EDLD 5301 - Action Research and Blogs in Education

What I have learned about Action Research

            Up until I took this course, I was unaware of the term "action research."  I learned administrators can take active roles in fixing a predicament and reverse a negative situation by inquiring about the situation, gathering data, and then changing the circumstances to improve the outcome.  As a result of my new information, I didn't realize what my school district was doing...until now.

            Last year my district implemented the REEL Teaching Information System (Responsive, Effective, Engaged, Learning).  This is where administrators and department heads conduct "walk throughs" to assess the classroom setting, teacher location, student engagement, and identify learning and teaching alignment with posted objectives. After the assessments, the information is then gathered together with results that display rigor rate that is directly connected to Bloom's Taxonomy and the learning hierarchy.

             Many of the teachers, including me, assumed this was a micro-managing technique to ensure teachers were doing their jobs.  The evaluators/administrators would walk in the classrooms with either a clip board or iPod, look around the room, look to see if objectives were posted, ask a few students what they were doing, and then punch the information into a form. Then turn around and walk out and go to the next classroom and do the same thing.   Many of us would compare with each other how many times a day we were interrupted by this process.  This could happen to the same teacher several times a day by various administrators throughout the district.  It was extremely frustrating, not to mention disturbing at first.  For the first three months or so, the teachers complained about it often.  We felt it was a "gotcha" tactic.  After a while, the teachers got used to the idea of these "walk throughs" and stopped complaining.   My district is still doing this program this year.

             Now I realize that this program is used to "collect objective data to improve student performance and identify campus strengths and growth areas through systemic evaluation and analysis."  (http://reelteaching.org/) Now I realize that the district was implementing action research and using REEL as a tool do conduct it.

How educators can use blogs

One use of a blog is for the broadcast journalism class to post their daily announcements on a high school blog linked to the district website.  There are several instances when students miss the opportunity to hear all of the announcements made on broadcast TV.  By implementing the use of a broadcast blog, students will always be able to see what they missed if they were absent that day.  Plus this is a good way to document information that is recorded on video and typed into the blog.  It is a good checks and balance system for documentation.

Final Web Conferencing Blog for EDLD 5306

 I really appreciate the fact that we have the opportunity to meet with our instructor and other class members face-to-face.  It fills the void of not meeting in a classroom.

This is my third web-conference to participate with this course.  I love it.  On-line courses are definitely the way to go. Especially when you have a family and work full time plus some. This meeting was very important to attend because it was the final one before the end of our class. Ms. Borel cleared up my confusion with writing the internship plan.  She led the class members to open up the book ISTE's Technology Facilitation and Leadership Standards and had us turn to specific pages giving us specific examples of how to fill in the blanks.  I don't think I could have completed the assignment without the use of her examples.  She also talked about the course based embedded hours log and the monthly activities report.  She stressed the importance of completing the appendix H and I that has to do with the class we are finishing up now. 

Course Reflection

This has been an incredible eye opening journey.  Fortunately I work in a district where my department chairman sends me to TCEA every year.  As a result, I realize there is a vast amount of technology resources available to administrators and educators.  Although technology is an awesome area to be part of, sometimes I feel like all of this knowledge is information overload.  On the bright side, this course has forced me to try new technologies that I have heard of but have not had a chance or better yet, made the opportunity to try.  It has been so exciting to try new things that I have told my students about this program.  I told my high school students that I was taking this course and to please forgive me if I come to class looking like I stayed up until one o'clock in morning. Most likely, I have. The students are excited for me.  I am trying to introduce more Web 2.0 in my classroom and use it along with what I am teaching them now.    

      This course is what I expected it would be.  Although I did not realize that there would be so much work involved with it, it is very relevant to what I teach at my school.  I had my BIM I students create a Wordle with their key terms.  Then I had them create a Wordle with 10 words that reflected upon what is important to them.  Of course, I told them that they had to type their name three times so it would stand out more.  I had my BIM II students create a wiki.  I told them that they would be uploading special projects to their sites throughout the rest of the year.  I also told them that I was going to grade some of their assignments on this wiki.  It had to be posted to earn the grade.  I could tell from their enthusiasm that they are really going to enjoy creating and using wikis. I am going to try to incorporate as much technology that I learn here into my lesson plans.  They really think it is cool that I am doing what I am making them do.  But the neat part is that they are only in high school.  Can you imagine what is going to be available to them in a few short years?  Technology is amazing.

      One outcome I was hoping for was to work on these assignments a lot less time. Even now, as I type this one up, I find myself glued to my PC trying to finish any loose ends that are not complete.  It is Saturday night at 11:50 this very moment.  I don't understand what is inside my will to do these assignments at this very late hour.  I amaze myself sometimes.  Other than that, everything is as I would have expected it.  On a different note, there is one down side. There were three other of my co-workers who started this program with me but decided to drop out for one reason or another.  They were all doing the principal leadership program.  One of them decided the weekend before this course started to drop out.  Another one just recently found out she has breast cancer.  I can understand how hard it would be to do this program and to deal with that as well.  The third co-worker is finishing up this week but has decided to quit now that her first class is over.  I was really hoping to have a support group on campus where we could all feed off of each others' ideas and thoughts.  Unfortunately, this is not going to happen after all. Despite the fact that they are giving up, I am going to keep going on.  Thank goodness for our cohort groups.

      I was successful in getting through the course load by taking the advice of Ms. Borel about doubling how much time you think you will spend.  This is on the class webpage. Pacing myself by working on this everyday for three to four hours really helped a lot.  At first I wanted to work all night Friday night, and all day Saturday and Sunday.  Instead, I quickly realized I found it was easier to get through the assignments if I worked on these daily and reflected upon what the articles were saying.  Another thing I would do is type out a response in Word, and then I would walk away from it for a while and then come back to it.  Walking away from the writings for a while appeared to help ease my thoughts. This would help me by thinking about how this all fits into the big picture of using technology and enhancing education.  For the most part, I was successful in carrying out the assignments.  I have to be honest though, I am really hoping that it does not get harder than this.  This was a lot of work.  I almost wanted to quit but I kept on telling myself to persevere and keep going. I am glad I did.

      I learned I really do not need eight hours of sleep a night.  I can survive on about five and still make it through my day.  I also learned that I have this determination to complete this task and not give up.  This has been a very hard five weeks for me.  I am busy with my children at home, my work, and my church activities.    I cannot give any of that up nor do I want to. I love studying the Bible.  Monday nights I attend Bible Study Fellowship (BSF) International in Beaumont, Texas.   This is a yearlong Bible study from September to May.  I have been doing this for a few years now.  We have prayer requests from our group members.  One of my prayer requests was to multiply my hours in a day so I would be able to complete this course.  So far, God has honored my request.  God is so good and awesome.  I am sure once I complete this course, my leadership skills will be much more refined than they are now.  I am willing to do what it takes to earn my master's degree. That should say something about leadership, determination to get something done.