Monitoring My GAME Plan Progress

I am pleased to say that I have made good progress in my GAME Plan since last week. In reference to the SMARTboard in my classroom, I now understand how to reorient the screen, scroll through documents, write on it, highlight words, erase information, view films, and utilize the notepad feature. I am also happy to say that I did not learn any of this from an online tutorial or a colleague...I learned everything from my students, just as one of my classmates suggested! It started during my first freshman class of the day. I was using the SMARTboard to provide them with notes regarding grammar and spelling, and I began asking questions about how to use it properly. They showed me the basics and, I must say, they took great joy in actually teaching their teacher for once! During each of my subsequent freshman classes that day, I asked them to show me more and more until I felt confident. While I may use a tutorial or ask a colleague for help with additional features in the near future, I realized that I just needed to jump right in and being using it on my own in order to understand its basic functions. The next thing I would like to learn is how to create templates, such as a JEOPARDY template for a review game.

This year, I am off to a good start regarding the inclusion of nonfiction and real-world scenarios in the classroom. My sophomores have been learning about American culture, the American Dream, and life in the 1920s in order to prepare them for The Great Gastsby unit. They read a recently published online article about the redefining of the American Dream, an article about how "American Idol" and other televised  competitions for fame have ruined the American Dream, and various webpages about interesting aspects of the Jazz Age. My academic level freshmen are reading Speak, so we have been tackling such issues as teenage depression, rape, and harassment. Students worked on a group activity for which they had to come up with solutions for a specific high school harassment scenario. In my lower level freshman classes, my students have been working on writing a series of newspaper articles that correspond with the realistic events in the text. So far, they have written an obituary and advice letter. Soon, they will be working on a major news article, police blotter, sports article, and editorial. As each article is assigned, we read an actual newspaper example together, so there has been plenty of incorporation of nonfiction pieces. Locating the resources I need has been easy; I just hope to continue the path I am on when it comes to integrating nonfiction into the curriculum. My goal is to introduce at least 2-3 nonfiction pieces into each unit. I would also like to modify my action plan by bringing more poetry into my lessons, as well.