ReplyDeleteI can resonate with your sentiments concerning your students performance. I too have experienced those same feelings as I attempted to introduce these new PBL learning activities and strategies to the students. I believe however that the time factor for me to set these activities up were too short as I did the research and modifications during the school semester, so not enough care I think was put into my set up and as such the students may not have been given the directions as clearly as it could have been.
I am also not very proficient with a lot of the technologies and my ineptness may be a factor in the students response.
With summer and all this learning I know that we will do a lot better in our planning and execution of the PBL strategies that we are so eager to impart to our students.
Good luck with your plans and be encouraged that what you are experiencing is not unique but that your lessons can be improved and that student reaction will also improve.
You are so right. Learning from experience, I think I can improve the parameters and design of the collaborative projects to make them more challenging and also more REAL. For 12th graders, the less like school, the better.
ReplyDeleteI am only substitute teaching right now, so I have not been able to implement my GAME plan yet. Have you already tried to incorporate this in your class, or is this a future goal?
ReplyDeleteI have been implementing online learning, voicethreads, and computer based projects all year. It is a lot of work to implement new ideas as you go but the experience is so valuable. Can't wait for time off to develop a repertoire so to speak.
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