Share any thinking, new design steps, progress, challenges, and or successes you have experienced during this course. How have you evolved as an innovative thinker?
Change is good! This was one of my first notes I wrote down when starting this program. Change is good. In the past years of my career as an educator; I would of never of stated change is good. As a primary teacher, change can be very upsetting for my students. However, with this program and teaching during a pandemic, I have realized that change is essential. If I am not willing to change for my teaching habits, designs and progress; my student will not benefit. I have realized that I need to change for my students! Their educational goals are consistently changing, thus my teaching goals need to evolve and change. In order to understand my evolution or successes I have experienced during this course, I went back to my initial blog. Blog #1 # 2 about where I am in my teaching and my reading of Qualitative Research in Innovative Learning. As I reread my blogs, I realized how far I have come in this course. When I first started this course, I was a knowledgeable educator that thrived on trying new concepts for my teaching formats. However, I forgot about design of lessons and how to evolve as a learner for myself. It took me to step out of my comfort zones to become an educator and a learner all over again. It has been enlightening to see myself evolve from a basic teacher to see myself slowly transforming into a researcher with an action research plan. The challenges I have experienced is how to take all the knowledge I am acquiring and to put it into my everyday teaching practices. I am able to do this; however I don't want to overload my students. I also have shared all of my new acquired to my grade level team and to members at my school site. I am very excited where I came from at my beginning of my blogs to my final blog. I am very excited to see my evolution with our next round of courses and to see where my ARP is in the final months of this program.
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Mastery learning is a method of instruction where the focus is on the role of feedback in learning. Furthermore, mastery learning refers to a category of instructional methods with establishes a level of perfomance that al student must "master" before moving on the the next unit (Slavin, 1987).
Games have always been helpful for me in my teaching practices. Many years ago, I used Bingo for sight words, telling time and math word problems. I love the concept of using Bingo to achieve transfer of learning with second grade standards. However, I was not confident in online tools for gamification for my second graders. This all changed with our current climate of virtual teaching and learning. As Matthew Farber states in How to find games for classroom learning Edutopia (2020), "I simply suggest thinking about bringing in one or two fames t add to or enhance course readings." I am currently using Kahoot in my classroom. Every Friday to assess weekly learing in spelling, reading comprehension, and math skills I design Kahoot games. I find that when I put the questions in a format of Kahoot, my students love to play. While researching and learning about new games to implement in my classroom structure, I would like to access ClassDojo. I have seen ClassDojo work in classrooms, but I was always hesitant as it online participitation from students and parents. With the current class I am teaching, I can see how I can use the data from ClassDojo to see if my students are achieving higher level thinking in my classroom. I also think ClassDojo would be a good format to access after the winter break when my students will need an incentive to "back into learning". The district is also currently in need of online assessments for our students. After looking at GoFormative looks like a great tool for our students to show learning in these formats. I will be creating a Bridges math assessment in this format for my research question to show data of students learning in an online learning world. Additional games I would like to use for my students is Legend of Learnings and Prodigy. I have heard from many fellow teachers that these are great tools to enable our students to play while they are learning. The possibilites are endless and I want to try all of them at once. However, I realize it is baby steps and I have to do one at at time for my students to master one online platform before I move onto another one! It is very exciting and fun for me too! I love encorporating gamification into my classroom. As for games I am playing, I have to admit I do not play games. However, I did try Roblox with my niece and nephew that live in Boston. We all like to log in and play together; I am not very good. It is more of a fun laugh for my niece and nephew to laugh at me trying to make my avatar jump over fire or not get killed within the first second. Currently, my student are playing Among Us and I am going to try and play over the Christmas Break. |
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