Preparing My Kids for Meeting NETS Goals

The ISTENETS for Students has an expectation of preparing our kids for tomorrow in their ability to communicate and collaborate. In the world we live in where social networking is a main force of collaboration it seems the worlds is preparing our kids to meet that goal.

Our job as educators is to help them know how to properly meet that goal. How to use social networking and collaborating in a beneficial educational and productive way not just to socialize and gab. With the massive size of the world, this ability to communicate with foreign countries and other states makes this world rather small.

The strategy of GAME can be a great tool in helping our students make a goal, activitly execute that goal and monitor as well as as evaluate their successed and failures. With our next unit and the focus on energy (sources and aspects), my students will be collaborating with another school to learn more, share ideas, and discuss possibilities. By helping them structure their plans with the GAME plan system, I believe they will be more successful, less like to stray off task in their collaborating and discussions.

Because GAME requires the monitoring of action as well as the evaluation of those actions, I think students will be able to find guidence in the structure. Because students (individually or in groups) will be using a blog to record their work, I can access/follow their blogs. As the teacher, I can comment and help keep them on track. Using the structure of GAME plan I can also ask them to revert back to the structure of their plan and work from where they strayed, when straying occurrs.

Using GAME plan will also help my students work at being a higher quality of digital citizens. Although they have grown up with the internet as digital natives, not many of them at their tender age of 12 to 14 know how to be good digital citizens. Like the NETS goal aims students need to be appropriate with their uses of technology as well as safe and legal. As educators, we can use the Goal and Action aspects of GAME to demonstrate and educate about the digital citizen actions. With the monitors and evulating aspects, there will be time for reflection and evaluation of how well them followed quality digital citzenship.