Monitoring GAME Plan Progress!

These past few weeks have been a hectic one with the end of the year quickly winding down.  I believe I have been able to find most of the information I need to take action on my GAME plan.  What I quickly learned is that it is easy to get bogged down in idea so it is important to closely monitor the time spent analyzing the data and work on the more essential task, which is designing the plan to respond to the collected data.

Image found at: Google Image

After reviewing my compiled list of webinars and conferences to work on the goal of improving my professional development and leadership, I selected those webinars and conferences that I felt would help prepare me in becoming a better educator so I can add more strategies and tools to my bag so I can engage my students and help them understand and become life-long learners.  I have also signed up to take a webinar about Edmodo, which is important that I learn more on this social networking site, seeing I will be teaching this to all my colleagues.  We also have three days of professional development, which is county wide- June 16th, 17th, and 18^th to make up the snow days. One day is devoted to different technology tools that we can implement into our instruction, and some meetings on assessments.

My other goal is to work on my assessments.  I have been researching different assessments that educators can use in their classroom to monitor and evaluate student learning.  That being said, I am part of an Assessment Learning Community, which is where I discovered AIMSweb, which is a monitoring tool.

Image found at: Google Image

After speaking to my technology adviser, she agreed getting trained in AIMSweb this progress monitoring tool would help me pinpoint student weaknesses in the content standards.  I plan to use this tool after the course in hopes that it will help me see improvement as students work toward the learning goals I established.  In addition to the AIMSweb, I discovered several free websites in which I can create rubrics for assessments.

Another form of assessments are online rubrics.  Rubistar is a popular online rubric generator, which allows an educator to quickly create, customize and save a rubric (Cennamo, Ross & Ertmer, 2009, p.157). 

Image found from: Google Image

By using Rubistar or a similar multimedia rubric I can create descriptors for each level of my rubric.  I think I will modify my game plan to look into this popular website.   I will also need to meet with my Technology adviser and other tech lab teachers to seek advice, and ideas as I create assessments that tie in the content standards.  If we work jointly on this project then our assessments and rubrics will have validity.  I will also be working on creating more short quizzes on the Edmodo social networking website, which is form of a forced-choice assessment (Cennamo et al., 2009).  By creating and placing these quizzes on Edmodo, this will give me immediate feedback and allow me to check for student comprehension.  I will also use open-ended response formats so students demonstrate creative and original thoughts on their blog post to the class.  I think these will be a beneficial assessments.

This far along, I feel I am making good progress with my action plan.  Throughout the summer, I will be spending time taking webinars, and appropriate assessment tools.  I am still searching different assessment tools, so I may modify what I have.  The opportunity is approaching and soon I will get a chance to apply/share this information with students and colleagues!

As I reflect, I think the biggest thing I learned thus far is that there is a vast amount of resources for educators to utilize.  It is not just the internet articles but teachers as well willing to share their prior knowledge and their ideas.

Finally, it is important to think of questions… One question that I have for myself is what other online sessions can I sign up for to help me find more information on assessment tools, or broaden my knowledge the information I have learned about a technology tool. 

I want to hear your thoughts on a practice you have implemented in your classroom that you would like to share or any resources you think may help me as I carry out my GAME plan that I could research more into.

References:

Cennamo, K., Ross, J. & Ertmer, P. (2009). Technology integration for meaningful classroom use: A standards-based approach. (Laureate Education, Inc., Custom ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.