PERSONAL ACTION PLAN

We have certainly been exposed to a lot of wonderful information in the last several months. Now it’s time to put it into action! I envision myself using the Web 2.0 tools in school for professional development, to communicate with colleagues, to plan lessons, to interact with students, and to enhance student learning by making lessons more engaging. Personally, I will use the tools for Book Club and for activities in church where I am active in Children’s Ministry and am the Executive Director. Now for specifics.
Professional Development – As Reading Specialist, I chair the Collaborative Planning teams for Reading. I can disseminate data and scores through Google Docs. The team can organize data through the use of wikilinks. During the planning, we are often assigned readings that enhance our instruction and we discuss the pedagogy of learning and instruction. By using Diigo, we can highlight, comment and annotate discussion points that could be addressed in our short meeting time.
One of the things I most look forward to after this course is sharing the wonderful sites I have learned about with colleagues. Our building has a wing for emotionally impaired students. The teachers of these children often have to look outside the Curriculum Framework provided by the county, even the Special Pops framework. I feel that now I can refer them to several e-tools. One I would refer them to is www.curriki.org. This is a multidisciplinary, collaborative website for shared curricula. It features games, videos, and podcasts that may benefit this population through differentiated instruction. This is also true for www.readthewords.com. This page enables the teacher to download documents or web articles that will be read to the student by an avatar. This is especially useful in these economic times that have resulted in a decrease in staff that may have previously been able to provide the reading to the student as part of their accommodation.
Instruction - I look forward to using the various tools for lesson planning and instruction. Because children today are so visual, the use of RSS feeds have become vital in instruction and make the lesson more interesting. Using them also shows the students that RSS feeds can open a whole new world of information to them. The students will soon realize that feeds are not just cutesy You Tube clips of dancing cats and singing dogs, but can add interest to their learning.
We have found that building prior knowledge is critical to our students’ cognition. Many of our children do not have the experiences that enable them to make connections to text. I found that www.alicechristie.org can help with building the necessary background knowledge and vocabulary through virtual field trips. This can be used in teaching other disciplines, such as Science, as it has virtual field trips of science processes. Again, in these hard economic times and high gas prices, this would prove beneficial.
So after I planned using wikilinks, Google Docs, or Diigo, and providing prior knowledge through virtual field trips, I could make games for centers using
www.teach-ict.com or www.classtools.net. At these sites, I can make my own games, or use the templates that they provide. For the assessment piece, I want to take all modalities of learning into consideration. I would refer to www.kerpoof.com, which is operated by the Disney Corp. This site provides a way of expression for the kinesthetic learner whose strength is art. I would also visit www.classtools.net again where the students could complete graphic organizers, timelines, or graphs, whatever is conducive to the particular lesson.
Personal – As I had previously stated, I am active in Children’s Ministry at my church. I could take the children on a virtual field trip to the Holy Land by using Alice Christie’s site or www.kids.nationalgeographic.com. Sometimes we use graphic organizers, such as timelines, during a Sunday School lesson. I could download a generic one from the www.teach-ict.com site. If I could get some other ministry team leaders to “buy into it” we could do the planning of various events using wikilinks. It could eliminate some face to face meetings and another night out. We are in the midst of some renovations at the church as well as deciding on a new logo. We want the entire congregations’ input. We could conduct some surveys using Survey Monkey.
I would like to use Diigo for my Book Club. Members could highlight passages that they want to discuss and come prepared to do just that.
This has been a wonderful learning experience for me. I realize that I have just seen the tip of the iceberg. I am in awe of your knowledge. It has been great interacting with all of you.