As I reflect back through my learning and development these last eight weeks, I am pleased by my progress, excited about future learning, and still desiring to continue the challenge of my GAME plan. As I developed this plan in week one, I had specific set ideas of what I thought it meant to accomplish the goals I had set for myself. From the beginning I felt frustrated and discouraged because these goals had been attempted before, and I had not successfully found a way to accomplish them up to this point. I was concerned how I would overcome my past inabilities.
Throughout the first several weeks of the class I constantly fought my frustration of how to attain my goals. I felt defeated and wasn’t sure how to lay aside past attempts and regain a new perspective. Through research, talking with peers, and much introspective thinking, I realized I wasn’t able to attempt or even attain my goals because my perspectives were limited and flawed. I needed more of an open mind and willingness to attempt new ways for successfully reaching my two goals.
My first goal encompassed “facilitating and inspiring student learning and creativity.” I envisioned enabling my students to use collaborative tools to share their creativity, thinking, ideas, and perspectives not just within my class but also with other classes around the world. I felt I had already attempted this through my class website blog, but never really saw success as the students only commented on the academic topics when made to. The only student responses outside of curriculum writing was from former students who wanted to contact me about how they were doing since leaving my class. This is not what I envisioned in the use of a blog as a collaborative tool where students sharing their thoughts, ideas, and creativity. Throughout this course, I began to realize my goal could be accomplished just not with the current tools I was using. While I knew it would be difficult, I took the plunge out of my comfort zone and developed a new blog in Google that would allow me greater capabilities of sharing pictures, videos, and student input than my prior blogging tool. This blog would also allow for our blog content to be posted to other collaborative sites drawing in many more readers than ever imagined with my prior tool. I began to see automatic differences in the excitement and student involvement within the first couple weeks. My new class blog lead to even more openness for better blogging tools for my students. I discovered KidBlog.org and after sharing examples of this with my students almost every student wanted to start their own blog. I saw as my ability to embrace new tools and engage a broad audience with an enthusiasm for sharing through the written word, my students wanted to be a part of this exciting venture and share their own thoughts and ideas.
My second goal was centered around “designing and developing digital-age experiences” for my students. I wanted them to become more actively involved in their own educational goals, developing their own learning and actively involved in assessing their progress. After making the changes in my blogging process, I found this only brought about more motivation for accomplishing this second goal. Blogging blossomed into developing my own professional learning network on Twitter. This single move has opened a whole new world of how to not only know about the latest digital-age experiences, but how other teachers are using them within their own classrooms. Meeting other “technology enthusiast” teachers through Twitter brought about collaboration with our first international school blog contacts which sparked conversations between my students and 4th graders in Argentina. My students have also made connections with other classrooms in Iowa, Illinois, and California simply through sharing their curiosities and becoming active in learning about the world around them.
As I move forward from these successes, I admit I have apprehension. Learning and implementing new technology takes a lot of times and commitment; what if I am not able to maintain this success? In considering the future, I realize my success will come in taking baby steps. It is most freeing to let go of preconceived ideas, strategies, and plans, and observe with a new perspective the abundant possibilities of growing one step at a time.
