The TREE Project

The Totally Remarkable Educational Exchange (TREE) Project is officially named and planned! I met with first grade teachers in my building this week, and we collaboratively planned monthly learning activities for classrooms to do and share with one another.

While some type of technology is present in nearly every classroom in the country, it is rarely used to its fullest potential (Royer, 2002). Some of this discrepancy is due to the teachers' lack of comfort with using technology for teaching and learning. Even teachers who report a high degree of comfort with technology tend to use it in fairly rigid ways, such as searching for activities to use with students, communicating with other teachers, and word processing (Price, Cates, & Bodzin, 2002). Although students frequently use computers in the classroom, often the use is limited to information gathering and word processing rather than using multimedia tools and digital content to design and create products, communicate or collaborate with other learners.

For these reasons, one of my main objectives is for this project is to keep the activities simple enough so that any teacher, despite their level of technology confidence, would be comfortable joining this project. Another objective is to connect classrooms to share and exchange educational experiences. We aligned the monthly activities with common educational standards from the Iowa Core in the areas of writing, math, science and 21st Century/technology skills.

This week I am working on creating a wiki with a detailed explanation of the project goals, information for teachers and monthly classroom activities. Our first grade teachers are working on completing the first month's activities so that we can post them on the wiki as an example of what to do. If there are any first grade teachers who would like to join us on this adventure - stay tuned! I will share the wiki and more detailed information in my next post!

Resources:
Price, B., Cates, W. M., & Bodzin, A. (2002 June). Challenges in implementing technology-rich curricular high school biology materials: First year findings from the “Exploring Life” project . Paper presented at the 23rd National Educational Computing Conference, San Antonio, TX.

Royer, R. (2002). Supporting technology integration through action research. The Clearing House , 75(5), 233-237.

Developing My Personal GAME Plan

ISTE's National Education Standards for Teachers (NETS-T) help promote continuous learning and effective integration of technology in the classroom.  As a technology teacher I have had the opportunity to focus on broadening my knowledge of the standards, but two NETS indicators that I would like to strengthen my proficiency of are:

Model Digital-Age Work and Learning

Teachers: collaborate with students, peers, parents, and community members using digital tools and resources to support student success and innovation.

Promote and Model Digital Citizenship and Responsibility

Teachers: develop and model cultural understanding and global awareness by engaging with colleagues and students of other cultures using digital-age communication and collaboration tools.

My GAME plan for developing NETS-T standards is as follows:

Goals:  I would like to develop and coordinate a globally collaborative internet-based learning project for first grade students.  Teachers and students can communicate and share information about weather, climate, plants, animals and insects found in their schoolyard environment with other students from different regions of the United States and around the world. Students can compare and contrast similarities and differences, which will promote further questioning and communication with students of other cultures.

Action:  I will collaboratively plan with the first grade teachers in my building.  We will develop a specific timeline of activities.  I will create a wiki which will describe the project and also provide a platform to share the information collected from each classroom.  I will reach out to my professional learning community on Twitter to begin connecting with other first or second grade classrooms.  

Monitor:  The first grade teachers and I will teach and engage our first grade students in the learning activities planned.  Students will collect, describe and illustrate information about our schoolyard environment.  Students will complete a KWHL chart to demonstrate understanding of environments in different regions.  The wiki with collected information will be shared by linking to my classroom website for students, parents and community members to view and leave comments on.

Evaluate:  I will evaluate and assess the success of the project by the active participation of our students and other classrooms.  Formative assessments of students’ observations, questions and communication throughout the project will help guide instructional practices.  Self-assessment and reflection will help to guide my plan in developing my own knowledge of using communication and collaborative tools in order to connect students to a global community.