Reflection - GAME Plan

As my Integrating Technology Across Content Area course comes to a close, I find myself pleasantly surprised at how much I learned in the course. I must admit when I first started the class I didn’t really believe I would learn much more than I already had regarding the integration of technology; however, while much of the technology applications I had already been familiar with or used before, I found myself viewing this technology in a whole new way. I looked at the utilization of different applications in a whole new light and found myself once again excited about its use in my classroom. The feeling was similar to that feeling I got my first year of teaching. It was quite refreshing. I think my students felt it as well, and they responded accordingly.

While I had used a blog earlier in the year, after this course, I started to utilize it more as a means of communication and a way for students to connect their thoughts through other means that paper and pen. This was refreshing for my students. I also begin to connect with parents and other teachers more often through the use of my school website, Twitter, and email. The parents were grateful for the additional connection to their child because as they and I have found, middle schoolers tend to begin to try and make their statement of independence at this point, especially in the 8th grade, and most parents are left feeling as if they have no idea what is going on in their child’s education.
One of the issues I will have to address more carefully in the future is the amount of knowledge my students come into the assignment with. To be more specific – how much of the technology do my students understand and are able to use? A few of the technology projects I added seemed to be simple – or should have been – but I quickly realized I overestimated what my students understood about certain aspects of the application. Even a simple word document and altering formatting for a Facebook page template took on a whole new dimension when I realized my students were aware of inserting text boxes and formatting graphs and tables. The lesson took much longer than I had anticipated and was nearly as neat looking as I would have hoped for, but I am able to say that those students who finally figured it out were very excited about their final project and learned more about characterization through a Facebook character page than they would have through a test.

I look forward to many more exciting uses of technology integration in the classroom as well as more engaging and thoughtful lessons for my students to connect to the standards as provided by our state.