Starting the Action Plan Phase…

After long hours of thought and consideration as to what I would most benefit from, I decided to change my original action plan.  Seems kind of odd to start an action plan now when I’ve been doing it since September, but it will allow me to be a better teacher, have more cooperative students and generally allow for a bit more breathing room.

 

On a daily basis I think I tell my students that change is good and the more you do it, it will seem to get easier…the trouble is, they aren’t used to a great deal and the slightest amount often unravels them.  Considering their already stressed out IB lives, or jammed-packed extra-curriculars, a teacher has to be cognizant of the student mindset at all times, which leads me to the change of my action plan.  Originally I was looking at trying to integrate Twitter into an activity that would help promote a special day my students run for the Admissions Department; however, I think it would overwhelm them at this point.  So I will choose an action plan that focuses on what I integrated this year and have been trying to learn more proficiently already—OneNote Classroom.  This interactive notebook allows me to create a binder that students have access to, as well as allowing them to create notes, collaborate with peers, file all of their research, keep marked assignments with rubrics (no longer lost papers!), experience interactive lessons, add additional notebooks for other classes, etc.  With students having to bring laptops this year, it made sense to give them a tool to organize their pages other than a straight folder in the drive.  It also made sense as students  lose their laptops that they wouldn’t have to recreate their binders from scratch because the beautiful thing is that the students files sync with the cloud!  For those students who forget their computers, they still can access their binder using a school laptop.  The other benefit is they never have to press “SAVE” as it automatically does it for them…no more excuses to endure!  The best advantage though was showing their parents their notebooks on Parent’s Night.  I was quite empowering to show different abilities as well as their level of competency with their laptops..often something parent’s have no idea of.

 

My integration of this was scary as no one used it here and I was sticking my neck out trying something that no one can help me with…not my first time doing this so I jumped off the cliff to see where I would land.  I actually integrated it with the younger students in my grade 10 class first as they seem to be receptive to anything I presented.  After about 2 weeks and working out some of the bugs, I then integrated the same software with my grade 12 classes.  Once things worked more smoothly, this group was able to start to see the benefits and all of a sudden a student would say, “I’m starting to love this program now that I understand how to move between the teacher binder and my own.”  The energy and enthusiasm started getting higher and students helped other students solve problems and it became a collaborative learning exercise on a regular basis.  I’m not going to lie, but there are about 1-2 students that haven’t adapted as well, most due to the fact that their laptop isn’t up to school standards and they can’t download the desktop version which is much smoother.  Overall, they are actually starting to ask other teachers to set it up in their classes and I’ve been giving training to help accomplish this.  It is my action plan to continue to learn new abilities of the program and experiment with my classes so that continual change lesson I keep talking about, actually starts to take affect and maybe next year, I’ll be able to add the Twitter component I wanted to this year.