Thursday, April 8, 2010

Revising My GAME Plan

After sitting down and actually completing The Outsiders WebQuest lesson myself, I realized that I needed to make changes with the handout that I created for my students. The handout had too much busy work that it took away from being able to browse and enjoy the WebQuest. I feel that if a lesson involves teaching students a new tool to use they need time to be able to browse, become familiar with it, and enjoy it. I went back and created a completely different handout with the same objective of allowing them to be able to become familiar with the time era of when The Outsiders takes place. I allow them more choice with guidance now. I also added classtime for them to reflect and discuss and share what they discovered and what they liked or did not like about the activity. I realized that this project will take two days to complete, something I was not sure of yet. Overall I feel pretty good about carrying out this activity and cannot wait to use it next year with my students.
Furthermore there is so much more that I still need to learn when it comes to WebQuests. One goal that I have is to actually create my own with the help of our applied technology teacher (NETS-T standard 1). I have very limited time and realize that this may take a while, but learning how to actually create one can have a huge impact when teaching. I also would like to find more teachers that have used this type of activity in their lessons and become familiar with how they used them as a learning experience. I will research this by asking teachers within my own building and research the Internet (NETS-T standard 5). Based on the NETS-T, I still have many goals for incorporating technology into my classroom by adding more NETS- T standards into my teaching. For example, I plan on creating a digital story telling lesson for next year too (NETS-T standard 2).
There is so much that technology has to offer for the classroom, and since it is constantly changing, I will learn and teach new technology to my students as often as possible. I will provide many different forms of formative and summative assessments that are aligned with content and technology standards and use resulting data to inform learning and teaching. I will also commit myself to evaluate and reflect on current research and professional practice on a regular basis. By committing to doing all of the above this will help improve my learning and contribute to completing some of my goals for integrating technology into my classroom.

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4 comments:

  1. Hi Joy,
    Your Outsiders Webquest sounds wonderful. That is such a great book with so much potential discussion! It would probably also be a great book to blog about if you asked the real pointed questions. I have done a few Webquests with my students. They've been pretty basic and they love them. I've found the same thing as you did at times. Sometimes they are way more complicated than you are looking for. I would love to find the time to create my own Webquests. I can guarantee it won't be this school year. Maybe summer....
    Tonya

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  2. Joy and Tonya,

    It looks like summer is going to be a very busy time! I have not used WebQuests very often but like you Tonya I woud like to create some of my own. Joy, your work with WebQuests so far is inspirational, thank you!

    Minty

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  3. Joy,

    Sounds like your Webquests are working out well. I will have to explore it more for my particular classroom and see how I can make it work.

    Your tips about the handout are important, keep the busy work down and help them learn by exploring.

    Great ideas.

    Take care

    Rob Zingg

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  4. Thanks for all your comments. I am truly learning so much and honestly cannot keep up with all the wonderful tools we have learned in this program. I hope to integrate technology much more in my classrooms even if it is a small lesson such as The Outsiders WebQuest.

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