The Pole Position - Racing from the Front

March/April 2010

Overall Research Question: How will utilizing technology in the classroom inspire students to learn and for teachers to collaborate/knowledge-share within Professional Learning Communities?

Research Question: If I continue to facilitate discussions with the Teachers and IT Support Staff through the PLCs, will they continue to be receptive and responsive in a timely manner when I introduce a variety of technologies (i.e., Wikis, Blogs, Podcasts, Social Media, and other Web 2.0 tools) to them and request feedback?

Background Information: At this time, the professional relationships that I have established with teachers and the IT staff between August-December 2009 are still in-place and my work is continuously moving forward. Originally, I was going to work on a technology framework solely on Physics since this was an area at my school in 2008-2009 that my principal and I wanted to focus on to help students better to prepare themselves to increase their Physics End-Of-Course (EOC) test scores. In November 2009, my principal told me that the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (NCDPI) decided not to provide a state-wide benchmark exam for Physics. Mr. Rivas (the Physics teacher) confirmed this to be true but, this didn't stop us from sitting down to brainstorm on the different lessons where technology can potentially enhance it. Although this didn't allow my research to focus only on Physics, it still gave me a grand opportunity to introduce technology into the classrooms for other subjects (i.e., English, History, Algebra, etc.,).

Note: As a first year educator, I had to realize along with my Action Research that I needed to stay focused on my classes, as well. I am teaching Computer Engineering Technology I, Digital Video, and Web Design classes. If I was going to introduce technology tools to other teachers, it was only fair for me to utilize or reintroduce them in my own classes.

Action Taken: During this cycle, I wanted to focus on the behaviors of students in the classroom and the discovery of technology tools that teachers could try after being introduced to them in their PLCs. The teachers when given an opportunity could use technology tools inside/outside the classroom. From the previous cycle, I realized from the collected survey results that a majority of the teachers/IT staff members were using some form of technology in their classroom/work environment and they would be willing to be introduced to additional tools that could assist them to enhance their use of it in the classroom. By focusing on the teachers to look at a variety of these technology tools, my first thoughts led me to think that their students would be willing to try something outside the "norm" of their traditional classroom. Three questionable concerns that I had about introducing these tools to the group were:

1. Would the school's network "block" access to the tools within the intranet?
2. Would the computers labs be available for teachers to use them throughout the workday?
3. How much time it would take for the group to learn the technology tools before incorporating them for their lessons later?

The key thing I had to remember here was that I wanted to have the teachers and IT staff members to be open, try the tools, and have them tell me whether they would see the suggestive tool helpful or not in their respective field of study.

This was challenging because 3 persons from the previous survey chose not to participate going forward. Alongside the teachers trying the technology tools for themselves, I had asked them to see if I could sit in their class environments as an observer to take notes on students learning different subjects. Due to my schedule being available during the morning times of 7:15 - 8:35, I was able to schedule times for Mr. Rivas's (Physics) and Ms. Boyd's (English) classes for observations. These two teachers along with most of the others have been very cooperative during the duration of the research conducted.

Two of the website resources for Physics and English Literature that I shared with Mr. Rivas and Ms. Boyd were:

Exploratorium Physics: http://apps.exploratorium.edu/10cool/index.php?cmd=browse&category=19

Exploratorium English Literature: http://apps.exploratorium.edu/10cool/index.php?cmd=browse&category=13

Other web technology resources that I introduced to them and other members came from the following websites:

1. Free Tech For Teachers: http://www.freetech4teachers.com
2. Go2Web20: http://www.go2web20.net/
3. World of Teaching: http://www.worldofteaching.com/

Again, I was just an observer of their classes and a "consultant" of sorts for these two teachers when I suggested different technology to check out and for them to provide me feedback for first impressions.

Evidence for Evaluation: Through my observations during this cycle, I had recorded the following 3 things:

About students:

1. In Physics classes, the male students were more engaged by answering more questions within the lessons. In English classes, the female students were a bit more eager to volunteer to express their thoughts through creative writing, poetry, etc., within the lessons.
2. The class demographics would have more male students than female students in Physics whereas this would be the opposite in English. The English class was very close to being even.
3. If the lesson given is related to something relevant to the student's interest (i.e., music, artists, authors, electricity, gravity, etc.,) and it allowed them to use the computers to be a bit creative within the various subjects.

About teachers:

1. Teachers are willing to assist without the need of a benefit for them when you show an interest in their subject matter and you study it as if you were one of their students.
2. Teachers would attempt to try the technology tools during their planning time, after-school, or at home.
3. Teachers would bring up additional technology tools that they considered or used in their process of learning.

About both:

1. For teachers and students, different times of the day affected the way students and teachers engaged with the lesson.

The other thing that I gathered was feedback within my PLC and other group members that were survey in the previous cycle to see what technology tools they may have used before to further enhance the learning of students.

After reviewing the data, 9 of 10 teachers surveyed to said that using a computer/technology does make it easier to accomplish tasks at their job. 5 teachers have used content management software such as Moodle whereas the other 5 teachers have not used content management software. 6 out of 10 teachers have used to make assessments online. Most teachers do not use blogs, wikis, or podcasts for their classes and most teachers use Microsoft Powerpoint for their presentation software.

Here is a list of questions alongside the responses that were supplied in a survey conducted in March 2010:

Q1. Does using the computer/technology make it easier for you to accomplish tasks at your job?