By developing my own GAME plan through self reflection I targeted specific areas of my teaching that I wanted to improve, this process allowed me to grow in areas that I feel are extremely important when teaching in the 21st century. My GAME plan forced me to focus on National Education Standards for teacher (NETS-T) which impacts my approach to teaching, development of lesson plans and strategies when teaching. I have learned how to keep my digital information updated more frequently and cited with the creator’s information. I have also learned how to plan and incorporate lessons that allow my students to have more choice in their learning as they use technology. This will encourage engagement and the pursuing of personal interests within my lessons; it allows the students to take more ownership for their individual learning. I think the process of creating a GAME plan enabled me to pursue the changes I wanted to make after reflecting on my teaching. This is something I can easily implement with my students as well. I have them reflect on their performance in class frequently and creating a GAME plan is taking those reflections a step further by laying out a plan to improve as a learner or teacher.
The technology we used throughout this course has inspired me to implement the usage of wikis and digital stories on more of a regular unit basis. I had created my own digital stories when going through my undergraduate studies, but I had forgotten about them until I took this course. They were not called digital stories when I was making them, but we used Windows Movie Maker or a program very similar. I remember them being some of my favorite projects. I know these types of projects truly spark the students’ interests and motivate them to do well on their final assessment. If I can plan a way to make computer access more available for my students and not lose too much physical activity time, I would like to incorporate digital stories in each quarter of the year. Another type of lesson I plan on following through on is my pursuit of changing school lunches. The problem-based learning assignment motivated me to finally start a project that focuses on the unhealthy choices students have during school lunches. I plan to have more projects like the one I have all ready created and eventually have the students research how we can actually get the school district to change the food and drinks available for students at school. We can incorporate social networks and other forms of online collaboration to gain insight from schools that have all ready addressed this problem and have converted their school to having healthy and more nutritious options during lunch.
I feel passionate about the lessons I have created during this course and the growth I have made as a teacher teaching towards 21st century skills is apparent to me. I feel more confident and eager to continue to learn 21st century skills and ways to implement them into my classroom. In the past I felt the challenges of incorporate lessons that strongly focused on technology skills could be too difficult when teaching physical education classes, but I have proven to myself they are not.
David
