My GAME Plan

In general, I have always felt pretty comfortable using technology as I have grown up using technology my entire life. That being said, however, there is always room for improvement and I aspire to constantly get better at using technologies I am already familiar with and technologies that are new to me as well. When I use technology in the classroom, there are two specific NETS-T Standards that I want to focus on getting better at.

One of these is standard number 3: Model Digital-Age Work and Learning. Like many people, when I find something I like, I have a tendency to stick with that something and use it a majority of the time. I think that over time, I must begin to incorporate multiple technological tools into my teaching to show my students the variety of tools available to them and also in order to model how to use these tools. In addition to modeling the use of specific technologies, I also want to model how to be use information that is found on the internet.

This falls under NETS-S #4: Promote and Model Digital Citizenship and Responsibility. In order to get my students to understand the importance of legal and ethical information use, I must model this in my own classroom and at ALL times. For a lot of teachers (myself included) it is easy to neglect these practices from time to time, especially if something is done in a hurry or time is not a provided luxury. However, it is essential to the development of our students behaviors to model this practice all of the time in our classroom so we 'practice what we preach' so to speak. How can we expect our students to understand and appreciate the importance of referencing sources if we provide information and various media files without the use of any citations what-so-ever. Not only is it unethical and irresponsible, it is creating an atmosphere where these types of things are not appreciated and are therefore likely to be neglected.

In both cases, strengthening my confidence in these two standards comes down to one thing, experience. I feel that if I gain enough practice in both of these standards, I will eventually increase my confidence in providing these two standards to my students. Therefore, I need to ensure that I am constantly staying up-to-date not only with new technologies but also with changes in citation etiquette, as it changes quite often. Essentially, what it comes down to me for me is establishing the effort to increase my proficiency in both of these standards by being a self-motivated learner. By increasing proficiency in these two standards, I will increase my confidence as well which will benefit my classroom greatly in these two areas.

Evaluating my progress on standard #4 is somewhat straight-forward, as I can simply evaluate all of the information that I use in my classroom and ensure that I am always citing these resources properly. I can go back at the end of a unit, or lesson, or even the year to determine whether or not I have accomplished my goal and have lived up to the appropriate standard.

Evaluating standard #3 may be a little more difficult because it is somewhat arbitrary to determine whether or not I have modeled enough different types of technology tools in my classroom. However, I think I will document each time I use a certain type of technology and then keep track of the number of times I use it in order to, at the end of the year, determine if I accomplished my goal of modeling digital-age work and learning in my classroom.