GAME Plan and Students

I see a lot of commonality among the National Educational Technology Standards for Students and the NETS-T. While the standards for educators deal more with professional development, assessment, and items more on the teaching end, they share some in common with the students such as working collaboratively, communicating effectively through multiple technologies, doing research, information fluency, and digital citizenship. Students are called upon to be advocates of proper usage of technology as are educators.

With this in mind, I think I would utilize the GAME plan in the following manner:

G - Goals. I would have my students set goals for themselves after reviewing these standards. I would ask them which areas they feel confident in and which areas they feel needs some work. I would have students make 2-3 goals at a time, each time we would do this. These goals would be simple goals that students wish to work towards to becoming a more confident technology user. I would try to do this GAME plan at least twice during the year, once during the first semester and once during the second semester.

A - Action. I would have students write down the actions they were going to take next to each goal. These can be simple as well, maybe written in a few words. I would have my students utilize a wikispace in which they add their goals and actions on their own wikipage. This way, they will have the other students in the class to keep them accountable for meeting their goals. This would also allow them to work collaboratively. Maybe one student knows of a resource and wants to post it on their friend’s wikipage to aid them in meeting their goals. This would make it easier for the students to see right away.

M - Monitor. I will monitor their progress through the wikispace. They will monitor their progress and the progress of their classmates also through the wikispace. I will have them write down in reflective journals during certain points of the semester about how they feel they are doing and how maybe their goals or actions have changed. Maybe a new goal has appeared through some research the student has done.

E - Evaluate. At the end of each semester, I will have students write a reflective paragraph on the GAME plan process. This will be located on their wikipage. They will tell me how well they did at accomplishing their goal, if they need to carry this goal over to the next semester, or if they found new goals throughout this process. Maybe the goal they made at the beginning was easier than they thought and they met that goal right away. They also will evaluate the help their peers gave them throughout the process and whether it was beneficial to them to get help from their classmates. I also want to know how well this process worked for them.

This GAME plan sounds very similar to what we did during this class, but when I think back on the process, we are students ourselves. We are trying to learn these new strategies and this GAME plan really allows us to focus on our weaknesses and making them strengths. That is what we expect our students to do in our own classrooms.