Growing up in the digital age has given me a certain appreciation for games. I can’t recall how many times when I was in High School that I’d be in class daydreaming about going home and playing games all afternoon.

From the previously linked article comes this quotation:

She’s come up with four elements she believes we all need to be happy: satisfying work, the experience of being good at something, time spent with people we like, and the chance to be a part of something bigger. Games, she says, do all of these things.

I completely agree. Games are amazing because you learn through trial-and-error, so there’s no real punishment for being bad at the game. You just reload and try again. Yet as you gain experience you can really feel it. You also get to be something bigger than your body. I’ve built a countless number of rollercoaster’s playing RollerCoaster Tycoon and learned how to run a city in Sim City/a>. It’s a natural extension of my creative nature.

I’m interested in how games can improve learning. I’m more interested in actually developing a game that teaches the fundamentals of web design. It would be a lot of hard work, but if it gets the students to happily learn the basics, then they suddenly have the skills to feel confident in building more complicated websites.

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Teach slower, teach longer.

As I reflect back on the fall semester I am amazed at how much I was expecting my students to learn at such a fast pace. I realized this as I was creating the fall semester exams and saw that every term or important concept I wanted them to know we hadn’t spent more than a class period on. One of my biggest goals for the new semester is to spend more time reviewing information and really learning it by heart.

This should also help students who missed classes not get too far behind because they’ll have several chances to learn the material.

Include more small group work.

Something I’ve been very bad about has been asking all my questions to the entire class and getting responses from only 4 kids at most. It’s a great learning experience for those special few who answer, but most of the class gets left out.

Instead, I plan on using a technique called ‘think-pair-share’, where students think of their response, pair off with a partner to talk about it, and then the partners share their ideas with the class. This gives the every student a chance to share a thought with someone else but doesn’t take require the entire class to hear everyone’s response. It also adds some accountability to someone besides me.

Use tickets more effectively.

At the beginning of December I introduced tickets to my students as a way to reward them for good behavior and class attendance. Since the introduction I’ve been a little stingy with the tickets.
It’s not so much that I haven’t found behavior to reward, it’s just that I’ve had trouble keeping organized with all the tickets. I’m hoping a little more planning and a few sheets of paper can help keep track if who’s done what.

Watch a soccer game

I played soccer in high school and hope to someday coach a team therefore you can guess that I also enjoy watching soccer. I have several students in my classes who play and it would be great to support the kids.

Use CHAMPS as a behavior management tool.

I’ve heard the praises of CHAMPS but haven’t found it too applicable to high school students. The ways I’ve seen it implemented have all been targeted towards elementary level kids and I’m thinking high schoolers would be very annoyed with some of the implementations. I’m hoping some quick googling will reveal methods for using champs with high schoolers.

Fish tank

When I took over in the middle of the fall semester, my new room was actually the past teacher’s old room. Everyday I found something new (old) and it was almost like a big toy box. Sure, I have little use for half the stuff, but I certainly can use some of it.

One item I found is was an empty fish tank. Immediately I wanted to fill it up and add some fishies, but my mentor advised me to hold back on it, at least until after my two-week Christmas break. Good advice, seeing as a two-week absence can make a fish or two go belly-up. But now that the break is over, I hope I can fill the tank back up. Fishes are cool and it’ll break up the white wall effect of the classroom.

Others items

• Display more student work
• Return grades quicker
• Be stricter about absences counting as zeroes if missed work not made up

Of course I probably won’t accomplish all I want, but I do expect to change some things. It’s exciting to think about the possibilities and it’s nice to see I have lots of room for improvement.

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