Monitoring the Process

This week in my current course, I am taking a look back at the GAME plan process thus far.  After being a part of it for three week and some change, I can say that I am making some progress in the goals I set for myself.  Specifically, I am showing growth in the area of modeling digital age work with the students.  The other goal I set for myself was to create more digital age learning experiences and assessments.  

The first question posed to me this week asked whether I was finding the information and resources I need to reach my goals.  To that, I say absolutely.  When I chose both of the goals, in the back of my mind I kept the idea of basing both around taking advantage of the learning tool MOODLE.  This has been very successful with this so far.  Last year, I was able to take a quick crash course on the use of the tool, and I got the basics down.  This year, I have re-thrust myself back into learning more about it.  In the past, I have found the best way I learn any new tools or methods is to just jump into them.  Two weeks ago I told my students that I was in the midst of moving more of our classroom online.  Within a few days, we were doing our book discussion wall online in a forum.  We immediately included our reading discussions in the same way.  The students now know that when we have a warm up question that they log in to MOODLE and hit up the discussion board.  A simple search for “MOODLE tips” on Google opens a wealth of information to be used to reach my goals.  The one resource that I wanted to make use of was a course offered by our ISD on MOODLE.  I had signed up for it, not even realizing that it fell on the same day as our parent/teacher conferences.  So that one fell by the wayside, but I am keeping an eye out for it to be offered again.

The second question asked if I needed to modify my action plan.  So far, nothing has come up to throw a major wrench in the process.  I think the one bump in the road was the scheduling mishap for the MOODLE course.  However, like I mentioned, there is a wealth of knowledge available for free online.

So far, I have learned that I am truly enjoying this shift to a more heavy focus on the use of technology.  The students have really taken to the increase in technology, and it is much nicer to walk into a classroom where the students are asking to use new tools and really desire to take part in the learning.  It makes my job more enjoyable.  I am becoming much more proficient in using MOODLE with the students.  Every day I find myself on there, poking around, trying to find new ways to present information to the students, and new tools to help with their learning.  For instance, on the page, as I worked out some things for our upcoming unit, I posted some assignments as well as some youtube videos for enrichment purposes.  This process has been much less painful than I expected, and I think it may be just that I was marginally out of practice with webpage creation technology.  

As far as new questions arising, I think there is only one.  I keep asking myself, how can I make this better?  I want to know how I can continue to model digital age learning and be even more effective.  One thing I am trying to work on is how to present assignment in an online format.  A forum is a great tool, but when it comes to a room full of students, you know you will always have the ones who wait, look at other answers, and then copy.  It is a wonderful tool when opening things up for discussion though.