End GAME

Throughout the last 5 weeks I have been trying to put the GAME strategy into practice. I have set goals for myself to improve in several areas of my professional life. While the components and strategies of the GAME plan process are not particularly revolutionary, the plan itself does create a framework that allows a person to plan out a strategy of improvement, attempt to execute that plan and come up with improvements and adjustments to continually push forward in an effort to learn and move forward.
The particular goals that I felt I made some good progress on throughout my GAME plan were my ability to use the APA format more consistently. I researched some books and resources and purchased on and have read it. I am also updating my Word application to utilize some APA formatting templates so I can more easily and consistently follow the spec.
Another goal I set for myself was to attempt to communicate more regularly with my classmates through message boards, chat and email. I see that this will continue to be an area I need to really focus my effort on, but I have made strides this term.
I also wanted to increase my comfort and facility with new educational technologies. Through the exercises of the course, I have generated a series of lesson plans that I'm comfortable with and I feel really make good and contextual use of technology.
The things I like about the GAME plan, the mapping out of goals and steps to achieve them, the monitoring of your progress throughout the process an ultimately the review of the entire exercise to find improvements or hangups can be easily taught to students and hopefully incorporated into their learning and lifestyles. I can see framing unit syllabi such that students are allowed to utilize the GAME plan throughout the class, defining goals and exercising activities to meet those goals and ideally over time, they'll learn how best to work so they can learn more quickly and efficiently in a style that works best with their experiences and personalities.

Getting my students into the GAME!

The question has been asked, how would I go about helping my students develop thier own GAME plans for improving their technology skills, specifically as addressed by the NETS-S standards. Obviously, I think the first step is to make sure the students understand the GAME process.

• [G] setting Goals
• [A] planning and performing Actions to meet those goals
• [M]constantly monitoring thier progress toward their goals
• [E]evaluating the effectiveness of thier actions toward meeting the goals and updating their plans accordingly

Once the students understand the GAME plan process then I think the next logical step would be to provide them with a template game-planner that allows them to identify goals in technology and NETS-S skills that they'd like to improve upon. Once the students have identified goals and actions, they can begin monitoring their progress toward those goals and updating their status through a blog, video-diary or some other evolving record of their progress.

I like the idea of video-diaries because the students can create and then later refer to a clear visual multi-media presentation of their progress. I think that can help them stay motivated and also help them organize their thoughts for presentation. The very process of organizing their thoughts to video-diary their progress helps them with the maintenance part of the GAME process and assuming that inital goal and action planning template helps them to clearly identify their end-state goals they will be able to evaluate objectively how they are progressing.

I think one important factor is that the students realize they aren't necessarily being graded on how quickly or efficiently the progress toward their goals so much as how well they document the process and present some valid reflection on how they've learned and not learned along the way. The real goal of the GAME plan is not so much to quickly conquer a topic but rather to create a personalized process of self-directed learning that the student can apply to practically any task or goal throughout thier life. For this reason, the video-diary (or voice-diary if the student is truly uncomfortable with video media) can be a tremendous artifact throughout the process as it helps the student see where he or she struggled and where they found their successes.

Wig is LOST, He Has to Go Back!

Ok, so what happened is that I completely missed the week 5 blog posting. I let myself get distracted with work and Easter and I flat out failed to see that I was supposed to post another entry on my GAME plan.

So, despite the fact that this post is late and now out of sequence, I'm going to post one anyway. What I should have done originally for this post was to update the activities I was doing to achieve my game plan and discuss whether or not I felt my planned activities were effective. As far as things I was trying to do, I had set a goal for improving my comfort and facility with APA format. I spent week 5 looking for decent APA format books on Amazon and Barnes and Noble as well as some local book retailers here. I did find a good resource book and ordered it. Having researched a bit to find a good book for my needs that was a practical guide I was happy with my order. I had also found some social networking applications, Elgg and Mahara which I began playing with and asking questions about. By the end of week 5 I wasn't terribly well versed with them, but I had made something of a start. While I'm not convinced that either of those tools would make particularly good classroom applications, I was excited with the technology and the influx of ideas. I am starting to think that customized educational portals may be really useful tools for teachers. As an English teacher for example, if I can put together a first-stop resource site for my students that provides them with safe chat areas, moderated message boards, content-appropriate wiki's and user added content that helps them learn and enhance their understanding of core area concepts I may be on the right track for really incentivizing students to start taking more and more responsibility for their own learning.

At any rate, while my current dabbles in social networking tools have given me some real interest in that area, I realize I need to learn a good deal more about creating and managing social and academic portals that can be truly useful to my students. So, like anything else, for every few steps forward, you realize that the journey seems to keep farther and farther.

On Fonts, Forms and Networking...

Looking over my original goals in order to get a feel for where I'm at with them, I am somewhat encouraged by my progress. One of my primary goals was to improve my usage of APA format. To that end, I have purchased a book on APA format and I've been reading through it and improving my knowledge. I have also played with a couple of social networking frameworks, Elgg and Mahara in order to determine whether or not they would be beneficial in a classroom setting. I also have an account set up with SiteGround to host a personal website using Joomla, which is a particulalry powerful and flexible web-site management framework. Through Joomla and it's various plugins a person can incorporate blogs, wiki's databases and any number of minor "canned" applications into his or her website. I intend to use these features to create my own modest web-portal which will present my own information as well as provide embedded and external links to other resources (like you good folks' blog-sites) for my visitors.
As for my goal of improving my online communication and collaboration, I have sadly continued to struggle in this area. Work has been particularly grueling the last few weeks, which is ironic since my travel schedule has actually lightened up. I've been working on some software coding for a demo that my clients require in two weeks so unfortunately my online collaboration time has suffered. The irony of the situation is not lost on my as I have recently commented on the discussion threads that I'd like to schedule some kind of organized chat time so several of us can get together and have a real-time conversation. Nonetheless, despite my lack of progress in this area, I suppose a positive I can take from the situation is the knowledge that often, technology does not necessarily equate with convenience and ease. At the end of the day, good old fashioned organization and time-management are as critical in the new world as they were in the old days of pen and paper.