This week I received a little more feedback than I did last week on my action research plan. Matthew Reyes said, "Planning time to meet and discuss your action research project with teachers will be tough. If you plan well it will be easier to help your participating teacher keep up with the technology aspect of your project and goals for the research." I will say that Matthew is very correct that meeting the teachers is tough. I spent over three hours coming up with a plan that would allow me to meet all the teachers at all four campuses at least once a week. It is tough, and I am extremely tired at the end of the day, but I think that the amount of feedback I have received from the teachers, and the amount of projects we have already created has made the faculty, vice-superintendent, and each principal very pleased with the progress we have made so early in the year. I think our staff has also been excited to implement the technology into their curriculum. I enjoyed that Matthew noticed the amount of time it takes to meet and discuss everything with the teachers. I was very pleased that I was able to get this schedule down. I really should attach my schedule so you can see how crazy it looks.
The second comment I received this week was from Michael Richardson. I agreed with about 90% of what his comment said, but I disagreed with his comment that said, "The great part about students these days is that most of them have grown up in a world of technology and can perform most tasks better than many adults." I replied on the Epic Player, but for those of you who aren't on there, I replied with, "... a good chunk of our students understand the use of technology, but not on how to apply it to education. For example, they might know how to do research on the internet, but not very good research. I think there is a lot of things that our students are oblivious to, and part of that goes back to the training. I have been meeting with teachers for the last three weeks, and some of our teachers (even though it is supposed to be met in their TEKS) have no clue what Boolean logic even is. A good chunk of the people didn't even know Google Scholar existed or what it was until last week. I think we overestimate what our students know a good chunk of the time, and really have no clue where some other states are." I went into more detail on that site, but I will give a short explanation of my thoughts. Just because our students have grown up with technology, does not mean that they have any more clue on how to use it for educational purposes than our teachers. When we were kids how often did we sit around and think up ways to improve our education? Did we skip out on hanging out with friends to create a better graphing calculator, or did we go the library and develop a better searching technique? I know for certain that when I was not in school, unless I was doing homework, I was not using technology for any school purpose. I knew a lot more about computers than my teachers, but I never learned anything about the educational applications of technology until I was in college and started applying my programming classes into my educational research. How many people realize that you can type site: into Google and pull up only certain web-sites? How many people actually use the asterisk in search engines as a fill in the blank? Of the people that actually do that, how many of those people are teachers, and of that group, how many of their students have learned those skills? We can't just hope our students understand technology just because they have a computer in front of them. It is almost as silly as us thinking our kids can learn differential equations because they possess a math book. Those are my thoughts though. Anyway, those were the comments on my page, and as of right now I'm leaving my action research project the same. All of the comments were very supportive of what I was doing so far, so hopefully that continues!
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