NETS-T GAME PLAN

I believe Technology is an intricate part of our present and future educational process. That being said, I need to provide some background information before addressing the NETS-T indicators because I think it is relative to my situation and to many teachers' circumstances.

I work in an inner city school district in which 90 % of the schools qualify as Title 1 schools. Over 95 % of our students are minority students and over 90 % of them live at or below the poverty level.

Within our community there is a great digital divide. Most of our student's households do not own a computer or have Internet access. The access is only available through the public library system or at school. Many of our schools, my own included, have limited computer/online availability, which means our students have limited availability.

I have no disagreements or hesitation with the standards laid out in the 2008 NETS-T guidelines. I think the standards are laudable, and that every teacher should strive to achieve compliance with them. My experience has been and remains, that the implementation of the steps necessary to meet the indicators continue to be the main problem we have to address.

My high school does not have a lot of the technology necessary to implement many of the standards and indicators. For example we have no smart boards in our school. We do not have enough classroom projectors to display digital materials with. The only class rooms that have sufficient computer technology for daily use are the computer labs which are used to teach the technology classes. We do have a library with computers, but that is available on a first come first served basis, and many time the library is closed to classes for testing purposes. We have received this year two mobile laptop computer carts with 24 computers per cart, but these are still limited assets considering we have over 1800 students in our school.

Now all that being said, I recognize that there is much I can do to advance my own technology capabilities.

As part of my GAME plan I want to develop my abilities to promote student reflections using collaborative tools to reveal and clarify students' conceptual understanding and thinking, planning and creative process (NETS-T indicator 1.c) and advocate, model and teach safe, legal, and ethical use of digital information and technology...(NETS-T 4.a).

To achieve the goal of indicator 1.c, I plan to require my students to use more concept mapping and graphic organizing tools in the early stages of their research and project development. To accomplish my goal of indicator 4.a, I will demonstrate how to determine the validity of websites and the information they present, respect copyright laws and demonstrate how to correctly site and acknowledge the authorship of material used in research and presentations and provide references.

I will establish revolving student teams to review other students citations and references to enable students to develop their sense of responsibility and to insure compliance.