Draft Action Research Project Progress Report

The Benefits of using Social Networking Sites

Being a technology teacher, my need for improvement formed out of one of the classes I teach, which was computer literacy. At my school, the computer literacy schedule is on an A/B day schedule. I essentially have an A day set of students and a B day set of students. The students are in P.E. when they are not with me. I noticed through observation that since the students don’t have my computer lit class every day, they were more late work assignments being turned in. Also, I wasn’t happy with the way that I was giving feedback to the students. Sometimes I wouldn’t be able to give feedback at all and other times I was just able to walk behind their computer screen and give feedback directly to them, which wasn’t very private. Through reflection and observations, I wanted to find a way to decrease late work assignments and find an effective means for giving feedback to my students.

Knowing what the need was, I now needed to formulate a plan or a vision. Before the school year started, my technology coordinator was talking to us about teacher-student social networking sites and how we were going to use this site for one of our computer literacy projects. After exploring the site for a few weeks, I learned that this would be a perfect solution for my need. This site would allow for students to turn in their work anywhere with an Internet connection and it would allow me to provide one on one effective feedback to my students. After I knew what tool I was going to use, my vision became to use the teacher-student social networking site to decrease late work turned in by providing a more efficient means for turning in work and to effectively provide feedback. Also, with seeing the students every other day and dealing with absences, I had at least one or two late assignments per assignment. Therefore, a goal attached to the vision was to only have three late assignments per six weeks for all my classes.

With only receiving feedback and permission to conduct the research, I was the only one involved in making the decision to do the action research. However, before coming up with the idea of using the teacher-student social networking site, I asked several different teachers their methods for decreasing late work and providing effective feedback, but it either didn’t fit my computer environment or I didn’t have the time. After hearing about implementing this new website for a project we were doing in one of our tech classes, I did further research about it and decided to use the social networking site Edmodo. I read articles such as “Edmodo Best Practices” and “School Principals and Social Networking in Education: Practices, Policies, and Realities in 2010.” The first article describes the students being able to take ownership of the group. Instead of the teaching leading most of the teaching and discussing, the students get to have more of a role in that area. Online social networking can also “connect students with real- life learning” ( 21). For example, I could invite a doctor to join a class discussion through Edmodo for students to interact with. In addition, collaboration is a real-life learning skill. After reading several of these articles and best practices, I knew that using Edmodo could prove to be the answer to the conflict.

After coming up with the vision, I primarily communicated the vision with my administrator. My administrator gave me feedback and helped me fine tune the action research plan. There wasn’t any initial need to communicate the vision with parents, community members, or other faculty members because it didn’t necessarily involve them. However, I did share my vision with the students. I told my students that I had been observing more frequent late assignments being turned in and that I wasn’t happy with the feedback I was giving them. I also quickly did a survey on whether or not the students felt like they were receiving feedback. When introducing the site with the vision, the kids were excited. After this next full year of piloting the site and the research, I plan on sharing the vision and the results of the research with parents and other faculty members.

Since the website was designed for teacher-student collaboration, implementing the project primarily involved the students and me. The majority of the responsibilities fell on me because I had to put in the time to set up the site, make sure updated content was on the site, provide feedback for every assignment, and monitor the chat among students. The site was free, which was an added bonus to the project. The most difficult responsibility to fulfill was all the time I had to put into the project, which turned out to be manageable now that I’m comfortable with the site. Before venturing out on this website, I made sure that this site was secure for students. For example, students do not need an email address to register. Students cannot chat privately one on one. Students can only chat with classmates in the class, which goes out to everyone. Every time a student sends a comment, I get an email. Also, to ensure student learning, there are guidelines the students must follow in order to keep the privilege of using the site. For example, all comments must be school related. I made it perfectly clear that this website was a privilege and that its intended use was to be a tool for them to use to collaborate with each other and the teacher for help or guidance.

Additionally, I used the needs assessment and data to guide the operations of my research plan and to set priorities. My top two priorities were to provide effective feedback and to decrease late assignments. When posting assignments on the website, there was a quick taskbar on the top right of each student’s homepage. On the taskbar, it listed all upcoming assignments and due dates. It would also alert you if a big announcement was made. The taskbar played an important role in the organization of the students’ computer lit assignments and in turn, decreased late work assignments. Furthermore, due to the large number of students I had in class, I would only provide feedback to students who did not receive a 100 on their work. This was also due to the amount of time I had to provide feedback and post grades.

This website can benefit both special needs students and exceptional needs students. For the special needs students, they can collaborate with their classmates and teacher for extra help. As the teacher, I can post special resource handouts to specific kids only and I can provide help anytime I’m on the internet and on the website. For my students with exception needs, they can be the students who help the students who don’t understand something. In turn, they get to be the teacher and post helpful comments to those who are having difficulty, which demonstrates a higher form of learning. In addition to all the main features that I wanted out of the social networking site, Edmodo can also help teach life skills such as organization and time management. With the calendar, spotlight, and bolded headlines, all the students are learning how to manage their workload in my class, which they can transfer these skills over into their other classes. Overall, I believe this website will provide exceptional results for my research and increase learning for all students.

Bibliography

Edmodo Best Practices. (n.d.). Retrieved July 29, 2011, from Edmodo Teacher Hub: http://edmodoteacherhub.wikispaces.com/Best+Practices

School Principals and Social Networking in Education: Practices, Policies, and Realities in 2010. (2010). Retrieved July 29, 2011, from edweb: http://www.edweb.net/fimages/op/PrincipalsandSocialNetworkingReport.pdf

Course Thoughts

I really enjoyed this course very much. I was a little worried at first because I see the word research in the title of the course, and I immediately think lots of research papers about issues that don’t relate to me. It’s funny because in the course, they actually bring that up when talking about why they use the word inquiry instead of research because of all the bad connections with the word research. Obviously, the class turned out to be a lot different than I thought it was going to be. I’ve never heard of the word action research or inquiry before, but as I started reading about what it was, it was answering questions that I had been thinking about before while teaching.
For example, I’ve always wondered about how a teacher goes about trying to improve things for next year or find solutions for different problems. I have always wondered about how to get my students to turn in their work. As a teacher before grad school, I never knew where to begin or where to start looking except to reflect and think about my “wondering.” It was neat to see that this class revealed all that information to me, and it opened my eyes to ways that my campus encourages action research whereas before, I didn’t realize or understand why my campus was having us do all these things. One example was PLC groups. At first, I thought it was a waste of time and pointless. After taking this class and learning about the reasons for it, I’ve enjoyed my PLC meetings at my school a lot more.
I have really enjoyed the readings for this class. I usually am not a textbook reader, but these books were great. The Dana text was probably my favorite book. It does an excellent job of taking you, in detail, step by step through action research. It gives you great real-world examples to follow and learn from and possible research questions that deal with common research topics.
The thing about this class that stood out the most was one of the videos that interviewed several people about action research. The video I liked was with Dr. Lewis when he gave the advice to research something that’s practical to you. I think sometimes I can do a project that’s assigned to me by a teacher or principal and get it done with just to get it over with without thinking about the content of my project. This may because I’m too busy and don’t have enough time or I’m not interested in the project itself. During this class, I did take his advice, and I am doing my research about something I’m interested in and something that benefits students. I believe Dr. Lewis is right that when you research something that you’re interested in, you will put more time and effort into the research.
I also like how we had to create blogs for this class. I think it’s beneficial when we can learn from each other and grow professionally. With blogs we are able to write down our thoughts, progress, questions, or anything for others to view and comment on. For action research, I think it’s a great tool to receive feedback. I’ve already started my research project and lots of minor issues and concerns have come up. It’s those concerns that you don’t know will happen until you start the project. These concerns or issues that arise are the things you want to post and share with people so that they can learn from you. If you have found a solution to these concerns, you can share that, or if you have not found the best way to fix a problem, you can solicit for ideas. It’s definitely a great way to collaborate with others.
Even though at first I was dreading this course because of the word research, it definitely has turned out to be a great course. The course taught me how to grow professionally and how to make student learning better.

Action Research Plan

My action research plan is posted to the week 4 discussion board. It didn't copy and paste into this blog well and this blog won't let you attach word files. It seems to only let you attach pictures and videos. I look forward to reading the comments.

Thanks

Lessons Learned Week 3

I really enjoyed the readings for this week. It definitely helped me plan and come up with a good research topic. I was looking at all the example research topics from the Dana text and I realized that my first couple of topics were too broad. It allowed me to think back and remember some of the wonderings that I had at the beginning of the year.

It was also interesting to learn about what you do after your research project. I was trying to explain what happens after the research for people to learn and read about your project to someone and I wasn't making any sense. Now I know that people either orally present it or write it for respected educational journals.

The readings were very insightful this week.

Lessons Learned Week 2

I thought it was interesting what Dr. Lewis suggested about action inquiry in his interview video, which was to research something that's practical or relevant to you. I think that's so important because it will do exactly what he said, which was "that you will be more interested in the research, more focused, and the students will benefit more from your practical research than something theoretical."

For me, I'm thinking about either researching effective feedback or accurate assessments. (grading) Both of these topics are very important and directly impacts student learning. Feedback allows for re-teaching and accurate grading allows for re-teaching and getting extra help on certain content.

Uses for Blogs

I think educational leaders can use blogs for many things. For example, our principal uses blogs to communicate with the staff. Every week, the principal will post the upcoming events on the blog. The principal also post everyday reference material to the blog for easy access to.

Teachers can also use blogs to communicate with students and parents. Teachers could post lesson plans, study material, and test reviews. Teachers could also post student work or the blog could provide for a discussion board.

Action Research

I have learned that action research can be a very powerful tool that involves the people inside the organization to reflect, analyze, and solve problems. In contrast with other methods of research, action research focuses on the concerns of people within the organization and involves them in the research, data collection, and the explanation of data. Also, action research provides a plan to bring about certain changes or improvements to a campus.
I believe I would be able to use action research in my job as a technology teacher with providing effective feedback. One of my “wonderings” is how I can be more effective in providing relevant feedback to students. As a teacher, I have found that sometimes it’s hard to schedule those days to provide feedback and to re-address areas of concern because you feel like you have to stay on a schedule. Usually this schedule is mandated by the state, district, or principal. I believe that reflection and research on effective feedback would get my brain going with coming up with ideas of how to implement effective feedback to kids. My personal belief is that an assignment is pointless if they don’t know how they did or if a student earns a grade lower than a 100 and doesn’t know why they earned that grade. Just like the text explains, we all find ourselves with no time, but it’s all about doing what’s best for the kids, and building feedback into the schedule is best for kids.