Reflection

Over the last 8 weeks because of my GAME Plan on incorporating more authentic assessments I have built a catalog of new ways to assess student learning. From the many teachers that responding in my district to my own personal research I have collected assessments in every subject area that I can use as guides to develop assessments that relate to math and science. I think that the GAME Plan lesson is a quick and easy way to develop lesson plans and staying on task. I really think that writing down the standards that I need to cover keeps me focused on the task at hand. I have in the past taught parts of units that I thought were covered in my standards, however really were not. In the end the students learned about a topic that “technically” they didn’t need to and I was behind for the rest of the semester. I think that my personal GAME Plan really fit into the particular class because I was trying to get new ideas on assessing students and came up with a unit plan that definitely fit into a new type of assessment and I was able to create a unit that I will be using in the next few weeks.

In the beginning I thought that these lessons were going to take much more time to complete in class however once I finished designing my 3 lessons (problem-based learning, online collaboration, and the digital storytelling) I found that I covered the same number of standards in 4 weeks with my new unit plan, where I taught the same standards in 4.5 weeks last year. I was very surprised and actually inspired to look at the next unit and design the next unit I am teaching in physics type up another unit plan using the GAME Plan template. I think that the planning stages when incorporating technology into the curriculum takes more time than what I was doing however I feel that the time that I spend developing is saved when it comes time to grade these types of assignments. I normally would have given a small worksheet or practice problems in class with some type of notes and then possibly a short quiz every other day. However, when it comes down to it the students are probably learning more with the different technology based activities and it save them from doing monotonous drill and practice with the same outcome.

This class has impacted the way I teach and design lesson plans more so than how the students learn, at least for me. I learned that technology based learning does not take more time and since I am more aware of the standards the students are learn the content while learning how to research, develop, produce, and present a product which is the curriculum standards/content area standards.