I have now been working with the GAME model for a little less than two months. It is a good system for gaining new skills and knowledges, and I will continue to use it and share it with my students as an option. The one problem I had with it is the same issue that I would have with any strategy for improving myself. I need to stay motivated with the project in order for it to work. For me, that means that it will only work if I am truly interested in the topic and want to learn it or need to learn it as a requirement. This is not a shortfall of the system, but of my own lack of focus.
Despite that, I have made progress on my goals. I have found several web sites that can help me extend the learning for my highly motivated students, and I have seen what other teachers have done in similar circumstances to help their students. While I don't feel like I have truly reached my goal yet since I have not had a chance to implement these strategies, I feel that I am making progress. I will continue my routines that have helped me so far, and when I work with my class again this fall, I will have an opportunity to test them and decide which ones work for me and which ones do not.
This class has actually helped me practice my modification techniques since that is part of the GAME plan format directly when writing lesson plans. I have thought more about different situations that may arise, including lack of computer access, highly motivated or unmotivated students, and time restraints. These have led me to better ideas about what I will need to do in the future. I feel like I have finished the first iteration of this goal, and now I am planning on extending it to other lesson plans.
This class has also been very good for me to see different ways that I can use technology in the math classroom. I had learned some strategies from previous classes, but I am impressed with the three strategies that we focused on in this program.
While problem based learning is not a new concept to me, I had not thought of all of the ways that I could use technology to help my students. I like the idea of my students using real data to solve real life problems as opposed to numbers that are provided by the text as examples. This makes the problems seem more valid and relevant to the students.
Online collaboration is something that I have been wanting to do, but I could not figure out a way to do it that would interest my students. With math, it is difficult to come up with topics where much discussion is needed with regards to the concepts, so I have been looking for ways that I can collaborate in other areas. The idea of working with students in other countries led me to the fact that conversions from metric to imperial are something that my students both need to learn and have had trouble with in the past. I feel that working with students that think in the metric system might help my students gain these skills.
But the strategy I am most excited about is digital storytelling. I can think of many ways that my students can use digital storytelling to assist in their learning. They can make videos about how to solve problems, examine the world around them and see where math fits in, present their own real-life problems as samples for the class to solve, and many more that I am only beginning to think about. I hope to use this in my classroom as much as I can based on the availability of technology to my students.
Eventually, I would like the classes that I teach to be focused around technology about half of the time. The strategies that I have learned in this class will help me gain that goal in ways that are exciting for my students.
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