Online Discussion Tool:
Cycle 2 Research Question: Will an online tool for collaboration and communication be used by the CoP? If the facilitator of this group creates a thread using the collaboration tool will the participants in the group respond and find the information useful?
PLAN for Cycle 2:
Action 1: Create an online collaboration space where participants can send receive information and discuss issues asynchronously. Create a discussion thread about a topic of interest to the group and measure the response by teachers.
Conditional Additional Action: If the response or use of the tool is low, determine the knowledge base of the teachers for using the tool and provide support to the teachers about how they can use it. For example support the teachers in how to save documents or pictures to the tool and then how to comment on that posting.
Artifacts to be collected in Cycle 2:
Timeline:
Evaluation of Cycle 2:
Ideally, the sharing of ideas and use of technology should increase after implementation of both cycles. To measure the discussions made by teachers, it would be beneficial to enable a scale of the types of discussions. Here is an example scale. But, the question is, would it be better for the participants to determine the levels they want to achieve?
Basic: Here's what I am doing
Forming: What are you doing and how?
Intermediate: Here's what I did, what do you think?
Advanced: I have an idea...Let's try this..... Here's how you do it.
To measure the use of the collaboration tool, analytics will be used. Statistics of user data will provide insight into the convenience and usability of tools created. A reading of the starting usage, then a weekly check up on usage would demonstrate whether or not the tool is being used by more people, for more time, and with more detailed collaborations.
A final survey to staff will be used to determine usefulness of the activity / CoP group and collaboration tool used.