Week 8 – Reflections

Posted by: Stephanie on: December 23, 2009

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• Reflect on the GAME plan you developed and followed throughout the course.  Summarize any new learning that resulted from your following your GAME plan and explain what impact your new learning will have on your instructional practice.

I enjoyed coming up with a game plan and going through the steps of GAME. It is nice to set goals and take the time to plan and work on them and evaluate the progress of achieving these goals. Even if not every goal is achieved, going through the process is nice. It is reassuring to structure the whole goal-achieving process as I am pretty unorganized!

I think that any sort of planning like this will have a positive impact on teaching. Setting goals, working toward them and evaulating your progress is how we become better teachers. I think teachers do this naturally, but again, the GAME plan just organizes the process into a clean-cut method of doing so. It is the evaluating that truly impacts teaching. If a lesson does not go well, you need to evaluate it and modify it so that it goes better the next time. Continuing to do failed lessons with students does not make for a good teacher! Workign through ineffective lessons and making them work better in the future is how to become a better and more effective teacher. The “E” in GAME plan, evaluate, it what helps teachers achieve this.

• Describe any immediate adjustments you will make to your instructional practice regarding technology integration in your content area(s) as a result of your learning from this course.

One adjustment that I need to make to my teaching is to always make sure I have a back up plan. Even the lesson plan template available with our textbook has a section for back up plans for a lesson. This is extremely important because as wonderful as technology can be, it can easily go wrong. In general technology is readily available, but the internet connection could go down, websites could be down or blocked or, like what happened at my school this semester, the entire school server could crash and there is nothing available on any of the computers in the building.

It is common sense for teachers to have back up plans, but honestly the need to use them does not arrive too often and it is something that I have slacked on since becoming a teacher. When creating lessons for this course where I had to come up with a back-up plan, it was a relief to know that I would be prepared should something go wrong. The peace of mind from knowing I have a back-up plan is worth the little bit of extra time and work.