The GAME

Every person in the world should always have goals in their life so that they have a reason to keep living, the same idea in the 21st teaching realm. We, as teachers, should always have goals so that we have a reason to continue our profession. As a student teacher, my mentor taught me only how to direct teach, while working on my masters, I feel there are topics to learn and goals that needs to be set and reached in order to fully feel accomplishment in our teaching career. After reviewing the NETS-T, I see the broad spectrum of what needs to be learned in order to enrich my curriculum. As a professional, setting goals and viewing what my weaknesses and strengths are as equally important as to understanding the curriculum. By using the “GAME”, suggested by Dr. Cennamo (2009), this will help aid me in the process of creating my goals and accomplishing the as well.

Strengths

I feel my knowledge of using technology to teach in a classroom, such as using PowerPoint presentations or online streaming, is a strong point in my teaching career. Also, I encourage my students to be creative in developing a way for them to remember mathematic process. This is an example of promoting creativity in the classroom. Promoting collaboration is another strong point that I have. The ability in working together as a team is an important asset in our students’ lives and their future.

Weaknesses

Some of my weaknesses are probably common to for the novice teacher, such as creating authentic lessons that contain real life situations for our students every day. As for a mathematics teacher, there should be numerous ways to do this, but I still feel that I need to improve on this portion. Having my students validate websites will also be my weakness because I need to work on this process myself. Another weakness that I know I will need to strengthen is to properly assess my students’ work on instruction and their digital development.

The GAME

Goals:

The most important goal, I feel, is to create more authentic lessons for our students to understand the main reasons why we all need to learn mathematics. The second goal that I would love to strengthen is creating an engaging atmosphere not limited to Power Points and streaming.

Actions:

In order to broaden my view of lessons and creating authentic lessons for my students, I feel that collaboration with colleagues and perhaps some mathematic professors will help me with suggestions for certain lessons. There are many resources; however, I feel that an example with a face-to-face human interaction will solidify my memory and better understanding of the situation presented. As for the second goal, following technology blogs will inform me of the new software that are out there, and see what our corporate world is using. Also, as for presentations, it would be nice to create a movie clip of some sort to teach the lesson or even try to get the school to purchase a smart board. Also, collaborating with my fellow technology majors will help in my broadening of my views on teaching.

Monitor:

As I learn more about different scenarios for authentic learning, the more revisions on my lesson plans, the more I am improving my instructions. My train of thinking will be more geared towards authentic instructions. Also my students’ progress in learning the material will improve since the relevancy of the instruction is much higher than direct teaching. As for the second goal, compiling a list of options of all possible technology software to use in the classroom will be a good start, then contributing time to explore those options and list below of each software what it would be good for, instruction wise.

Evaluation:

As stated earlier, the evaluation stage would be seeing the complete compile forms of revised lesson plans for creating authentic lesson plans. When asking myself, “Did I learn anything?”, I would be able to say, “yes” since I kept of record of it. This gives me the opportunity to reflect on what I learned as well as improving my lesson from the beginning and how much improvement I have made. As for the second goal, just seeing my lesson plan include different software is a great way to see how much you learned. There are always software that you can learn and figuring it how to use it in your lesson is great way to see how much you learned.

All in all, we as teachers should always strive to better our profession. In order to do that, we consistently need to have goals and reach them at our pace. Without accomplishing any goals, we would be stuck in the boring same routine and the same type of scores as well.

Reference:
Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (2009). Integrating Technology Across the Content Areas. Baltimore: Author.